by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n In the last three years, the president has taught us a great deal about America, the world, and himself.<\/p>\n Before Obama, many Americans still believed in massive deficit spending, whether as an article of fairness, a means to economic growth, or just a lazy fallback position to justify an out-of-control federal government. But after the failure of a nearly $800 billion \u201cstimulus\u201d program \u2014 intended to keep unemployment under 8 percent \u2014 no one believes any more that an already indebted government will foster economic growth by taking on another $4 trillion in debt. In other words, \u201cstimulus\u201d is mostly a dead concept. The president \u2014 much as he advised a barnstorming President Bush in 2005 to cease pushing Social Security reform on a reluctant population \u2014 should give it up and junk the new $500 billion program euphemistically designated as a \u201cjobs bill.\u201d The US government is already borrowing every three days what all of America spent on Black Friday.<\/p>\n Obama has also taught us that prominent government intervention into the private sector often makes things worse, and invites crony-capitalist corruption. Nearly three years into this administration, it is striking how seldom Barack Obama brags about Cash for Clunkers, the Chrysler and GM bailouts, or Solyndra. He either is quiet about them or sort of shrugs, as if to say, \u201cStuff happens.\u201d Even creative bookkeeping cannot mask the fact that the auto-company bailouts (begun, to be sure, by the Bush administration, but made worse under Obama) will prove a huge drain on the Treasury. No one even attempts any more to convince us that we will like Obamacare once we read the legislation, or that it will save us costs in the long run, or that it will cheer up businesses so that they will invest and hire. All that was dreamland, 2009, and this is reality, 2011, when we hear only \u201cIt could have been worse.\u201d<\/p>\n Obama has also taught us that a president\u2019s name, his father\u2019s religion, his ethnic background, loud denunciations of his predecessor, discomforting efforts to apologize, bow, and contextualize past American actions \u2014 none of that does anything to lead to greater peace in the world or security for the United States. And by the same token, George Bush\u2019s drawl, Texas identification, and Christianity did not magically turn allies into neutrals and neutrals into enemies.<\/p>\n Israel, Britain, and Eastern Europe are not closer allies now than they were in 2008. Iran is still Iran \u2014 and may be even a more dangerous adversary after the failed Obama outreach. Putin\u2019s Russia, despite \u201creset\u201d (a word we no longer much hear), is still Putin\u2019s Russia. China still despises the US, and feels in 2011 that it is in a far better position to act on its contempt than it was in 2009. North Korea never got the \u201chope and change\u201d message. Europe is collapsing, reminding the world where the United States is headed if it does not change course. Outreach didn\u2019t seem to do much for the Castro brothers, Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, or Daniel Ortega. We are helping Mexico to sue our own states, but that does not seem to persuade its leaders to keep their citizens home. Muslim Pakistan went from a duplicitous ally to a veritable enemy. The more we bragged about Turkey, the more we could feel it holds us in contempt. We hope that the Libyan rebels and the Cairo protesters are headed toward democracy, but we privately admit that they seem to have no more interest in establishing it than we have in promoting it. In other words, Professor Obama reminds future presidents that the world will transcend their rhetoric, their pretensions, and their heritage. Other nations always calibrate their relations with the United States either by their own perceived self-interest, or by centuries-old American values and power, or both.<\/p>\n Barack Obama has taught us a great deal about dealing with radical Islam, an ideology not predicated on what presidents do or say. There will be no shutting down of Guantanamo as promised, and no end to either renditions or preventive detentions and tribunals. Khalid Sheik Mohammed will never be tried, as promised, in a New York courtroom not far from the scene of his mass murdering. The so-called Ground Zero mosque \u2014 once so dear to sanctimonious members of the Obama administration \u2014 will never be built; either liberal New Yorkers will quietly prevent it, or the architects of the scheme will be exposed as financial as well as cultural con artists. Obama will never again give an interview to Al-Arabiya expanding on how his own heritage will ameliorate relations with Arabs. The Cairo speech will go down in history not as a landmark creative effort to win over Muslims, but, to the extent it is remembered, as one of the most ahistorical constructs in presidential history. The Obama legacy in the War on Terror is as Predator-in-Chief \u2014 boldly increasing targeted assassinations tenfold from the Bush era, on the theory that we more or less kill the right suspected terrorists; few civil libertarians care much, apparently because one of their own is doing it.<\/p>\n We have learned from Obama that the messianic presidency is a myth. Obama\u2019s attempt to recreate Camelot has only reminded us that JFK\u2019s presidency \u2014 tax cuts, Cold War saber-rattling, Vietnam intervention \u2014 was never Camelot. We shall see no more Latinate presidential sloganeering (\u201cVero Possumus\u201d), no more rainbow posters. Gone are the faux-Greek columns, the speeches about seas receding and the planet cooling \u2014 now sources of embarrassment rather than nostalgia. Chancellor Merkel won\u2019t want another Victory Column address from someone who ducked out on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama himself will not lecture crowds any longer about the dangers of their fainting when he speaks; Michelle will cease all the nonsense about \u201cdeign[ing] to enter the messy thing called politics\u201d and finally acquiring pride in the U.S. when it nominated her husband. Even Chris Matthews\u2019s leg has stopped tingling. There will be no moreNewsweek<\/em>\u00a0comparisons of Obama to a god. Even the Nobel Prize committee will soon grasp that it tarnished its brand by equating fleeting celebrity with lasting achievement.