Looking back without happiness, and forward without cheer

 
On the day of Barack Obama’s first presidential inauguration, four years ago, I made this post expressing my hopes for the future. Now that he’s been sworn in a second time, I’ll take this time to look back on those hopes and see how well they’ve worked out.

So, harking back to my 2008 “Welcome, Mister President”:

I hope you’re even one-tenth as special as your most enraptured supporters appear to believe.

No evidence for that, sorry. If anything, he seems to have been bent on proving the opposite, while giving every indication that he’s a complete believer in his own hype.

I hope you’re every bit as idealistic as you’ve presented yourself as being, and at the same time cynically calculating as to which campaign promises you intend to keep (and how), because winning a campaign and running a country are entirely different tasks, not to be carried out in the same way.

Yeah, right. He certainly delivered on the cynicism … and the idealism, too, if one accepts ‘full-blown socialism’, with all power invested in the overarching state, as an ideal to be pursued. As far as running the country rather than campaigning, who could have expected that he would attempt to use permanent campaign as a WAY of governing?

I hope there is solid substance underlying the magnificent style, resulting in years of impressive performance to (finally) fulfill all that perceived potential.

No substance, and the style itself turns out to have been all surface flash. It appears that his major — perhaps only — talent was in convincing everyone that he HAD so much potential.

I hope that, having won largely on the basis of race — while presenting yourself as post-racial — you can actually move this country beyond the dogmatic straitjacket of racial politics.

The bitterest of all disappointments. The man who was supposed to cure our racial ills has governed as a dedicated racialist demagogue, a one-note purveyor of racial grievances. Worse, his entire party, and the mainstream media that voluntarily act as the action wing of the Democrat party, have universally condemned any policy disagreements with the Anointed One as motivated by nothing but racism. Can anyone deny that racial tension and racial hostility were lower in the much-maligned Bush years than they are now?

I hope you can inspire both parties, but especially your own, to more idealism and less ideological posturing.

Not even close.

I hope you will actively resist the desires of some on your side of the aisle to attempt the ex post facto criminalization of policy differences. This is a sword that cuts both ways, and would do incalculable harm to the nation for decades to come, regardless of which side happens to be in power.

The only one of my hopes that wasn’t directly contravened. If it’s happened at all — and I can think of no instances — it hasn’t been at any greater level than exhibited at other times Democrats were in power. Which is to say, too much, but nothing new.

I hope the man who turned the national imagination toward the future will avoid falling back on those past nostrums (particularly socialism and New-Deal-style big-government interventionism) that not only aren’t new but were consistent failures in their own heyday.

Nope. Again, ideology trumps reality. John Maynard Keynes had himself, by his death, repudiated the policies now known as ‘Keynesianism’, but liberals are never willing to give up on ANYTHING that involves government getting bigger and its power more pervasive, regardless of how continually or how badly such policies have always failed.

I hope “the smartest guy in every room he’s ever occupied” will have the wisdom to surround himself by people who know more than he does, and listen carefully to them before making his decisions.

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said about a political opponent, “He is a humble man, but then he has much to be humble about.” Barack Obama is the precise opposite: a stupendously arrogant man, with nothing at all to justify such an overweeningly high opinion of himself. He has stated, repeatedly and in multiple areas, that he knows more than the experts advising him, and apparently believes it. Anywhere but Washington or Hollywood, such pathological narcissism would disqualify a man for any position of trust or responsibility … but we’re stuck with him nonetheless, and he seems to have learned precisely NOTHING between then and now.

Above all, I hope the next four years — or more — will be a time of actual growth in this country, rather than something that simply has to be survived.

Now, I just hope the next four years CAN be survived.

This isn’t a matter of “I really wanted to be proven wrong,” because I didn’t make any predictions there, I put aside my reservations (for the day) and expressed genuine hopes. What we got instead was as if my list had been taken as a blueprint to do the precise opposite for four years.

I have disagreed with many presidents (all the ones I’ve known, in one way or another, though of course I disagreed more with some than with others), but have only despised two. The first was Bill Clinton, who I see as a smirking sociopath and genuinely evil man. The second (who I do not see as evil, but am certainly not willing to call a good man) is Barack Obama, who has successfully amalgamated the unadulterated self-worship of Bill Clinton, the clueless incompetence of Jimmy Carter, the arrogant elitism of Woodrow Wilson, the disastrous social engineering of New-Deal-FDR (who was a terrible president, while World-War-Two-FDR was a great president until he folded the game at Yalta), the unapologetic corruption of Lyndon Johnson, the unbridled racism (but reversed black-to-white) of Andrew Johnson, and even — in a somewhat different way and to an admittedly lesser degree, so far — the paranoid self-isolation of Richard Nixon.

I wanted better than this. The country deserved better. Heck, black Americans deserved better. So, okay, we’ve had our history-making first black president. Maybe sometime in the future we can manage to elect our first qualified black president.

Because this one is a dud. Worse than a failure, worse than a disaster: a man who gives every sign of wanting disaster, working with all his energy and imagination to bring it about, because he can only see the wonderfulness of his intentions rather than the awfulness of the results. And feels nothing but contempt for anyone who doesn’t share his vision, or recognize his (self-announced) greatness.