{"id":9450,"date":"2016-09-15T15:00:40","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T22:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9450"},"modified":"2016-09-15T15:00:40","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T22:00:40","slug":"the-legacies-of-barack-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-legacies-of-barack-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"The Legacies of Barack Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Without policy achievements to hang his hat on, Obama\u2019s rhetoric will be how he\u2019s remembered \u2013 and the results have been ugly. <\/span><\/p>\n

By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online<\/em><\/div>\n
\n

O<\/span>n his recent Asian tour, President Obama characterized his fellow Americans (the most productive workers in the world) as \u201clazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, he went on to deride Americans for a list of supposed transgressions ranging from the Vietnam War to environmental desecration to the 19th century treatment of Native Americans.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re in the United States,\u201d the president said, \u201csometimes you can feel lazy and think we\u2019re so big we don\u2019t have to really know anything about other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The attack on supposedly insular Americans was somewhat bizarre, given that Obama himself knows no foreign languages. He often seems confused about even basic world geography. (His birthplace of Hawaii is not \u201cAsia,\u201d Austrians do not speak \u201cAustrian,\u201d and the Falkland Islands are not the Maldives).<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s sense of history is equally weak. Contrary to his past remarks, the Islamic world did not spark either the Western Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Cordoba was not, as he once suggested, an Islamic center of \u201ctolerance\u201d during the Spanish Inquisition; in fact, its Muslim population had been expelled during the early Reconquista over two centuries earlier.<\/p>\n

In another eerie ditto of his infamous 2008 attack on the supposedly intolerant Pennsylvania \u201cclingers,\u201d Obama returned to his theme that ignorant Americans \u201ctypically\u201d become xenophobic and racist: \u201cTypically, when people feel stressed, they turn on others who don\u2019t look like them.\u201d (\u201cTypically\u201d is not a good Obama word to use in the context of racial relations, since he once dubbed his own grandmother a \u201ctypical white person.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Too often Obama has gratuitously aroused racial animosities with inflammatory rhetoric such as \u201cpunish our enemies,\u201d or injected himself into the middle of hot-button controversies like the Trayvon Martin case, the Henry Louis Gates melodrama, and the \u201chands up, don\u2019t shoot\u201d Ferguson mayhem.<\/p>\n

Most recently, Obama seemed to praise backup 49ers quarterback and multimillionaire Colin Kaepernick for his refusal to stand during the National Anthem, empathizing with Kaepernick\u2019s claims of endemic American racism.<\/p>\n

What is going on in Obama\u2019s home stretch?<\/p>\n

Apparently Obama is veering even further to the left, in hopes of establishing a rhetorical progressive legacy in lieu of any lasting legislative\u00a0or foreign-policy achievement. Turning the presidency into an edgy soapbox is seemingly all that is left of Obama\u2019s promise to \u201cfundamentally transform\u201d the country.<\/p>\n

But divisive sermonizing and the issuing of executive orders are not the same as successfully reforming our health-care system. The Affordable Care Act, born of exaggeration and untruth, is now in peril as insurers pull out and the costs of premiums and deductibles soar.<\/p>\n

Even presidential nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is not really defending the Obama administration\u2019s past \u201cred line\u201d in Syria, the \u201creset\u201d with Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia, the bombing of Libya, the Benghazi tragedy, the euphemistic rebranding of Islamic terrorism as mere \u201cviolent extremism,\u201d the abrupt pullout from (and subsequent collapse of) Iraq, or the Iran nuclear deal that so far seems to have made the theocracy both rich and emboldened.<\/p>\n

The U.S. economy \u2014 with its record-low growth over eight years, near-record labor non-participation rates, record national debt, and record consecutive years of zero interest rates \u2014 is not much of a legacy either.<\/p>\n

Racial relations in this country seem as bad as they have been in a half-century.<\/p>\n

Given the scandal involving Hillary Clinton\u2019s use of a private, unsecured e-mail server for official State Department communications, the politicization of the IRS, the messes at the GSA and VA, and the current ethical confusion at the FBI and Justice Department over Clinton\u2019s violations, Obama has not made good on his promise of a transparent, efficient, and honest government.<\/p>\n

Near energy independence through fracking is certainly a revolutionary development, but it arrived largely despite, not because of, the Obama administration.<\/p>\n

The sharper the sermon, the more Obama preps himself for his post-presidency as a social justice warrior, akin to the pre-political incarnation of Obama as a community organizer.<\/p>\n

Following the Clinton model, a post-presidential Obama will no doubt garner huge fees as a \u201ccitizen of the world\u201d \u2014 squaring the circle of becoming fabulously rich while offering sharp criticism of the cultural landscape of the capitalist West on everything from sports controversies to pending criminal trials.<\/p>\n

What, then, is the presidential legacy of Barack Obama?<\/p>\n

It will not be found in either foreign- or domestic-policy accomplishment. More likely, he will be viewed as an outspoken progressive who left office loudly in the same manner that he entered it \u2014 as a critic of the culture and country in which he has thrived.<\/p>\n

But there may be another, unspoken legacy of Obama, and it is his creation of the candidacy of Donald J. Trump.<\/p>\n

Trump is running as an angry populist, fueled by the promise that whatever supposed elites such as Obama have done to the country, he will largely undo.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s only legacy seems to be that \u201chope and change\u201d begat \u201cmake America great again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Without policy achievements to hang his hat on, Obama\u2019s rhetoric will be how he\u2019s remembered \u2013 and the results have been ugly. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online On his recent Asian tour, President Obama characterized his fellow Americans (the most productive workers in the world) as \u201clazy.\u201d In fact, he went on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1091,46,136,185],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2sq","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2659,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-historically-challenged-president\/","url_meta":{"origin":9450,"position":0},"title":"Our Historically Challenged President","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 15, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a \"student of history.\" But despite Barack Obama's image as an Ivy-League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, both in areas of facts and interpretation. 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Yet if both sides would agree to just follow the earlier advice of President Obama,\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":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/3544735027_8a0ac7b28a-201x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3367,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/president-obamas-most-amazing-libyan-achievments\/","url_meta":{"origin":9450,"position":5},"title":"President Obama’s Most Amazing Libyan Achievments","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 4, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services By bombing Libya, President Obama has accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America: (a)\u00a0War-mongering liberals: Liberals are now chest-thumping about military \u201cprogress\u201d in Libya. Even liberal television and radio commentators cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9451,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9450\/revisions\/9451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}