President Barack Obama’s Legacy - Hope And Change for the Better?

“Hope and change” was his mantra. What was his hope, and what did he want to change? The first thing he changed as a young adult was his name from Barry to Barack. Why? What was wrong with Barry? It seems he may have had an identity crises. Based on his history, it would be understandable. His white mother married a Kenyan who Barry never knew growing up and finally met for only one week as a young adult. She remarried an Indonesian, and Barack spent time in that country as a youngster attending a Madrassa for several years. In fact, Barack said, as an adult, the sweetest sound he liked to hear was the Imam’s call to prayer. He left his mother and stepfather at a young age and lived with his white grandparents who literally raised him in Hawaii. On the other hand, he may have wanted to change his name to Barack Hussein to give his name a cache that Barry lacked. This would set him apart from an ordinary Barry and make himself mysterious.

This is not the typical background of someone who becomes the President of the United States. When you think about it, where else in the world could this have take place? What was so important to change about this country? It would be impossible to say we have institutionalized racism in this country today since we elected Barack Hussein Obama president twice. He defeated: Hillary Clinton, John McCain, a war hero and a well-known Senator, and for his second-term candidacy Mitt Romney, an ex Governor and a very wealthy business man. Think about it. We elected a black man whose middle name is Hussein that had virtually no experience other than a short term in the Senate. This is an amazing success story and represents a great achievement by Barack. It is a testament to how far we have come as a diverse country.

Therefore, I could never figure out why he seemed to have such a chip on his shoulder, particularly dealing with race relations. So where did this “chip” come from? He no doubt faced many indignities growing up as black man with a white mother since racism was much more endemic compared to today’s environment. Nevertheless, he went to Occidental, a prestigious prep school, Columbia undergraduate and Yale law. Since his grandparents were not wealthy and considered middle class, how could he afford to get into these great schools? In his book, “Dreams from My Father,” he doesn’t mention how he got into these prestigious schools or how well he did. This part of his life has been kept out of public view.

Academia is one place that could have fostered this negative attitude. He attended a school in Indonesia where, according to Pew surveys, they have some of the most unfavorable views of the Jews in the Muslim world. In the early 1980s he attended Columbia. At that time, professor Edward Said was expounding a pro-PLO narrative against Israel. Unfortunately, academia is a bastion of progressive thinking that, in many quarters, seems to emphasize what’s wrong with this country. They promote the idea that we are an evil, racist country based on the exploitation of men of color, and our founding fathers were all rich white slave owners. While we know that slavery was part of our sordid past, we have to put that in some sort of context. The founding of this country and its principles is nothing short of an extraordinary accomplishment. Yes, our founding fathers were not perfect and had their share of foibles. However, their accomplishments far exceeded their drawbacks such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, our three branches of government and the formation of our democratic republic that decentralizes federal government power. While we did not invent the concept of slavery, it was finally abolished with the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives during the civil war.

We are an exceptional country based on the genius of our founding fathers who established the bedrock principles that continue to govern this country today. We are a country of laws that protect individuals and property ownership. Title, aristocratic family lineage and wealth are not mandatory requirements in order to govern. This country is a capitalistic, meritocracy. While having an inheritance helps one’s chances to be monetarily successful, capitalism has been the great equalizer that gives anyone that chance. Silicon Valley and all of those entrepreneurs that started in their family basement, like Bill Gates of Microsoft fame, have created billions of dollars of wealth. Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, was not wealthy when he amassed his fortune as a great stock investor. Oprah Winfrey, talk-show host, celebrity and marketing genius, is a multibillionaire. She started out very poor. These are just a few diverse examples, and there are too many others to enumerate. For instance, there are 4.8 million millionaires in this country according to the annual World Wealth Report in 2016. This is an astounding number and a testimony to the great opportunities this country can offer.


Another important negative influence on Barack was reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose church he attended for over 20 years. Reverend Wright was a firebrand that spewed anti US and Jewish sentiment. He was a mentor to Barack and married the Obamas. This was a very close affiliation that Barack had to repudiate and disavow in order to win the White House. In addition, according to Ruth R. Wisse, a former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, Obama had an association with the anti-Zionist hard left in Chicago. The Obama’s house in Chicago was on the same block as Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Black Muslims, a radical, anti-semitic, anti-white organization. In addition, Barack had an affinity for the teachings of Saul Alinsky who developed his theory of political agitation in his famous 1971 book “Rules for Radicals.” This is considered a classic radical, left-wing guide to community organizing. Saul Alinsky was a community organizer in Chicago, and Barack recalled those years as “the best education he ever had”. Furthermore, years later, Barack seemed comfortable talking about Alinskian jargon in 2007 to Ryan Lizza, a reporter for the New Republic. He recalled Barack’s organizing workshops where concepts like “being predisposed to other people’s power” were used. You could easily tie in that comment to Reverend Wright who was able to mesmerize his audience with his powerful orations.


