Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe posted an article today evaluating the eight years of the Presidency of Barack Obama. President Obama is planning to give his farewell address in Chicago on Tuesday. The purpose of the address is to“celebrate the ways you’ve changed this country for the better these past eight years.” Wow.
The article takes a look at the past eight years to see if there is anything worth celebrating. Here are a few of the highlights:
In 2010, two years after electing him president, voters trounced Obama’s party, handing Democrats the biggest midterm losses in 72 years. Obama was reelected in 2012, but by nearly 4 million fewer votes than in his first election, making him the only president ever to win a second term with shrunken margins in both the popular and electoral vote.
The trend continued, he campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016, saying that a vote for Hillary would be a vote to support his policies during the past eight years. Hillary lost.
The article notes the economy during President Obama’s time in office:
The economy. Obama took office during a painful recession and (with Congress’s help) made it even worse. Historically, the deeper a recession, the more robust the recovery that follows, but the economy’s rebound under Obama was the worst in seven decades. Annual GDP growth since the recession ended has averaged a feeble 2.1 percent, by far the puniest economic performance of any president since World War II.
…In 2008, when Obama was first elected president, 63 percent of Americans considered themselves middle class. Seven years later, only 51 percent still felt the same way.
The article talks about President Obama’s impact on healthcare:
But Obamacare has been a fiasco. At least 27 million Americans are still without health insurance, and many of those who are newly insured have simply been added to the Medicaid rolls. Far from reducing costs, Obamacare sent premiums and deductibles skyrocketing. Insurance companies, having suffered billions of dollars in losses on the Obamacare exchanges, have pulled out from many of them, leaving consumers in much of the country with few or no options. And the administration, it transpired, knew all along that millions of Americans would lose their medical plans once the law took effect. The deception was so egregious that in December 2013, PolitiFact dubbed “If you like your health plan, you can keep it” as its “Lie of the Year.”
President Obama has not been successful in the area of foreign policy. The world is less safe now than it was when he took office. Part of the problem is the premature troop withdrawal from Iraq, which paved the way for ISIS. This is not totally President Obama’s fault–America has politicized wars since the Korean War. We have forgotten how to win them, and thus have wasted more lives because we were not willing to fight hard. War is ugly, nasty, and horrible, but there would be less of it if it were fought quickly and ended quickly. Somehow since the Korean War, politics have determined battle strategy, and that is a recipe for disaster. President Obama has to take some responsibility for politicizing the war in Iraq (along with his Democratic Party allies), but the precedent for their behavior was set many years ago.
The most disturbing area of failure that the article brings up is the area of national unity. The article states:
According to Gallup, Obama became the most polarizing president in modern history. Like all presidents, he faced partisan opposition, but Obama worsened things by regularly taking the low road and disparaging his critics’ motives. In his own words, his political strategy was one of ruthless escalation: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” During his 2012 reelection campaign, Politico reported that “Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign.” And when a Republican-led Congress wouldn’t enact legislation he sought, Obama turned to his “pen and phone” strategy of governing by diktat that polarized politics even more.
The article concludes:
Obama’s accession in 2008 as the nation’s first elected black president was an achievement that even Republicans and conservatives could cheer. It marked a moment of hope and transformation; it genuinely did change America for the better.
It was also the high point of Obama’s presidency. What followed, alas, was eight long years of disenchantment and incompetence. Our world today is more dangerous, our country more divided, our national mood more toxic. In a few days, Donald Trump will become the 45th president of the United States. Behold the legacy of the 44th.
We need to remember that the U.S. Constitution was put in place to limit government–not to limit American citizens. Hopefully Donald Trump is aware of that history and will act accordingly.