HIS LAST HURRAH
Obama vows smooth transition with Trump but sounds alarm on bitter partisanship, distorted media • HIS LEGACY: Battenfeld, Carr
He leaves a hero to the left and a villain to the right but there’s a better word to describe Barack Obama: disappointment.
Put aside Obamacare, the War on Terror, and unemployment; the lasting legacy of this president will be his failure to live up to his great promise.
Anyone who stood on the Washington mall in the teeming masses eight years ago could not forget Obama’s call for unity and bipartisanship, and the tears of joy from those watching the first black man take the oath of office.
For a few seconds you almost believed it.
How ridiculous. Obama is bowing out with the nation way more divided than it was eight years ago. And handing the keys of the Oval Office to Donald Trump after the most divisive campaign in modern history.
It’s not all his fault. Republicans, of course, returned to their partisan ways soon after Obama took office, but the president sets the tone and should have risen above it.
He didn’t. When Henry Louis Gates was mistakenly arrested by Cambridge police in 2009, he reflexively called the cops stupid even though he admitted he didn’t know all the facts. After getting criticized, Obama patronizingly called it a “teachable moment.”
Yes, it taught people to immediately inject racism into an incident that was not a racist act. Obama later held a ridiculous “beer summit” but the damage was already done.
Obama did manage to pass his signature health care plan — no easy feat — but reneged on his promises of bipartisanship by ramming it through without any support from Republicans.
Even worse, Obama turned around and used the issue as a weapon, knowingly lying about its impact in order to get re-elected.
“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period!” will go down as one of the most audacious lies in American politics.
Sure, politicians lie all the time, but Obama was supposed to be better than that. That was a bunch of hype. He wasn’t.
The president campaigned on “change” but nothing has changed in Washington. Lobbyists still run the town and Congress still squabbles and gets nothing done.
Obama was good at one thing: giving stirring speeches and getting re-elected. He also gets
credit deservedly for taking out Osama bin Laden. Obama could have backed out of the mission, but stuck with it and trusted his troops.
But on other fronts in the terror war, Obama failed miserably. His dismissal of ISIS as the “JV” team allowed the vicious terrorist movement to flourish. Under his watch, America suffered its worst terror attacks on home soil since Sept. 11. And he has stubbornly refused to acknowledge that Islamic extremism is the problem.
Obama could have been a great president. He could have brought hope and change to all Americans.
Instead he brought us Donald Trump.