The Obama administration has fallen far short of the soaring aspiration in which it began. The wars have not ended. Obama is the first two-term president to be in one war — the war in Afghanistan, the war that even his own “surge” could not end — for his entire presidency. And it’s a war in which the Taliban has been making a comeback. Obama hands off American involvement in Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and a humiliating wind down of its five-year covert intervention in the Syrian Civil War.
Other inaugural promises have come to naught as well. More people have health care, yes, but more people also pay more to get the health care they want. And American health-care costs have not gone down to meet the standards set by the rest of the world. Our education system still fails people at the same desultory rates as before. And our respectable allies feel more empowered than ever to denigrate us.
And the political promise is spent as well. Obama was hailed as a genius and political savior. Now his own Democratic Party has fallen to new lows in the state legislatures and governors’ mansions across the country. Instead of handing on the executive branch to an ordained successor, he is passing it onto the man who questioned his birth certificate.
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