Obama has built a legacy, all right: appeasement, staggering debt, racial animosity
President Obama last week spiked the ball on the Supreme Court’s decisions to legalize gay marriage and to ratify the Affordable Care Act.
Yet it is difficult to see quite how Obama had much to do with these decisions — or, to the degree he did, that they are earth-shattering. He twice ran for president expressing opposition to gay marriage while emphasizing the religious element of holy matrimony, which, he argued, precluded same-sex marriages. Is he delighted that the Court ignored his prior views?
On the Obamacare front, all the Supreme Court did was to clean up the Affordable Care Act, in a postmodern ruling that the administration’s poorly worded law actually meant something other than what the text as written actually said. The Court’s intervention was an act of partisan salvation, not disinterested legal reasoning.
Obama’s trade pact passed only with Republican votes. Apparently free-traders in Congress wanted the deal more than they worried about the president’s taking credit for their eleventh-hour rescue of what otherwise would have been a strong rebuke from his own party.
Nonetheless, Obama still talks of his “change” legacy, as if altering something necessarily meant improving it. Pulling all U.S. peacekeepers out of Iraq certainly changed the dynamics there, as ISIS can testify. The current talks with Iran will change Iranian ideas about how best to get the bomb. Normalizing relations with Stalinist Cuba also changes — as in increases — that regime’s viability.
Jimmy Carter was asked to evaluate President Obama’s foreign-policy record. He concluded that it was hard to identify any improvement in our relations with any nation since Obama took office, defining change as change for the worse. Carter for once is probably right. Some of our outright enemies — Vladimir Putin, for example — have changed by showing even more contempt for us than they did in 2008, apparently on the Munich pattern that appeasement wins, not praise for magnanimity, but rather contempt for obsequiousness. Hitler, remember, vowed to stomp on his benefactor, Neville Chamberlain, after the latter gave him what he wanted in 1938. “Worms,” the Führer scoffed of his appeasers.
Iran so far has repaid Obama’s indulgence by blowing up a mock U.S. aircraft carrier in military drills, de facto running affairs in three other Middle Eastern states — Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen — and brazenly renouncing almost all the basic elements of prior nonproliferation understandings, from on-site inspections to cessation of enrichment to kickback sanctions in the event of noncompliance. Iran embraces change, and looks forward to a nuclear future.
Apparently, the theocracy sees Barack Obama and John Kerry as hell-bent changers, willing to achieve their own legacies at the expense of the interests of their country and its allies — and thus as bewildering and worthy of contempt in a world where leaders are expected to promote their own people’s interests. Expect the geriatric Castros to share the same contempt for American outreach, and to double down on their anti-Americanism and their ruthless suppression of freedom to add spite to the embarrassment of U.S. appeasement. They see U.S. recognition as a big change that will further empower their police state.
What allies we have left in the Middle East seem either tired of the U.S. change or baffled by it — especially Israel, Jordan, the Gulf monarchies, and Egypt. All that can be said for a changing U.S. foreign policy is that our friends see the Iran deal as a framework for changing ideas about their own nuclear acquisition — on the logic that the institutionalization of American nonproliferation models makes it fairly easy for anyone to get a bomb. Not since Israel got the bomb has any other ally or friend of the United States gone nuclear. (China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea were hostile to the U.S. at the time of their nuclear acquisitions.) Obama may well change that trend too, as we see all sorts of former allies and friends. both in the Middle East and in the Pacific region. creeping toward becoming nuclear powers — fearing either that they are no longer protected by the U.S. or that, on Obama’s watch, too many crazy neighbors may go nuclear.
Our friends have come to resent American change, especially the Obama administration’s sense of self-righteousness that judges partners on impossible standards that it does not apply to enemies or neutrals, such as Iran, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority. Obama’s smugness turns old allies off — as by defining ISIS as a jayvee organization, or psychoanalyzing Putin as a class cut-up bent on a macho shtick when he gobbles up neighboring countries, or lecturing Israel on Obama’s rare insight on what is really in the Jewish state’s self-interest.