More evidence of Barack’s views can be gleaned from his actions and inactions as President. For instance, his commentary on high-profile police shootings of black men were often prejudicial before all the evidence was revealed. The Michael Brown case in Ferguson Missouri is a classical example of this. The officer in this case was exonerated by a jury trial and an intensive Justice Department investigation. The false narrative that Mr. Brown was executed while he had his hands up is still pervasive in the black community. What is completely inexplicable is that Barack had Al Sharpton act as his liaison in this case, and Mr. Sharpton has been at the White House over a hundred times. Another example is his embracing the “Black Lives Matter” movement. The leadership of this organization has not forcefully condemned some of their group’s advocating killing police. Furthermore, this group continues to stir up racial animosity without criticizing black on black crime, which is at epidemic proportions, particularly in Chicago. This lack of balance in this organization’s commentary, in my mind, delegitimizes their purpose and supports a nihilist anti-cop movement.

While I did not vote for Obama, I was hoping race relations would improve under his auspices and unfortunately, in my opinion, they have gotten worse. He has unfairly demonized police when the overwhelming evidence is that blacks are not unfairly targeted since they cause a disproportionate amount of the crime. According to Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, “In 2012, Blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites [excluding homicide] and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence against blacks.” Blacks, therefore, had committed 85% of the non-homicide interracial violence while they make up less than 13% of the population. Furthermore, police shootings of black men are rare. A case in point is Chicago, where there were 4,368 shootings in 2017, according to the Chicago Tribune’s crime database. However, more than 99% of those shootings were committed by civilians not cops. What is the most disappointing to me is that he had done nothing to try to stop the killing fields in Chicago. Not only gang members are being killed but innocent children are being harmed as well. People are living in a war zone there, and he focuses his attention on demonizing the police. In high crime black neighborhoods police protection could very possibly be negatively impacted by the “Ferguson effect”. It is a theory named after that community in Illinois that has had policing problems. It postulates that some cops are reluctant to get involved with black crime for fear of being assaulted by blacks then criticized and falsely accused of inappropriate policing.

It is very difficult for me to give President Obama good grades for his presidency, especially looking through the prism of his foreign policy. When he became president, one of the first things he did was to remove the bust of Winston Churchill from the White House. This was a good indication that this president was going to view world affairs and our role in it from a different perspective than we had been accustomed to. For example, he went on a world apology tour, even stopping in Venezuela to acknowledge Hugo Chavez, emphasizing our mishaps to other countries. In addition, he was asked about American exceptionalism in an April 2009 press conference. He said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism”. He went on to say he was enormously proud of this country and the role it played in world history, However, these comments appeared inauthentic in view of his world apology tour. In addition, during his administration, he has used the term we should “lead from behind," not a great endorsement from someone who believes we are an exceptional country that should have a strong role in shaping world opinion.

His lack of leadership has resulted in a world lit by fire after his presidency. When he first became president, Iraq was stabilized. He and Vice President Biden actually commented it was a remarkable achievement for a democracy to actually take hold in that country. This analysis gave Barack cover to withdraw the bulk of our forces there against the advice of many of his military advisors in order to keep his campaign pledge. Under his watch, ISIS had spread to many countries, and we have wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Russia has taken over Crimea, parts of the Ukraine and is now involved in Syria. Also, China is making unstopped incursions in the south-China Sea by constructing islands there. Moreover, Europe is being destabilized due to the flood of millions of immigrants coming from war-torn Syria.

According to some experts, one of his great foreign policy accomplishments was the Iran agreement in order to stop their continued development of a nuclear bomb. However, this was not a treaty since he did not get senatorial approval, which would have formed a more iron-clad agreement. Furthermore, we gave this terrorist nation billions of dollars to come to the table. Moreover, if Iran decides to break the agreement, we lose most of our leverage since we will never be able to easily put back the multi-country embargoes that brought pressure on them in the first place to start the negotiation process.

