While E. J. Dionne is fretting that the irritant presence of President-elect Trump will deprive President Obama of the quiet repose he so longs for, Dana Milbank has been complaining that our retiring president hasn’t been getting much praise. “For a man who has achieved so much, Obama….must be wondering where the gratitude is,” he informs us. “After eight years of achievements, it must vex the president” that more people aren’t giving him thanks.
This unhappy columnist must not be looking, as the grateful are surely among us, and more than eager to tell us how happy they are. Assad of course is grateful that Obama did nothing when he crossed the “red line” that Obama had set him. The Islamic State is glad he allowed it to flourish — “The J.V.,” he called it as it geared up for action. And Russia is happy he did nothing to interfere with its ambitions regarding its neighbors, Ukraine and Crimea. Syria, Russia and Iran all expanded their influence during his tenure, so they are all happy. And happiest of all must be the Republicans, who feared the worst when Obama took office, and are now facing their most promising prospects in years.
Of course, there are those who are not all that happy, and we all ought to know who they are. This is not a good time to be raising a kid in Aleppo, or to be living anywhere in a very large radius surrounding that city. Millions of people had their health care disrupted by Obamacare’s ministrations, and lost their plans, lost their doctors, and saw their costs and deductibles rise, many times drastically, who did not say “Thank you” in the upcoming elections, but showed the act’s sponsors the door.
This brings us to the third class of ungrateful people. They are the more than one-thousand Democratic placeholders — in the Senate, the House, the governor’s mansions and the state houses — who were punished by voters in the three of the four elections after the passage of Obamacare. There is very good reason for most of the Democrats not to be grateful for that.
All this occurred because Obama, the smartest man, as it was said, to ever be president, made the two worst decisions ever made in his office, concerning the power of force in foreign relations, and the power of public opinion at home. His decision in 2011and 2012 to pull all of the troops out of Iraq was to work as the thread that unraveled the region, though it took over two years to unfold. If you doubt the Iraq war was won when he made his decision, you have only to look to Obama himself when he said so, and to Vice President Joe Biden when he made the statement that securing the country and region was one of the greatest achievements that his administration had made.
And on a par with this, though not nearly as deadly, was the decision made in March, 2010, after the shocking election of Ohio Republican Scott Brown to the Senate, to ram the healthcare bill through Congress on a technicality, in the face of strong and widespread public rage.
“No piece of legislation is permanent, but must be sustained politically,” John Judis would tell us in 2013, saying Obama believed that getting the act passed would ensure its survival, without building the backing that would help it endure. As a result, a major disruption involving enormous expense is likely to dissolve into even more chaos. And no one is grateful for that.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
