The
Failed Legacy of Barack Obama
Like
most people, I had hoped for the customary settling down after the very
tumultuous and nasty election. We have been denied that, not by the candidates,
who have been dignified, but by the outgoing administration. I have written here
and elsewhere before that this has been the most incompetent administration
since James Buchanan brought on the Civil War, but I had not realized how the
immunity to severe criticism afforded President Obama, because of his
pigmentation, had been allowed to disguise how inept this administration has
been, how authoritarian and sleazy, and how the president’s demiurgic vanity has
gone almost unnoticed as the toadies and bootlickers like Tom Friedman and David
Remnick went into overdrive.
Only
now, when, instead of simply expressing solidarity with his party’s narrowly or
even questionably defeated nominee, as Dwight Eisenhower did with Richard Nixon
in 1960 and Lyndon Johnson did with Hubert Humphrey in 1968 (and even Bill
Clinton slightly managed with Al Gore in 2000), President Obama has disparaged
Hillary Clinton. He said the election was “about my legacy,” and that he would
have won had he been allowed constitutionally to seek a third term, and for good
measure he has incited the inference that the election was determined by
unspecified illegal computer-hacking by the Russian government.
The
president is correct that the largest issue in the election was the Obama
legacy: the 125 percent increase in federal debt while the national work force
shrank by 10 percent, the shameful Iran nuclear and sanctions giveaway, the
shambles of the “red line” and other flip-flops and miscues all over foreign
policy, the haughty disparagement of large sections of the electorate (in which
he was almost outdone by Mrs. Clinton), the immigration policy of proudly
admitting to the U.S. whomever might be seized by the ambition to enter, and the
slavish adherence to the most alarmist versions of the faddish climate
apocalypse, whatever the cost in American jobs and the current-account deficit,
and without waiting for evidence adequate to justify radical measures.
The
president has had a whim of iron, informed by bygone reflexively socialistic
pieties, and while he has not been popular and the majority has thought
throughout his administration that the fundamental direction of the country was
mistaken, about half the people either like him as a public personality or are
afraid, because he is not white, to admit that they don’t. He may be, as he
often seems, a charming man, but when he has gone and the issue of race is not
much involved in assessing his performance, he will be seen to have failed as
president, as did, though for somewhat different reasons, and not without some
successes, his predecessor, George W. Bush. That is their shared legacy:
failure, for four terms.
There
has never been such a sequence in the country’s history. Which is why, for the
first time in the country’s history, a person who has never held a public office
or senior military command took over one of the main parties by winning the
primaries and went on to win the election: an unprecedented solution to an
unprecedentedly prolonged period of presidential failure. Viewed in this light,
President Obama’s shameful attack on Israel last week – in effectively passing a
United Nations Security Council resolution laying the entire blame for the
impasse in the Middle East on Israeli settlements in the West Bank (which it did
not occupy prior to the 1967 War, which the Arabs unleashed and lost) — is quite
consistent.
The
Obama regime betrayed the forces of democracy in Iran over the rigged 2009
election in that country, preparatory to the surrender to Iran of scores of
billions of impounded dollars and a free pass into the nuclear-military club in
ten years (if it chooses to wait that long). Obama betrayed Iraq by his petulant
departure from that country, which was only tepidly and tardily reversed when
ISIS arose out of the ashes of the Obama Iraq policy — an ineffectual about-face
that the president, with his customary modesty, informed the country was “in the
highest foreign-policy traditions of the United States.” Lend-Lease, the
Marshall Plan, Atoms for Peace, Open Skies, the response to the Cuban Missile
Crisis, the opening to China, the sponsorship of the Camp David Agreement, the
treaty removing intermediate ballistic missiles from Europe, the Gulf War
coalition to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, the Partnership for Peace in
Europe, and the U.S.–India strategic partnership could all be so described, and
have been. But Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter,
Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes left it to others to say so.
Obama
betrayed the Syrian moderates who rose against Assad, and the civilians whom
Assad gassed (having assumed, correctly, that the Obama red line was an empty
threat). The administration lied about the murder of the U.S. ambassador to
Libya in Benghazi in 2012, and sent Secretary Clinton out to make her groveling
speech of apology to the Muslims of the world. It waffled about Libya, appeased
the corrupt Communist regimes of Venezuela and Cuba, and finally crowned the
entire farrago of incompetence and betrayal by agreeing that the Jewish quarter
of Jerusalem is a settlement in illegally occupied territory, and holding Israel
solely responsible for the Arab–Israeli dispute, as if the general Muslim
refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state (as it was created by the United
Nations) had nothing to do with it.
It
is also of a piece with the entire foreign-policy career of Secretary of State
John Kerry. He entered public life whitewashing the odious and murderous regime
of North Vietnam, even as he made false claims to being a war hero, and he exits
with his 78-minute pastiche of lies and defamations of Israel at the State
Department last week. “Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic,” he said; he
must be mad. How anyone can contemplate the horrifying fact that George W. Bush,
inept as he largely was (though not in fighting terrorism), almost lost to Al
Gore and then to John Kerry, and can reflect on the practical and moral disaster
of the Obama Gong Show, and can still be seriously nervous about a Trump
presidency escapes my comprehension. In less than three weeks the United States
will take off and disarm the self-destructive devices it has been swaddled in
for many years. Only a person burdened by a pessimism not of this world could
think the State of the Union is about to deteriorate from where President Obama
leaves it.
—
Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom,
Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies
that Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World
Leadership.
