He took office at a time when
the U.S. economy was on its worst slide in 75 years, but pushed policies
using borrowed money that were more meant to preserve government jobs
than broadly help the private sector where the great majority of
Americans work, ensuring the jobs crisis continued.
He
railed against the heavy spending and big deficits of his predecessor,
but blithely backed budgets that had triple the deficits ever seen in
American history.
He
promised a smart, sweeping overhaul of the U.S. health care system, but
ended up giving us a Byzantine mess promoted to the public with myths:
that offering subsidized care to tens of millions of people would save
money; that people would keep their own doctors; that access to care
wouldn’t change; and that rationing would never happen.
He
promised a more sophisticated approach to the economy than that of his
predecessor, but had so little common sense that his health law actually
gave businesses a big financial incentive to discontinue providing
health insurance to their employees.
He
offered hosannas to genius entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs in his
prepared remarks, but when speaking off the cuff betrayed his
faculty-lounge view of the world, saying of businesspeople, “if you’ve
been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.”
He
swore to bring overdue oversight and honest accounting to the corporate
world, but made flagrantly dishonest claims about General Motors paying
back its government loans that would have triggered a criminal fraud
investigation in the private sector.
He
promised to set a high new standard for ethics in the White House, but
used a baffling claim of executive privilege to shield his embattled
attorney general from the repercussions of a cover-up involving the
death of a federal law enforcement officer.
He
denounced his predecessor for permitting harsh interrogation tactics
with suspected terrorists, but once in office somehow concluded that a
better, more moral approach would just be to use drones to assassinate
such suspects without getting any information from them.
He
presented himself as a shrewd student of Washington politics, but once
in office displayed a counterproductive standoffishness to many
Democratic lawmakers eager to embrace him, never developing the broad
range of personal relationships that often mark a successful presidency.
He
ran as a unifying force who would bring in a new era of civility and
racial healing to Washington, but once in office embraced ugly,
Chicago-style political hardball that saw nothing wrong with his
supporters’ loathsome practice of depicting opposition to his policies
as being driven by racism.
He
constantly offered praise for the wisdom and insights of the American
public, but reacted to the broad discontent over Obamacare, high
unemployment and vast deficits by saying it was a failure of his
administration to properly explain its glorious record to a confused
populace – not a predictable reaction to his struggles and
ineffectiveness.
And in
December 2011 – at a time in which one-quarter of American adults who
wanted full-time work couldn’t find it, after a year in which the
federal deficit was a staggering $1.3 trillion – here was what Barack
Obama had to say for himself in a CBS interview: “I would put our
legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years
against any president, with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and
Lincoln.”
Unbelievable. If
self-reverence were a crime, our current president would be facing a
life sentence. For the good of America, let’s pray we have someone else
in charge of the federal government come Jan. 20, 2013.