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A legacy of O

When he ran for President, Barack Obama promoted \"we are not red states or blue states, but the United States.\" He didn’t mean it.
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January 17, 2017

When he ran for President, Barack Obama promoted “we are not red states or blue states, but the United States.” He didn’t mean it.

Radicalized by his prolific communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis, Barry (Soetero) enjoyed his pot-smoking “choom gang” in high school, and then regularly attended socialist conferences while in college.

He became a community organizer in Chicago and close friend of the radical Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, his philosophical and political influencers. Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” were calculations against the American Dream.

As Presidential candidate in 2008, Senator Obama declared the cumulative national debt, at 8 Trillion dollars, “unpatriotic.” But his unprecedented generational assault on America’s children has now resulted in a staggering debt of 20 Trillion dollars, and all-time high levels of government dependency in “food stamp nation”.

For that bill, taxpayers could have easily covered all the medical care of the uninsured without imposing the Obamacare disaster. But the Affordable Care Act was never about affordability, access, reducing health care costs, or keeping your insurance or your doctor.  It was always about federal control and a path to socialized health care through an eventual single-payer system.

Obama’s legacy therefore is a decline of consumer choice and health care competition, with providers and doctors walking away, and middle class Americans shocked at their skyrocketing insurance premiums and extremely high insurance deductibles.

Since 1790, the annual average domestic economic growth rate in our nation is just under 4%. Having never worked in the private sector, Barack Obama has presided over the poorest-ever 8 year national economic performance, a mere 1.5% annual growth.

Declaring “I won”, President Obama promoted an extreme and often petty partisanship, incessantly castigating, and never compromising with Congress.

He demoralized entrepreneurs (“you didn’t build that”), demonized the “bitter clingers” to their guns and religion, opposed domestic energy production (Keystone pipeline) and ridiculed doctors “seeking profit”.

A former adjunct law professor, Obama’s executive over-reach was repeatedly repudiated by the Courts.

Mr. Obama promised transparency, but his administration produced a stunning collection of scandals:

Fast & Furious gun running to Mexican drug lords, the IRS assault on Conservatives, the targeting of James Rosen and AP reporters, released GITMO terrorists returning to battle, the Benghazi failure to anticipate, protect, defend, or admit the truth about the planned 9/11 anniversary assault on U.S. assets, Healthcare Insurance Fraud, the woeful Bo Berghdahl trade, Auto Dealergate, the DOJ Black Panther whitewash, the NEA Art scandal, the Sestak affair, Inspector General Gerald Walpin’s firing, the mis-spending of Stimulus Funds , the DOJ propaganda unit, Solyndra, the Attorney General held in contempt of Congress, and massive failures at the Veterans Administration, the CDC, and the Secret Service.  The list goes on and on.

As Commander in Chief, Mr. Obama, absent any national security experience or credentials, called our troops “corpsemen” and oversaw significant declines in military preparedness and troops, tanks, planes, and warship levels.

His human rights record is a disaster — diffidence about assaults on Christians, and Yazidi and Nigerian girls sold into slavery without rescue, and unforgivable decisions to side against dissidents from Tehran to Eastern Europe.  Mr. Obama took the wrong side in Honduras and Egypt (Moslem Brotherhood), and sought to appease and empower the Castro regime in Cuba and the Mullah tyranny in Iran.  He didn’t extract concessions; he conceded, over and over, to our enemies.

The Russian re-set was an historic blunder (“Tell Vladimir I’ll have more flexibility after I’m re-elected”) and Obama failed to retaliate against Chinese cyber hacking, a lesson Russians must have learned.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner managed a tripling of US combat deaths in Afghanistan over his predecessor, and his most unfortunate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, which VP Biden had declared stable, helped to unleash the barbarism of ISIS (“a JV Team”, “contained”).

Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry exhibited remarkable ineffectiveness in promoting stability in the Middle East, encouraging Palestinian irredentism and resulting in failed states in Libya and Yemen.

UN Ambassador Samantha Power who literally wrote the book on R2P, the “responsibility to protect” against genocide, failed her mission. Responsibility was abandoned to beg favor with the Iranians, who received not further sanction but billions of American dollars and a green light to continue regional domination and terror, support of Assad in Syria, and threats against Israel.

Most egregiously, President Obama failed to enforce his own red line in Syria or even create no fly zones, after the Assad regime used chemical weapons. There is no more Syrian state, 500,000 are dead, and millions of refugees are flooding into Europe, destabilizing the West.  History will judge this administration harshly.

The Obama Doctrine (“offend friends and hug thugs”) was perhaps most calculated to undermine Bibi Netanyahu, (including Obama sending his political team and U.S. taxpayer funds to influence the Israeli elections).  Seeking “daylight” between special allies, Mr. Obama used every opportunity to destroy the bi-partisan tradition of U.S. diplomatic and political support for the Jewish state.  During the Iran Deal debate, Mr. Obama sank to new lows, castigating opponents (the majority in Congress and in public opinion) as dual loyalists.

Once hailed as a political genius, Obama’s radicalism led his party into disarray, and repeated electoral disaster, with some 1000 national and state legislative seats and many Governorships lost during his tenure. Ungenerous to his political opponents, he ultimately was quite uncaring about his own political party too.

The black community faired quite economically poorly during his two terms.  And, abandoning his roots, Barack Obama has sadly accepted no accountability for the years-long murder wave gripping Chi-town.

Barack Hussein Obama chose purposefully to assail American allies abroad, befriend tyrannies, abandon dissidents and victims abroad, and attack traditional Americans and economic growth at home.

He was also never a truth teller about Islamic Jihad and the challenge of radical Islam’s assaults on Americans within our own borders.

His legacy is to have made America less safe and sovereign, less prosperous and entrepreneurial, and less united than the promised hope and change campaign of 2008.


Larry Greenfield has served as executive director of the Reagan Legacy Foundation, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the Republican Jewish Coalition of California. He is long associated with the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship & Political Philosophy.

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