In 2008, a hopeful America elected to the presidency the first ever black American. It mattered little that Barak Obama had a white mother or that his father was a Kenyan to whom the President’s mother had been married for only three years. He was young, charismatic, and black enough for everyone to overlook his equally white background. No doubt Blacks felt that he would fix every wrong, both real and imagined, while Whites reveled in the new, racial equality in America that his election portrayed. We were all wrong.
The first Black president should have brought us together, helped heal the wounds of slavery which ended 150 years ago, and eased the memories of the fierce struggle that Blacks have had to endure as they have gradually fought their way towards the equality that the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation decreed was theirs. But such was not the case. This president, instead, fomented greater division among Americans than we have ever seen before. Just before his inauguration in 2008, then President elect Obama said: “We are just five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America. . . In five days, you can choose policies that invest in our middle class, and create new jobs, and grow this economy, so that everyone has a chance to succeed, not just the CEO, but the secretary and janitor, not just the factory owner, but the men and women on the factory floor.” And yet, his policies resulted in just the opposite. Oh, he transformed America, all right. But not in a good way. Let’s look at what he left us.
- A greater divide between the races and between the ever left-moving Democratic party and the rest of the country.
Throughout his presidency, the media, who supported him with such enthusiastic vigor that Chris Matthews of MSNBC famously said he felt “this thrill going up my leg” when he heard Obama speak, most Democratic leaders, and members of Obama’s administration regularly accused as racists anyone who dared to disagree with Obama’s policies. That, of course, included all Republicans, Independents, and conservatives. Obama himself said to The New Yorker’s David Remnick in the January 27, 2014 edition of the magazine, that “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President.” No doubt that was true, just as some people didn’t like President Kennedy because he was a Catholic and some people didn’t like President Reagan because he had been a film star. But for the first black President to say that to a news outlet was unpardonable and only served to further convince some black Americans and many liberals that no objection to the President’s policies had any basis in sincere disagreement, but only in racial hatred. Hardly a unifying move. Feeling supported by their President, black activists and college students around the country began demanding “free spaces” where non-blacks were not allowed and became often violently “offended” by often innocent words and actions that they declared to be racist. For example, the use of cotton plants in fall decorations had become popular until a group of black students, invited to the home of the president of Lipscomb University, saw and were offended by his wife’s cotton ball centerpiece. The president has since apologized! Any reasonable person would agree that the black students should apologize for rude behavior that undoubtedly upset the president’s poor wife! Black columnist, Carl Jackson, in an article decrying the charges of racism and bigotry from the left that he calls nonsense and outlandish accusations, ends his comments with a sentence that I could not improve upon. He states, “Today, the word racist simply means you disagree with Democrats, the political party that founded the Ku Klux Klan” (Townhall, 24 October 2017).
- Despite his promise to make life better for the average worker, President Obama’s many regulations had the opposite effect.
During the Obama administration, the federal government added 20,642 new regulations that have burdened the economy with more than $100 billion annually in additional expenses, crippling small businesses and adding costs to products that the average American buys daily. As one website noted, that is one dollar for every star in the galaxy or one dollar for every second in 32 years. During the 8 years of the Obama administration, the average annual growth in real GDP was just over 1%, less than a third of the 3.405% average annual growth in the last two decades of the 20th century. According to The Telegraph out of Great Britain, the U.S. Federal Reserve reported middle-class incomes as stagnating from 2010 through 2013, while incomes at the bottom end of the scale continued to fall. In addition, they reported that in January 2009, the poverty rate “stood at 14.3 per cent. It rose to around 15 per cent and then fell back down in 2013 to 14.5 per cent.” For black Americans, the poverty rate rose from 25.8 percent to 27.2 percent!
According to CNN, under President Trump, the economy already looks very different. The unemployment rate is 4.3%, a 16-year low, with 1 million jobs being added since Trump took office. The average price for an existing home in June hit $263,800 which was 6.5% higher than a year ago, and the stock market has gone from 18,250 at Trump’s election to over 23,000 last week. The GDP growth for the second quarter is 3.1%, three times what it was at any time during the Obama administration.
