Shed no tears for the weak, naïve Obama

Rarely in 76 years has there been more cause to recall that famous quotation used by King George VI in his first wartime Christmas broadcast for 1939. “And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light, that I may tread safely into the unknown’; and he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness.’” At least as we step out into the darkness of 2017, we can look forward to the end of what turned out to be one of the most curious political “non-events” of recent history – the presidency of Barack Obama.

It is now eight years since the BBC sent 175 of its staff to Washington to celebrate Obama’s inauguration, just as America’s banking system was entering meltdown. On the face of it he seemed everything Hollywood central casting could have wanted in America’s first black president. He looked good. He sounded good. He seemed full of promise and heady idealism. But what actually lay behind that charismatic façade?

Even before he became president, as I noted a week later, no US politician had done more to precipitate that banking crash. As a young politician in Chicago, he had in 1995 played a leading role in the amending of the Community Reinvestment Act, requiring US banks to lend billions of dollars to buy homes for millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by two giant mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

In 2005, when it was clear that this would lead to defaulting on an unprecedented scale, no one did more to block moves to halt those insane guarantees than the then Senator Obama, given more funding by Fannie Mae than any other politician.

One consequence of the inevitable crash was that, in the eight years since he entered the White House, US federal debt has more than doubled, from $9.9 trillion to nearly $20 trillion (to be precise, $19,877,449,679,259.48). Much of the US economy has been struggling ever since.

None of Obama’s promises were more specific than his pledge to close down the abomination of Guantánamo Bay. Today it is still open. His foreign policy, from the “Arab Spring” and Libya to the Iran deal and America’s backing of the EU’s hubristically provocative bid to absorb Ukraine into its empire (and Nato), has been so weak and misguided that America’s political and moral standing in the world has never been lower.

As confirmed again by the latest Syrian ceasefire, President Putin and the mullahs of Tehran have run rings round him. The geopolitical shift that has seen so much power and influence slipping away from the West to the outside world has made America seem irrelevant in a way which eight years ago would have been unimaginable.

Nothing better symbolised Obama’s naiveté than his infatuation with climate change, which saw him elected in 2008 on a promise that his drive for “renewable” energy would wean America off fossil fuels and create “five million jobs”. Today, most of those jobs are nowhere to be seen. At a cost of trillions of dollars, wind farms, solar panels, biofuels and the rest are still supplying barely 14 per cent of all US energy. And nothing has done more to keep its economy afloat at all than the mass of cheap energy supplied by fracking for CO2-emitting natural gas.

The most damning epitaph of all on the multiple disillusionments of the Obama presidency was the fact that America’s voters should have chosen as his successor the weirdest, most improbable president their political system has ever thrown up. The message of a deeply unhappy, divided country which has lost so much of its pride and self-respect was that almost anyone would be better than that remote, self-regarding political elite which Obama and his own chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, had so come to typify.

Thus do we step forward into a new darkness, full of threatening unknowns in every direction. But at least, whatever else it may bring, America will have a president pledged to put an end to one of the greatest collective flights from reality the world has ever seen: the belief that, by destroying our economies, we can somehow change Earth’s climate. For that at least we can be grateful.

Obama was elected on a promise that his drive for ‘renewable’ energy would wean America off fossil fuels