Taking Stock Of The Obama Presidency
by Nick Paleologos
Now that we officially have 2016
presidential candidates from both major parties, we can start sizing up
the Obama years in earnest. Breaking down barriers is never easy. As a general
rule, being the “first” rarely translates into being the “best.” For
example, you need a Jackie Robinson before you can have a Hank Aaron. Charlie
Sifford must come before Tiger Woods. Jack Johnson before Muhammad Ali. Barack
Obama may be a rare exception to that rule. But before descending into
hagiography, here are Obama’s top three worst moments:
1) Looking the other way while
millions of homeowners drowned in red ink created, with troubling impunity, by
Wall Street bankers who — to this day — still profit handsomely from their
perfidy. That was a low point.
2) Trashing Edward Snowden for the
crime of telling America the truth, while the president’s NSA and CIA directors
were flat out lying to U.S. senators — on national TV. Not good.
3) Giving up on simple background
checks — even after so many innocent children were murdered in Newtown, and
then blaming American voters for congressional inaction. Don’t get me started.
Now on to the plus side.
Here is an American politician — with
the middle name Hussein, no less — who managed to get himself elected president
not once but twice, with handsome majorities both times. I can still remember
when his out-of-nowhere campaign surged past Hillary Clinton, the prohibitive
favorite, in 2008. At the time, a ’60s-era liberal friend of mine observed with
astonishment, “Apparently they haven’t noticed he’s black.”
During Obama’s stewardship, despite
being relentlessly vilified as a job killing communist, he added more than 12 million private sector jobs to a
U.S. economy that was in complete free-fall when he took office. In the
process, he managed to cut the jobless rate nearly in half —
to 5.5 percent. And far from crippling American businesses, he has
presided over a 200 percent increase in the S&P 500. In fact, on his watch, corporations are healthier than ever.
Obama accomplished all of this while knocking annual deficits down to
roughly a third of what they were only a few months after he took
office. Oh, and did I mention he brought affordable health care to 16.5
million previously uninsured Americans while at the same time reducing the
projected overall cost of health care for everybody else?
Yeah. That too. And with
absolutely no help from a Congress that had to be dragged along kicking and
screaming every step of the way — making Truman’s famous “Do Nothing Congress”
seem like a model of legislative productivity.
The Obama foreign policy doctrine has
been an unqualified success — if only measured by the trillions of dollars we
did not squander pointlessly, and the thousands of young American
lives we did not lose needlessly.
By the way, just one of these
noteworthy accomplishments would be considered a proud legacy for any other
president. Taken together, they represent a truly astonishing record of
achievement. And he’s not done yet.
On his way out the door, when
most second term presidents are pouring over design details for their libraries,
Obama is instead rewriting the rules of relevancy down the home
stretch. The press can barely keep up with his breakneck pace. In just the
last few months he has:
1) Protected millions of undocumented parents of children that were born in the United States from sudden
deportation.
4) Reversed a half-century of failed
foreign policy by proposing trade with Cuba and peace with Iran.
Let’s face it. That’s a pretty
impressive litany. For a guy whose
nickname is “No Drama Obama,” this duck is anything but lame.
Plus, he can sing a song and tell a
joke better than most of his predecessors, and his wife and kids have set a new
standard for First Family Cool. Sooner or later even his harshest critics will
have to grudgingly admit that Barack Obama was considerably more than simply
America’s first black president. He will be a tough act to follow.
Which brings me back to Hillary
Clinton. She certainly had her cross to bear as first lady. Yet she became the
first, first lady ever elected to the U.S. Senate — from a state she never
lived in — and did a pretty good job to boot. And who could have predicted that
after her bare knuckle brawl with Barack Obama in ’08, he’d go and make her the
secretary of state, where she also performed admirably.
If Hillary does become the first
woman elected president of the United States, and is even half as successful as
Obama, it may be a very long time before America sends another white male to
White House.
How great would that be?
