What Hath Obama Wrought?

In 2012 President Obama became the first president to win two terms by a majority of votes cast since Ronald Reagan, back in 1984, and the first Democrat to do so since Franklin Roosevelt, back in 1936, and, yeah, you read that right. Yet now his administration drifts towards the 2014 mid-terms like a rudderless ship headed for the rocks borne on an irresistible tide. How did things go so downhill so fast?

Domestically, Obama’s record is pretty good, particularly considering that for his entire six years in office the Republican Party has done nothing except attempt to destroy him. But the president has been repeatedly sandbagged by his excessive faith in the power of rational analysis to solve any issue.

The Administration never really recovered from its failure to realize how deep and disorienting the recession would be. Never in living memory had so many things gone so wrong—not in the U.S., at least—and Obama was semi-crippled by the impact of collapsing housing prices, soaring unemployment, and soaring national debt. That was more than bad enough, but the Administration’s rosy predictions made it a lot worse.

The president also believed that it was possible to create a national health system that would require a measure of sacrifice for millions but would be accepted by everyone as “fair.” Wrong! None of the people who developed ObamaCare know what it’s like to depend on it, and that’s a big problem. People who aren’t millionaires just seem to have a funny perspective on things, and the Administration never really caught on to that.¹

An even bigger problem, of course, was the president’s belief that the federal bureaucracy could set up such a massive program that would operate like Facebook, or iTunes, or one of those other really cool Internet things—forgetting that those hip new programs did not go global overnight, but were preceded by years of invisible fumbling. The Affordable Care Act was the president’s ultimate legacy, and with all that riding on its success, he couldn’t prevent its debut from turning into a complete disaster. The VA scandal—hundreds of federal bureaucrats gaming the system instead of taking care of America’s vets—didn’t help much.

I’ll pass over my own complaints about the president—his near-total lack of interest in civil liberties, his constant preference for arbitrary power, his contempt for the very idea of judicial oversight—because it’s clear that 99% of the electorate simply doesn’t give a damn. And if they don’t, you can bet the president doesn’t either.

But, of course, what has really sandbagged the president has been the developments in Ukraine and Iraq, events over which he has no real control and events which are of far less significance to the U.S. than most Americans believe. Even though the president’s one real foreign policy disaster—our quasi-invasion of Libya—was the clear result of a needlessly aggressive policy, he is now being pilloried by virtually every foreign policy wise man and wise woman for not having been aggressive enough. If only the president had backed the Syrian moderates like I told him to! And surely Obama wishes he had, though not because it would have made things better. It almost surely would have made things worse. But if the president had pitched himself into the Syrian mudhole, he’d have Hillary and Leon and Bob Gates and 90% of the other Beltway talking heads in there along with him. The mudhole he’s in now—the sissy mudhole—he’s in all alone. And the moral the next Democratic president will draw from this, I’m very much afraid, is this: “Don’t be smart. Be stupid. Because then you’ll never lack for company.”

Update
I’m not at all surprised to learn that there were very good reasons at the time for not trying to assist the Syrian “moderates,” arguments and reasons that were simply ignored by Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, et al., for the simple reason that they contradicted their blind hunger for “action.” The New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti fills us in here.