The Europeans are flummoxed. Why that is so is another Obama lesson. In just six years, Obama’s defense cuts, his recessional from world leadership, and his abdication of a strong presence in the volatile Middle East — in other words, a changed foreign policy reminds our EU and NATO allies to be careful of the change you wish for. Socialist pacifism in Europe was always predicated on the presence of America’s friendly free-market military muscularity. What the Europeans wanted was not change but the continuance of an America quite unlike themselves, willing to subsidize their indulgences and to serve as a scapegoat for their fits of envious venting. Instead, they got a president who is a fellow democratic socialist who likewise believes in reducing Western military power and influence. Now they are baffled if not terrified about their wishes for change coming true.
By bringing this about, Obama reminds us that European anti-Americanism was mostly a psychological tic, arising from dependency and a sense of inferiority — and always predicated on strong U.S. military and political leadership contextualizing European angst.
Obama, in truth, is not much interested in Europe, ancient or modern. For him, it is not the cradle of a singular Western civilization that brought consensual government, freedom, and rationalism into the world, but a once imperial and colonialist incubator of race, class, and gender oppression, quite dependent on the underappreciated discoveries and genius of the Islamic world. Why a bunch of privileged foreigners thought that their sophistication and traditions might win them exemption from an administration bent on exposing privilege and ensuring fairness is perplexing. In the eyes of the Obama administration, Europe is to the rest of the world what the 1 percent at home is to the 99 percent — a “you didn’t build that” elite in need of some Obama redistribution of power.
Obama’s most notable change legacies at home are debt, indifference to the law, and racial polarization. He is on schedule to have borrowed more money than all previous presidents combined. Debt can trump the gift of record U.S. oil production, which came about despite, not because of, Obama. Debt can hamper even natural recoveries from recessions. Debt can nullify the stimulus of endless near-zero interest rates.
Obama has taught us that the government can slash defense spending, hike income taxes, and still end up with half-trillion-dollar annual deficits, in a way unthinkable under the old Gingrich–Clinton paradigm of budgetary compromise. For the next two decades, American presidents will be paying down what Obama has squandered through jacking up social spending and not addressing entitlement and tax reform. Let us pray for continued near-zero interest rates — the only thing that will have allowed Obama to reach $20 trillion in national debt by 2017 without a Greek-like implosion. Obama’s changes have managed to make the deficit-spending George W. Bush administration seem fiscally timid.
Obama does not much care for settled law. For him, enforcement of statutes hinges on the election cycle. Once there would be no more referenda, then Obama simply started interpreting immigration law or health-care mandates as he has seen fit. In theory, the next president could more or less do what he pleases, given that the media are on record that they have no objections to a president’s simply ignoring legal statutes. Not since Richard Nixon has a president so predicated enforcement of the laws on political expediency.
Little need be said about racial relations. They have changed too. Here the Obama legacy is twofold: The president has editorialized on the nation’s racial fault-lines, both trivial and fundamental — from the Professor Gates psychodrama to Trayvon Martin and Ferguson — and usually gotten it quite wrong. No other president would take the case of a Harvard professor being arrested for trying to break into a locked house (in fact, it was his own house, and he was quickly released) and turn it into a national metaphor for racist, stereotyping police. Nor would any other president use his sense of racial solidarity with the victim of a shooting to editorialize about an ongoing capital trial, or traffic in mythologies like the “hands up, don’t shoot” Ferguson fiasco, or claim that one deranged racist killer is proof that white America is still racist in its DNA. After nearly seven years, we know the Obama racial paradigm: Quite wealthy and privileged elites will lecture the members of the struggling middle class on their inherent “white privilege,” while the crises in the black community — high urban crime, escalating black-on-black murdering, epidemics of illegitimacy, drug use, and family disintegration — remain taboo subjects, given the need for record minority turnout and block voting at the polls. No president since Woodrow Wilson has so set back racial relations.