- A failed foreign policy that has left not only the United States, but also the world in a more dangerous position than it was in 2008.
President Obama began his presidency with a world tour which immediately alienated many Americans as he repeatedly apologized for the “arrogance” of America. In Strasbourg, France, for example, he said “In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” Obviously, the President had not read his history books very well, since without the United States, western Europe would have been lost to German Imperialism in WWI, or failing that, lost to Hitler’s Nazi repression in WWII. Eastern Europe would have remained behind the Iron Curtain without President Reagan’s pressure on the U.S.S.R. And do you suppose South Korea really wants to be ruled by North Korea’s insane dictator as they would have without U.S. intervention?
Have we made mistakes in the world? Of course we have, but they have stemmed from the belief that this most powerful and freest nation in the world owes a responsibility to help other countries in need. And some of our greatest mistakes came under President Obama’s leadership. In an effort to improve relations with Russia, Obama removed defense missiles from several from Soviet block countries, our allies. His administration also approved a deal which enriched the Clinton Foundation and saw former president Bill Clinton paid $500,000 for a single speech in Russia in exchange for our giving one fifth of our precious uranium deposits to a Russian Company (read: to the Russian government). And when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Russia the greatest threat of any country to the U.S., Obama and his fellow Democrats scoffed and ridiculed the idea. Yet now, having lost the 2016 election, those same Democrats are wildly accusing the Russians of interfering in our election, the nasty brutes! They ignore the facts which continue to show that Russian meddling was limited and relatively ineffectual in changing any minds.
President Obama also brokered a deal with Iran which removed sanctions and allowed billions of dollars to flow back into their country to fund their terrorist campaigns and their attempt to gain control of Syria. In exchange, we got their promise not to complete their nuclear bomb for 10 years as well as some other minor promises which they have already reneged on.
He refused to interfere in the Syrian civil war, declaring only that Syrian president Assad must go, but doing nothing to get rid of him. He warned that if Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, that would be a “red line” that the U.S. could not ignore, and yet when Assad gassed his people a few months later, Obama ignored it.
He removed troops from Iraq, allowing that country to fall into turmoil and paving the wave for ISIS to create their caliphate. He then totally underestimated the power of ISIS, calling them the “JV team” and allowing their foothold in Iraq to spread into Syria until, from a start with just a few hundred fighters in 2010 they had grown to 80,000 strong by 2014, controlling major cities in both Iraq and Syria and spreading their terrorism throughout Europe and into the United States.
He joined with Europeans to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Lybia, leaving a void in leadership that was quickly filled by ISIS affiliates leading to the attack on Benghazi and the deaths of 4 Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the first American Ambassador killed in the line of duty in 33 years. The ensuing cover-up of the real cause of the killings (not a video although the Obama administration arrested and imprisoned the hapless video maker for a year) and the ineffective response of the State Department who never managed to send in assistance until the fight was over, created a scandal that continues to this day.
He mangled relations with long-time ally Israel, sending American tax dollars to an Israeli group opposing Prime Minister Netanyahu in their most recent election (can anyone say “foreign interference in an election?”) and was caught on an open mike with French President Sarkozy responding to Sarkozy’s remark “I can’t stand Netanyahu.” with “You’re tired of him; what about me? I have to deal with him every day.”
President Obama also left us a country in which Christianity, the religion shared by 98% of the colonists at the time of the Revolution, and its moral values upon which the country has been founded, have been attacked with unprecedented ferocity, attacks often made by the government itself. Because of the seriousness of this aspect of his legacy and the multitudinous examples to discuss, I will leave this for my next blog. I close only with a comment that former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore (R), made after a prayer breakfast at which Obama compared the ISIS brutality to that of the Christian Crusaders. Mr. Gilmore concluded, “Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.”