Unfortunately, his domestic policies were not much better. While it is true that Barack was handed a very extreme financial crisis, it is questionable this was the major reason that the economic recovery was one of the worst on record. After studying 27 recession-recovery cycles since 1882, two economists, Michael Bordo and Joseph Haubrich, showed that recoveries after financial crises are actually sharper than other recoveries. Moreover, Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute concluded that the regulatory burdens of the Dodd-Frank law had a burdensome effect on bank lending, particularly community banks, which lend primarily to smaller businesses that are the major growth engine of employment. Employment by small business between 2002 and 2010 created 64% of the net new jobs in the US economy. That source of employment, according to Mr. Wallison, disappeared since the enactment of Dodd Frank. U.S.Economic growth in 2016 grew at 1.6%, which marks the 11th consecutive year that the economy grew at less than 3%, the longest period on record according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

In addition, his energy policy did very little to help us become energy independent and help stimulate the economy. He focused solely on renewal sources like wind and solar while excluding fossil fuels. In fact, he derided Sara Palin’s comment of “drill baby drill” to deal with high energy prices. As late as 2012, according to the Wall Street Journal, he called her comment “a slogan, a gimmick, and a bumper sticker” but “not a strategy.” In 2006, we imported 12.9 million barrels of crude and petroleum products. In October of 2017 that declined to 2.5 million a day. Furthermore, the fracking boom increased natural gas production by approximately 50% from January 2010 to November 2017. Incidentally, Barack took credit for the reduction in carbon omissions. However, that primarily resulted not from alternative sources of energy but from industry switching from coal to less expensive gas.

One area of strength during Barack’s tenure was the stock market, which had a remarkable run contrary to the poor economic recovery. I believe he deserves credit for maintaining stability at the Federal Reserve Board keeping Bernanke at the Fed and choosing Janet Yellen as his successor. They both seemed to be the only grown ups in the room who recognized the breadth and depth of the economic slowdown by providing the necessary liquidity to keep the economy from going into a deeper tailspin in the absence of appropriate fiscal stimulus. However, it remains to be seen whether the FRB is going to be successful in unwinding the unprecedented amount of stimulus as the economy improves without causing economic dislocations. The irony of the Feds policies was that the rich got richer due to the gains in the stock market, deepening the divide between the rich and the poor. This was contrary to what President Obama wanted to achieve since he claimed to be the champion of the middle class and the underprivileged. Furthermore, under Barack’s egis, the national debt increased by 10 trillion dollars to 20 trillion. This is a huge amount of money that may hamstring President Trump to effectively use fiscal policy to stimulate economic growth. So far, we have been lucky as interest rates have been historically low, making the financing of this debt manageable.


In addition, President Obama should get credit for putting health care front and center on the radar screen despite the failures of Obama Care and the way it was enacted. No other administration has been able to pass comprehensive health care legislation providing health care to millions of people that never had access before. One of the potential hallmarks of the Trump administration is whether he will be able to improve Obama Care and reduce the ever increasing costs to our economy. Nevertheless, health care access to people who cannot afford it is not going away in my opinion. The political fallout of removing those people who have health care for the first time will be untenable.

I believe the most damaging aspect of Obama’s presidency was that major institutions like the IRS and the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, were weaponized against political opponents. The IRS used inappropriate criteria to screen and disapprove applications for tax- exempt status of names of any group involving: the Tea Party, or patriots, or with a specific policy position, primarily conservative groups. The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration released a critical report entitled, “Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review.” Lois Lerner was the director of the Cincinnati-based Exempt Organization of the IRS. When she went before a congressional committee investigating this, she pleaded the fifth. Four days before the critical report of the inspector general was released, she finally publicly acknowledged and apologized for the practice of targeting these groups. Ultimately, Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, settled the case with 400 groups who sued. Barack has maintained this was a rogue agent and he knew nothing about her activities. Nevertheless, I would like to know why Lois Lerner received a full pension despite her stonewalling unlawful policies.

The House Intelligence Committee investigation of the FBI is even more damaging than the IRS debacle. The Republican report from the committee claimed that the FBI acted inappropriately to get FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page, a very low level operative in the Tump campaign. They used the Christopher Steele dossier, which was based on Russian intelligence that was financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign. A memo that James Comey referred to, in Senate testimony many months later, when the FISA warrants were issued, as containing “Salacious and unverified” material. While the democrats believe their memo refutes the republican memo, there are many questions that were not resolved. Why wasn’t the FISA Court informed specifically that Hillary Clinton was the party responsible for obtaining the dossier. In addition, was the Steele dossier the major evidence used to grant these warrants? Furthermore, if FBI head James Comey, an Obama appointee, knew this memo was unverified, why was it used in the first place?

In addition to the FISA warrants controversy, Mr Comey seems to have acted inappropriately during the Hillary Clinton email investigation. It was discovered that he wrote a memo exonerating Hillary before the investigation was completed. Moreover, the language which would have implicated her to be in violation of the law was changed. The phrase “reckless disregard was crossed out and in its place was written she was “extremely careless.” Also,
The Justice Department released very damaging communications between Peter Strzok, a lead FBI investigator on Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, and his girl friend Lisa Page, a lawyer for the FBI. He also participated in the Russia probe under Robert Mueller, the special counsel, These communications showed their disdain for Donald Trump. Ultimately, he was fired by Mueller for this conflict.

