Krauthammer: Obama's legacy is toast
Remember Barack Obama's boast that he would so change the world that even "the rise of the oceans began to slow". Charles Krauthammer says the truth is that Obama's legacy will be wiped out. And good.
What Barack Obama promised on the night he won the Democratic nomination for President:
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America, this is our moment. This is our time... Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love...
If we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.
Charles Krauthammer does a stocktake:
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Obama's legacy is toast. Obama's legacy is gone. Which explains why he's so desperately, and unusually in American history, campaigned so roughly against Donald Trump. He knew that so much of his accomplishments had been built on ramming stuff through the House and the Senate with very little consensus, in fact none on Obamacare coming from the Republicans, on executive orders that are reversible with the stroke of a pen, on regulation that is easily reversible, that it collapses if and when his successor turns out to be a Republican. And that's what happened.
And I think he's going to end up as a parenthesis in American history in the sense that he thought when we came into office, he thought he was the Ronald Reagan of the left, meaning Reagan came in, he changed the ideological trajectory of the country, he turned it into a conservative country where that was the underlying consensus.
Obama thought he was going to change all of that and begin a liberal ascendancy the way that Reagan began a conservative ascendancy. Well, it did not turn out that way. The country rejected his policies.
Remember what Obama said when he was campaigning, I'm not on the ballot but my legacy is on the ballot. It was on the ballot and the country has rejected it. The idea that he would be the beginner of a new liberal ascendancy is now dead and Obama I think understands that very well.