Later this week, President Barack Obama leaves the stage as he began it – personally popular and with an adoring echo chamber.
However, he leaves behind a more partisan nation, a more racially divided nation, a nation with a beating but fibrillating economic heart, and a nation less respected and less influential abroad.
Obama leaves after three elections – in which he said his policies were on the ballot – that left his party in tatters, and after the November presidential election in which Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton openly campaigned to be the “third term” of the 44th president but lost a convincing Electoral College decision to a man in Donald Trump no one believed could win.
Despite the glowing picture he painted of the country in his farewell speech last week, he ends his tenure without the scope of accomplishments he envisioned when he told the 2008 election night crowd that “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment… .”
Obama, nevertheless, was the country’s first black president, a feat of which history cannot rob him. We are confident many young people in various demographic groups saw him ascend to this office and now believe they too can live out their dreams. For that inspiration alone, the country is better off.
Fortunately, the president, a married father of two daughters like his predecessor, can leave office, also like his predecessor, with no personal stain. He called his wife in his valedictory speech “my best friend” and said to his daughters of all he’s done “I am most proud to be your dad.” By filling those roles alone, he is a hero to emulate.
Unlike President George W. Bush, though, Obama has no intention of being a gracious retiree. As he indicated in his farewell speech and on other occasions, he intends to stay in Washington, D.C. – the first president to do so since Woodrow Wilson nearly 100 years ago – and defend his policies.
Frankly, there is much he will have to defend. Indeed, for every accomplishment he ticked off last week, there is a “rest of the story” he left out.
* Obama said he presided over the “longest stretch of job creation in our history,” but the country was coming out of the Great Recession. Job growth was practically a given. Further, wages have been stagnant for the majority of his administration, and the labor force participation rate is the lowest it’s been since the mid-1970s. Under his leadership, the federal debt soared, and the federal deficit, which fell for a time, is back on the rise.
* The president touted his Affordable Care Act for the number of people who gained health insurance, but he glossed over its cost, his broken promises about it and its significant rate hikes.
* Obama mentioned that he “shut down Iran’s nuclear program,” but the terrorist-exporting country began to violate the one-sided agreement from the beginning and now has billions of dollars – sent from the U.S. – with which to continue its nefarious activities.
* The president noted his administration took “out the mastermind of 9/11” (Osama bin Laden), but what he didn’t talk about – as intimates of the raid have written – is how difficult he made it on teams responsible for such missions. And what president, armed with the information he had, wouldn’t have made the decision to take out the terrorist leader?
Curiously, Obama made no mention of Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service scandal, the increase in food stamp enrollment, the Veterans Administration health care crisis and the flood of illegal immigrants, just to name a few things history will include in the judgment of his administration.
Meanwhile, we believe the president’s rapprochement with Cuba was a mission whose time had come, but he was unable to score any significant promises from the communist country in return. And little has changed for the beleaguered people in the island nation since.
We also believe Obama missed the most pregnant opportunity he had as the first black president by not using his bully pulpit at every opportunity with young black men and women to extol the virtues of marriage, the value of education, the necessity of personal responsibility, the tragedy of teen pregnancy and the dead end of crime, all of which have worsened over the last 50 years with the advent of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Oh, he talked about each one here and there but never made those issues a mission. It was a mission that might have made a huge difference.
Overall, we believe the president showed a remarkable tone-deafness about the country. His rhetoric said one thing; his actions said another.
In his nomination acceptance speech, he said “we must again have the courage and conviction to lead the free world…. That’s what the American people want.” He was correct that the American people wanted that, but he spent eight years leading from behind.
In the same speech, Obama said neither his campaign nor party would use “religion as a wedge,” “patriotism as a bludgeon” or see “our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize.” Yet, from day one in office, he has attempted to separate people by race, gender, sexual orientation and class.
As he leaves, we believe the president’s policies and his ability to say one thing and do another are what the public continued to reject. And in the end, that makes him not the giant his echo chamber sees but just another politician on the world stage.