I share many of the hopes for our country that President Obama outlined in his recent farewell address. His call for unity was eloquent and admirable, and in places his speech reinforced my belief that he loves America. That said:
In his address he claimed that “race relations are better than they were 10, 20, or 30 years ago — not just in the statistics, but in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum.”
Race relations may be better than 10, 20 or 30 years ago, but when president Obama was elected nine years ago, polls showed 70 percent of whites and 61 percent of blacks thought race relations were good or improving. Today, 51 percent of blacks and 45 percent of whites feel that way, and if the “Black Lives Matter” movement is any indication, the “attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum” are more antagonistic than positive regarding race relations.
He also bragged of his foreign policy successes, not mentioning that he oversaw the rise of ISIS, the most powerful Islamic terrorist group ever, or that his refusal to support the rebel groups fighting to end the bloody rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad resulted in the deaths and displacement or nearly 1 million people, and Syria’s future is now in the hands of Vladimir Putin and Iran’s mullahs. As for his nuclear weapons agreement with Iran, it guarantees Iran a nuclear weapons capability within eight years, and it was so disliked by the American people and Congress, the president refused to submit it as a treaty.
He also spoke of his climate change agreement, signed in 2015, which two of the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas polluters, China and India, will ignore because the agreement contains no sanctions or penalties for those signatories who violate the agreement.
He also bragged of the 20 million people now covered by Obamacare, while not mentioning that health insurance costs have skyrocketed, and insurance companies participating in Obamacare are exiting in droves, having lost millions of dollars (United Health Care has lost more than $1 billion).
Finally, he bragged of a growing economy. Not mentioned was that his original economic growth-generator, his $1 trillion “stimulus” package, resulted in the loss of $697 million in government-guaranteed loans to three “green” companies — Solyndra, Beacon Power and Ener 1 — all of which went bankrupt. Also not mentioned was an anemic annual GDP growth of 2 percent, or the doubling of our national debt to nearly $20 trillion.
Obama’s address was a last-ditch effort to shape his legacy, but on that the American people seem to have weighed in by electing a man whose only selling point was his promise to undo as much of Obama’s legacy as possible.
