3. He took a bold stand against freedom of conscience. Obamacare should have just been about expanding access to healthcare. But Obama also used it as an opportunity to compel religious employers to provide contraception coverage to their employees. This is a big philosophical departure for US liberalism, which hitherto tended to disagree with but respect Catholic moral theology. By contrast, the President made challenging the Vatican’s position on free love a big part of his re-election drive. This included an alliance with a female student, Sandra Fluke, who wanted her Catholic college to provide contraception coverage worth $1,000 a year – a figure that works out to 6 acts of contra-celibacy per day. Time Magazine considered making her a person of the year, too…
5. His ego grew another thousand feet. When Americans gathered in December to honour the memory of Hawaii’s Senator Daniel Inouye, they probably expected the President to use his eulogy to talk about the late Democrat’s service to America. Instead, he described how Inouye had done the world a big favour by inspiring a young Barack Obama to shoot for the presidency. This was illustrated with a looooong description of a vacation the Obamas took across America, during which Barack saw Inouye on TV and decided that he too – glory be! – might run for office some day. Even the usually sympathetic Slate wrote, “Someone needs to tell Barack Obama … that his own birth is not Year One, the date around which all other events are understood.”