Obama also has reminded us that “big government” is by nature incompetent and scary, given that the larger and more politicized it becomes, the more it will be bored with its assigned tasks. A growing government is a parasite whose reason to be is to expand at the expense of its host. Hiring people, not auditing what they do, is now the federal government’s aim.
Try a thought experiment about changes in government. Say “the ______ under Obama” and then fill in the blank with what follows: IRS, VA, NSA, GSA, EPA, TSA, DHS, ICE, Secret Service, NASA. Have these agencies “changed” and do we have more “hope” because of their evolution? Are any of these bureaucracies more transparent or efficient than in 2008? Do we associate their directors with skilled and honest leadership? Or do we see these alphabet soups corrupted by cronyism and politics, immune from audit and accountability, led by incompetents, and now mostly social-welfare organizations bent on patronage and redistributive engineering?
All this may be “the face of change,” but change is a neutral term that can be as calamitous as it once was welcomed.
Not to mention his Dear Colleague letter which turned title IX into an opportunity for radical feminists to drive a wedge of hysteria and danger between young men and women on college campuses, and possibly the rest of the country if hysteria prevails.
2VictorDavisHanson 4ObamaLegacy
One thing pre-eminent of the Blame America First crowd (BAFsteers) of which Pres. Obama is the ne plus ultra specimen, they derive immense satisfaction in seeing American decline in the eyes of the world. The Obama Regime should be orgasmic in their titillation at Pres. Carter’s assessment that “it was hard to identify any improvement in our relations with any nation since Obama took office . . .” If putting down America is your cup of tea, maybe you should consider giving Pres. Obama a third term. Constitutional amendment, anyone?
Seems to me you have this Islamist, racist, Marxist President about right, even though you went rather lightly on his Islamist moves like embedding the Muslim Brotherhood into his WH & State Dept, calling the Fort Hood terrorist act by a radical Islamist as “workplace violence,” or his refusal to attend the World Unity rally against “radical Islam” in Europe followed up by a ridiculous conference entitled, “Violent Extremism.” Then there’s his attaching himself to Morsi in Egypt, deleting the term “radical Islam” from all the FBI training manuals, etc., etc., etc.
This is VDH’s finest article to date. An outstanding description of all things Obama that cannot be improved upon. I daresay it is perfect. Thank you.
I agree, excellent article.
I’m so glad I can honestly say that I didn’t vote for the Con-man in Chief either time. Obama can’t leave the White House soon enough in my opinion, and that day should be a national holiday.
I vote ‘yes!’ on a national Obama Departure Day observance…but does anyone really believe he’ll leave voluntarily?
What Obama has set the stage for ?? ” The tide in the affairs of men” is ushering in another turning point. Starting with Arkansas finest, Bill Clinton, our leaders built sand-castles with the tide out. The inbound full-tide is set to reveal what is born from self-serving leaders enacting policy for enormous personal gains. One such visionary, the bane of shapely brunette interns, has a reported net worth around the 80 million mark. The betrayed but wealthy wife, ironically now lusts for power—- the very same power her quick-zippered husband once possessed. There’s a Harold Robbins novel in there somewhere.
All true, but if The Stupid Party doesn’t select a credible woman candidate who can’t be easily parodied then they’re going to lose again. All I hear is “You go, girl”, even though the “girl” in question should be an anathema to feminists and egalitarians.
Obama’s basic ideas were formed as an adolescent as a result of his own self-hatred. He made an emotional ID with the Kenyan father he scarcely knew (one week when he was ten) and rejected his white mother, who abandoned him, and the white grandparents from Kansas who raised him. Hence he rejected white America and Europe – and their shared culture – and embraced the ’70s counter-culture of his teen years (anti-war, black power, feminist, Great Society big government, PC, etc. This was all cemented later in the only real job he ever had – 12 years as a part-time lecturer at the U of Chicago – and in his Chicago one-party political indoctrination. That he has a racial chip on his shoulder (like Eric Holder) has always been evident (Al Sharpton chosen as an adviser. for instance); it proceeds from the confusion and angst of his childhood. His authoritarianism and arrogance are based in personal problems – or neurosis, as we used to call it.
