In the meeting, Randolph asked Roosevelt to speak out more on labor and civil rights issues. According to Eleanor Roosevelt, who was present for the conversation, the president responded, "I'd like to ask you to go out and make me do what you think it is I should do. Go out and make me do it."
Is it possible Barack Obama is asking his supporters to make him pivot away from remote technologically advanced attacks on Muslim targets and attacks on Muslim nations like Iran and Syria, both sources of Israel's collective paranoia.
It was FDR's strategy to ask for help to contend with the pressures he faced, including a recalcitrant Congress. Obama needs the same help now, some of which is already available in a New York Times editorial:
"Mr. Obama has demonstrated that he can be thoughtful and farsighted, but, like all occupants of the Oval Office, he is a politician, subject to the pressures of re-election.
"No one in that position should be able to unilaterally order the killing of American citizens or foreigners located far from a battlefield -- depriving Americans of their due-process rights -- without the consent of someone outside his political inner circle.
"How can the world know whether the targets chosen by this president or his successors are truly dangerous terrorists and not just people with the wrong associations?"
The Times editorial writer is being gentle. Others are less so.
If Obama ever expects to regain the
support of the more progressive political left in the US, he will have
to make a strong case to writers and activists like Medea Benjamin, a cofounder of Codepink, and the author of the book , Drone Warfare.
Benjamin has been an advocate for social justice for more than 30 years. After the Times story on drone warfare appeared, Benjamin wrote in the progressive web site, Nation of Change:
"On May 29, The New York Times published an extraordinarily in-depth look at the intimate role President Obama has played in authorizing US drone attacks overseas, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is chilling to read the cold, macabre ease with which the President and his staff decide who will live or die.
"The fate of people living thousands of miles away is decided by a group of Americans, elected and unelected, who don't speak their language, don't know their culture, don't understand their motives or values.
"While purporting to represent the world's greatest democracy, US leaders are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17, people who are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law.
"Who is furnishing the President and his aides with this list of terrorist suspects to choose from, like baseball cards? The kind of intelligence used to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of intelligence that put people in Guantanamo.
"Remember how the American public was assured that the prisoners locked up in Guantanamo were the 'worst of the worst,' only to find out that hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the US military by bounty hunters?
"Why should the public believe what the Obama administration says about the people being assassinated by drones?"
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