Forget Hillary and Trump. The biggest loser Tuesday night was Barack Obama.
Yes, his approval rating is above 50 percent. In at least one survey Obama is more popular than Reagan was at the end of his second term.
But numbers are fleeting. The facts are not.
President Obama’s record on foreign and domestic policy is dismal, to say the least. His withdrawal of American power from the world coincided with the rise of ISIS, the ravaging of Syria and a series of successful terror attacks both in the heart of Europe and here on American soil. Would there have been a Brexit, or victories for anti-immigration parties in Europe without the failure of Obama’s leadership in the Middle East and North Africa?
President Obama’s domestic-policy record is even worse: The weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression; a record number of Americans on food stamps and for the longest time; a stimulus plan that was an economic joke even before “Cash for Clunkers” became a punchline; and a doubling of the national debt in eight short years. And then there’s Obamacare.
On election night Democratic operative James Carville announced “Obamacare is dead.” He’s right, but that was true whether Trump or Clinton won.
Obamacare didn’t die in the ballot box, it died in the mail box: Millions of Americans getting letters announcing premium increases of 50, 60, even 100 percent. And that’s on top of huge deductibles that made their “insurance” little more than a reverse lottery ticket against medical catastrophe.
President Obama did this to America on purpose. Obamacare wasn’t crippled by being the best deal he could wrangle from the Republicans. It was crafted and passed entirely by Obama and his Democrat allies. He wanted it and he got it.
Good and hard.
Obama’s supporters shrug off such criticism. They believe Obama will be viewed as a success because history is written by political winners, not masters of healthcare policy. As the first black American to achieve the presidency and the first Democrat to win a popular-vote majority since 1976, Obama fans believe his two White House wins make him a lock for the list of successful presidents.
But now President Obama is going to hand the keys of the White House to Donald Trump. It’s the biggest of his electoral defeats, but hardly the first. In fact, the devastation of the Democratic Party is Obama’s true political legacy.
If Democrats were a species of wildlife, Barack Obama would be indicted under the Endangered Species Act. As Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia reports, the Obama era cost Democrats 11 governorships, 13 U.S. Senate seats, 69 House seats and 913 legislative seats(!). And that’s before the 2016 results, in which (for example) Kentucky Republicans won the statehouse for the first time since 1921, and the Iowa GOP picked up the state senate.
The Obama Effect has wiped out a generation of Democrats—rising stars like North Carolina’s Kay Hagan or Indiana’s Evan Bayh or Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold—who could be potential POTUS or VP candidates…if they hadn’t been defeated in the Obamacare backlash (in Feingold’s case, twice!)
So who is the face of the post-Obama Democratic Party: Joe Biden? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders? I’d make a “Golden Girls” wisecrack but they’d all have to play Sophia. (She was the really old one.)
To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, the entire Democratic village went all-in to raise Barack Obama to the White House. He, in turn, razed that village and set it ablaze. Now he’s leaving the White House in the hands of a man who spent a year searching for his birth certificate. Because Barack Obama couldn’t beat him—not with all the money, all the media and all of his magical “light-bringer” political powers.
Barack Obama is a failure. Obamacare is done. His executive orders will be overturned. He has no political successor. There are not “Obama Democrat” to champion his ideology.
And the indisputable evidence of Obama’s failure will come the moment Donald Trump stands with him on January 20 and takes the oath of office.