It is hard not to conclude that the fix was in to exonerate Hillary Clinton. Especially, knowing Bill Clinton, during his wife’s investigation, met with Loretta Lynch, who was the attorney general under Obama. After that meeting, Hillary was not put under oath during her FBI testimony. Unfortunately, the majority of the main-stream media is not actively reporting and investigating this huge story, much bigger than Watergate in my opinion. The one saving grace is the inspector general of the Justice Department will be coming out with a report shortly. This should explain, in a nonpartisan way, exactly what happened during the FISA Court warrant process of the Trump campaign. In addition to this report, it is my understanding he will be reporting on the Hillary Clinton email investigation some time in the future.

According to the New York Times, President Obama was rated by historians as one of the top ten presidents. Apparently, he gets high marks for the dignified way he conducted himself. However, what I cannot resolve is how he escaped criticism from the main-stream media, other than Fox, about statements he made that were either incompetent or bold face lies. For instance, he told the American people that his 787 billion dollar stimulus package had “shovel- ready projects.” He gave the impression that a meaningful amount of this money would be committed to infrastructure. The Wall Street Journal reported that only 60 billion dollars was actually spent on infrastructure. Barack had to finally admit there were very few of these projects since it was a lot more complicated to get their approval Furthermore, he and Hillary Clinton told gold-star families that a Christian preacher’s video criticizing Mohammad was the major cause of the Benghazi Embassy raids. This was proved early on to be patently false. To make matters worse, Susan Rice, his national security secretary, went on TV for a week reporting this false narrative. Moreover, in his selling of the Affordable Care Act to the American people, he stated emphatically you will be able to keep your doctor and plan, which was patently false.

In addition, we recently learned from an FBI report that Obama was informed that the Russians were meddling in our elections as far back as 2014. Yet Obama castigated Trump for complaining about Russian interference during his campaigning. Obama said there is absolutely no evidence to support Trump’s statement, and it is virtually impossible for Russia to have any meaningful control over the election process. During one of the debates with Romney he chastised Romney’s assertion that Russia was our main threat. Then according to The Washington Post in March 26, 2012, with an open microphone Obama was overheard talking to acting Russian President Medevev. He said, “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this, can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space.“ He was referring to incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin. Obama also said, “This is my last election”. He interjects, “After my election, I will have more flexibility.”

Finally, a very troubling event that took place, which was widely publicized, was how President Obama permitted Russia to gain control of 20% of our uranium. Through a very convoluted process, Armz a Russian company took over Uranium One, a Canadian company that had uranium mining reserves in the US. All these events, illustrate that President Obama was not very hawkish when it came to Russia and Putin. It’s ironic, that today, we get a steady drumbeat from the media on how Russia interfered with the last presidential election and President Trump colluded with Russia in order to win the presidency. Trump is constantly being criticized for not speaking out more forcefully against Putin and punishing Russia for undermining our democratic process.

In conclusion, it is fair to say that President Barack Obama looked the part as President. He was immaculately attired, a good family man with a encaging demeanor that many people liked. His defenders would say that republican obstructionism was the primary reason for Barack’s lack of success in implementing his policies. In fact, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate Minority leader, at the very beginning of Barack’s first administration said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president “. There is no doubt that the republicans were acting as obstructionists, Nevertheless, Barack had clear sailing for the first two years of his presidency since the democrats controlled both houses of congress. Moreover, it is politics as usual for the opposition party to push back against any sitting president from implementing policies which are fundamentally counter to their philosophy. As an example, when President Ronald Reagan first came into office, he was met by Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, who said, and I am paraphrasing, welcome to the room that we will be conspiring against you. In addition, Obama was no centrist since he represented an extreme wing of his party. Moreover, even the New York Times, a noted liberal supporting newspaper, several years ago featured a very revealing piece in the “Review Section” on President Obama. It stated he lacked the personality to reach across the isle and schmooze with his opponents in order to gain support for his policies.

In summary, based on his lack of accomplishments, his ineffective domestic and foreign policies, his divisive rhetoric on race relations, and the many statements he made on substantive issues that were patently false, it is very difficult for me to believe that future historians will give him high marks. It is a shame, since he had a wonderful opportunity to improve upon the greatness of this country as an important healer for race relations. His very success is a testament to that greatness However, he squandered that opportunity as a result of his misguided views and philosophy regarding our country, which in his opinion needed major change.