In spite of all his putdowns of many Americans and America, Obama sure does love to live the high life at the taxpayer expense. I suppose he feels that is only retribution – although, of course, he is half white and his father was an African, not an African-American. I am half English so I suppose I should refer to myself as English-American. And if he really thinks we have a climate problem, why doesn’t he give up flying all over the world in Air Force One? It is so sad to witness the decline of once great America. What is even sadder is that so many people in the country think Obama is a great President and the answer to their prayers. How did we acquire so many stupid citizens?
Stupid citizens, like the poor, will always be with us. Unlike the poor, however, we should not feel compassion toward those who want a path destructive to the American experiment. Help the poor, reject the foolish Leftists!
“” Hillary’s Alinksy ties.”” From frontpage mag. Obama’s grasshopper will finish the death of freedom if elected.
Obama is what he has always been! He was and is no mystery! Those who voted for this *** (twice) are the ones that need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask (rhetorically) what have I done? (THIS WAS EDITED BY THE MODERATOR FOR UNCOUTH CONTENT. we exercise the right to monitor the comments we receive. We will not publish comments that include obscenities, swear-words and vulgarisms; ad hominem attacks; racist expression; rudeness or discourtesy; violations of copyright; or any other transgression of taste or civility that the editors deem unpublishable on a Hoover Institution affiliated web site. We reserve the right, also, to close down comments on a particular essay if the editors believe we have reached “saturation” point. )
I keep going back to Abraham Lincoln’s January, 1837 speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois where he said the following:
” In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era.–We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them–they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their’s was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.
How then shall we perform it?–At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?– Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
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“Hope & Change” … IT’S A COOKBOOK !!!
(Twilight Zone reference)
Obama has taught us nothing.
If you’re looking for some unchanging permanent truth, it is this: “Biochemistry before behavior”
It would be an informative experiment to see if one could detect the release of endorphins in our President, when for instance, he was elected President and greeted by his supporters in Chicago.
Since then, what would the President be willing to do for a short term fix?
For the endorphin high?
Especial as tolerance builds.
Perhaps, ignore the Constitution’s separation of powers.
We’re left psychoanalyzing the behavior…contemplating therapy while our enemies clearly understand their dealing with a “druggie”.
Black racism and white guilt elected the half black Barak Obama to the Presidency. It was a vein hope that ‘hope and change’ might really happen. He talked sweet smack to the ghetto and sweet nothings everywhere else. Hope is still hoping for no more changes and change has simply turned daydreams into nightmares. In the next election voters might have color choices again, maybe even gender choices. This time ‘hope’ for a real intellectual instead of a pseudo one and ‘change’ the idea that smooth talking somehow equates with experience or wisdom or even honesty.
In 2008, America elected its first radical Social Justice president. This despite Obama’s secretive, and, at times, disturbing past, as well as his glaring lack of either experience or qualification.
After four years of watching our economic malaise grow worse, seeing massive borrowing, printing and spending that only led to more chronic unemployment and tepid economic growth, the passing of an unpopular healthcare law that had failed miserably to deliver cost reductions and doctor choice, and a stunning rebuke from voters in the 2010 midterms Barak Obama looked destined to follow Jimmy Carter into the dustbin of presidential history. But after what can only be described as a vapid campaign about nothing, challenger Mitt Romney failed to win what should have been an easily winnable election.
Since then, the thin veneer of “Hope and Change” has peeled away from the Obama presidency to reveal a pall of hypocrisy, incompetence, and corruption. Whereas Newt Gingrich fought ferociously for a clearly defined agenda, sadly, John Boehner just looks utterly impotent and ineffective. And without any credible opposition this light tyranny is hear to stay and will probably get worse. Hillary Clinton, despite her easily exposed flaws and well catalogued deceptions and lies, will be difficult to beat.
After the past 8 years, the American public is realizing that not all the glitters is gold. The only trouble is that they don’t know who is more to blame.