By every measure, Barack Obama leaves the office of the presidency with a legacy of failure. Americans are poorer, less safe, more bitterly divided, angrier, and more cynical than when he entered it. To say that the world would have been better off had Obama lost in 2008 would be to put the matter mildly.
Obamacare, the outgoing president’s signature domestic policy achievement, has become the worse disaster of its sort in a generation. Obama had promised that it would both expand the availability of health care and lower its cost. The Affordable Healthcare Act has had the opposite effect, with skyrocketing premiums and enormous deductibles and copays resulting in most people paying for health insurance that they can’t use.
The system is in a death spiral as costs increase and more people leave the exchanges, preferring to pay the penalty.
Economic growth has been anemic, less than two percent. Obama will be the first president in history never to enjoy even a single quarter of economic growth of three percent or more. Employment participation rates are the worst since the 1970s, with tens of millions of Americans having been forced out of the workforce. Tens of millions more are underemployed and are getting by paycheck to paycheck.
Overseas, Obama managed to set a match to the Middle East and North Africa, presiding over the rise of ISIS and civil wars in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. China and Russia are on the march with imperial designs on their neighbors.
The administration has made an ill-considered deal with Iran over nuclear weapons that makes the 1938 Munich Agreement seem like a great diplomatic coup. Obama has snubbed America’s friends, such as Israel, and have cultivated her enemies, such as the mad mullahs of Iran and the communist tyranny of Cuba. He has caused a migrant crisis that threatens to change the demographics of Europe in more ways since the fall of the Roman Empire.
Politically, Americans are so divided along gender, racial, political, and regional lines, that the term “United States” would seem to be more of a joke than a descriptive name. This situation seems to have been by design.
Ironically, Obama has caused the most damage to his own party. The 2010 and 2014 elections went through the ranks of elected Democratic officeholders like a scythe.
With the 2016 election, the absolute domination by the Republican Party of American politics is complete The Democrats may be in the wilderness for a generation.
As Barack Obama leaves the presidency, it is hoped that he will have the grace to go somewhere quiet and far away and think about what he did. But, a man of such cold arrogance and the capacity for self-delusion, may find such beyond him.
