A Monumental Failure

In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected President, many members of the populace--who were starving for competence and respectability after eight years of the Shrub disaster--were set to start chiseling the nation's first Black chief executive's features onto Mount Rushmore, before he even took office. No one in my lifetime--including the conservatives' holy man, "Saint Ronnie"--entered the White House with a greater mandate to take action and change the direction in which the nation was heading.

Fast forward to today, and it is clear that there will be no carvings, statues, or any sort of respectful memorial in future days for the nation's 44th President.

We have reached the point where this author can see no choice but to declare this administration, and the man who leads it, a monumental failure. In the wake of the debt ceiling fiasco...which came on the heels of last year's capitulation on the tax cuts for the wealthy...which followed an abysmal showing by his party at the polls...which followed a timid, half-measured effort for meaningful health care reform (which resulted in the inadequate Affordable Care Act)...which came on the heels of the failure to enact an adequate stimulus in the face of the Lesser Depression...A realistic assessment must view the past two and a half years as little more than a series of missteps and outright blundering, almost from the moment Obama took office.

Apologists will undoubtedly point out--as they have continually pointed out, in lock-step with the proceeding litany of stumbles--that Obama has had to work with (or against, depending upon your perspective) a hostile opposition who have only cared about subverting his every initiative, and that he has done the best he could working within that context. But that argument is nonsense. Too often, Obama has greeted the hostility of the Republicans with a timidity bordering on obeisance, if not outright cowardice. It was obvious from the start, to keen observers if not the President himself, that such would be the situation. But Obama bore the opposition's attacks and failed to answer with the required vigor when he needed to respond in kind. All the public got to see from the target of the vitriol was an obsessive concern with "bipartisanship"; Obama fetishized transcending political differences even when such efforts guaranteed doom for policies the nation truly needed.

And, lest we forget, from the start Obama rarely lived up to his own stated platform. He has not ended any of America's wars; in fact, he has expanded them. He has been tepid in his response to the criminal activities of Wall Street; hardly a surprise, in retrospect, seeing as the "banksters" are among his biggest donors. He even wavered on his promises to the gay community on equality issues, taking most of his time in office to end the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. All of this and more have accumulated in the minds of the American populace as the actions of a man who is ineffectual, at best, and incompetent and/or a liar at worst.

The upshot of perception--its benefit for his rivals--is the worst part of this fiasco. Obama's lack of performance as President has done more to legitimize his opponents than any acts of their own. Left to their own devices, the 2012 Republican contenders would look wholly inadequate in the eyes of the nation's voters. But Obama's wretched showing, especially the lack of progress on turning around the economy, has left the door open for one of those petty hustlers, including a few would-be Nehemiah Scudders, to walk through, claim the Oval Office, and enact a whole new series of lurid, neo-con disasters. The failures of the present are also dooming the future.

Perhaps most galling, much of this lack of vigor for a true, reforming policy agenda by Obama seems to have been the product of a cold calculation that assumed that liberal and progressive voters, no matter how disgusted they might be with the President's failure to enact a platform to their liking, would never vote for a conservative candidate whose policies and beliefs they abhor.

As it turns out, this political bet will almost certainly prove unwise. While it may be true that voters like myself would never consider positively casting a ballot for the semi-reasonable Romney--let alone nightmares like Palin, Bachmann, or Perry--that does not mean that votes for Obama are assured. At a certain point, even the most zealous leftist will throw up his hands in disgust and simply not vote at all. Eventually, when all you see around you are horrors and the future seems lost regardless, you will choose the quick death over the slow; or, as the aging titlular emperor in I, Claudius declares (upon deciding to let the repugnant Nero succeed him), "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud, hatch out!" It would appear that we have reached the bitter end, and some of us have no stomach for the long, slow descent into the abyss. It may as well be a plunge into the shadows, rather than an ignominious crawl.

Such, it seems, will be the legacy of Barack Obama.