<\/p>\n \u201cGreen\u201d will never be quite the same after Obama. When Solyndra and its affiliated scandals are at last fully brought into the light of day, we will see the logical reification of Climategate I & II, Al Gore\u2019s hucksterism, and Van Jones\u2019s lunacy. How ironic that the more Obama tried to stop drilling in the West, offshore, and in Alaska, as well as stopping the Canadian pipeline, the more the American private sector kept finding oil and gas despite rather than because of the US government. How further ironic that the one area that Obama felt was unnecessary for, or indeed antithetical to, America\u2019s economic recovery \u2014 vast new gas and oil finds \u2014 will soon turn out to be America\u2019s greatest boon in the last 20 years. While Obama and Energy Secretary Chu still insist on subsidizing money-losing wind and solar concerns, we are in the midst of a revolution that, within 20 years, will reduce or even end the trade deficit, help pay off the national debt, create millions of new jobs, and turn the Western Hemisphere into the new Persian Gulf. The American petroleum revolution can be delayed by Obama, but it cannot be stopped.<\/p>\n One lesson, however, has not fully sunk in and awaits final elucidation in the 2012 election: that of the Chicago style of Barack Obama\u2019s politicking. In 2008 few of the true believers accepted that, in his first political race, in 1996, Barack Obama sued successfully to remove his opponents from the ballot. Or that in his race for the US Senate eight years later, sealed divorced records for both his primary- and general-election opponents were mysteriously leaked by unnamed Chicagoans, leading to the implosions of both candidates\u2019 campaigns. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in the history of public campaign financing to reject it, or that he was also the largest recipient of cash from Wall Street in general, and from BP and Goldman Sachs in particular. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in recent memory not to disclose either undergraduate records or even partial medical. Or that remarks like \u201ctypical white person,\u201d the clingers speech, and the spread-the-wealth quip would soon prove to be characteristic rather than anomalous.<\/p>\n Few American presidents have dashed so many popular, deeply embedded illusions as has Barack Obama. And for that, we owe him a strange sort of thanks.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In the last three years, the president has taught us a great deal about America, the world, and himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[536,546,271,196],"tags":[1051,12,1057,1015,1055,405,293,88,40,320,560,1022,1052],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-lR","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1424,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-economic-quackery\/","url_meta":{"origin":1355,"position":0},"title":"Obama’s Economic Quackery","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 25, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Sometimes the wrong medicine can make a struggling patient far sicker than he would have been had he been allowed to recover naturally. Western medicine began with the premise that the physician either must know how to cure the patient or simply leave\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Energy"","block_context":{"text":"Energy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/energy-obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2403,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-old-not-enough-excuse\/","url_meta":{"origin":1355,"position":1},"title":"The Old ‘Not Enough’ Excuse","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 30, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services To newly inaugurated Barack Obama and his prime-the-pump technocrats, the logic seemed so simple. America's problem was a struggling economy. The solution was to spread around even more borrowed government money. The result would be a return to prosperity. But after nearly three\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Unemployment"","block_context":{"text":"Unemployment","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/unemployment\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5710,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/after-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":1355,"position":2},"title":"After Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 11, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services We can imagine what lies ahead in 2017 \u2014 no matter the result of either the 2014 midterm elections or the 2016 presidential outcome. There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10 trillion will have been added to the national debt\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "America's Future"","block_context":{"text":"America's Future","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/americas-future\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2442,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-if-the-president-liked-businesspeople\/","url_meta":{"origin":1355,"position":3},"title":"What If the President Liked Businesspeople?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 16, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The US stock market has nose-dived. Congress just approved the highest debt ceiling in American history, allowing the government to carry over $16 trillion in national debt, and prompting the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor\u2019s to downgrade America\u2019s multitrillion-dollar debt for the first\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Debt and Deficits"","block_context":{"text":"Debt and Deficits","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/debt-and-deficits\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1099,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/an-existential-dilemma\/","url_meta":{"origin":1355,"position":4},"title":"An Existential Dilemma","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 8, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's The Corner Unemployment is at 9.8 percent, and the figure is even higher when the long-term unemployed and dispirited are added in. What does President Obama do now? He has already tried massive government spending, borrowing $3 trillion in just 22 months in order to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2010"","block_context":{"text":"December 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/december-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1329,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/oil-rich-america\/","url_meta":{"origin":1355,"position":5},"title":"Oil-Rich America?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 12, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services There is a revolution going on in America. But it is not part of the Tea Party or the loud Occupy Wall Street protests. 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