Thread: Obama’s tragic admission: He’s learned nothing as president

Obama’s tragic admission: He’s learned nothing as president

October 4, 2016 | 11:42pm


News flash: President Obama didn’t learn anything in eight years in the White House. And he’s proud of it.

As Obama admitted in an interview with New York magazine: “If you go back and you read speeches I made when I was running for the US Senate in 2003, or if you go back further and you look at statements I made when I was on the Harvard Law Review, my worldview is pretty consistent.”

The comment was a point of pride, which makes it doubly tragic. Once the smartest man in the room, always the smartest man in the room.

Never mind that the world is on fire, that America is polarized, angry and scared. Or that ObamaCare is a sick patient, that the economy is growing at a snail’s pace and that many cities are racial war zones.

It’s not Obama’s fault. None of it. He would do it all again.

With voters fixated on his successor, Obama is fixated on his legacy. A large part of his effort on the way out the door is explaining what he did, and insisting that what he did was right. Always.

There’s no news there, but there is some valuable insight from the ways he defends the indefensible. Let it be a warning to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton about the pitfalls of the power they are seeking.

If nothing else, the winner should take the oath of office next January armed with the knowledge that hubris is the common thread in Obama’s many failures.

For example, the president says his secret sauce was that he “trusted my judgment” but didn’t “trust the noise out there,” meaning Republicans, talk radio, cable TV and pretty much everybody else who didn’t agree with him.

At some point, he said, he concluded his critics were “not even trying to be fair-minded in their assessments or recommendations,” and he found that liberating because he could ignore them.

Whether it was enforcing his red line in Syria, which he didn’t, or substituting executive orders for congressional action, he expressed no regret. He was right and everybody else was wrong.

It’s a remarkable notion, yet plainly a trend when government is the largest special interest, one that uses and abuses its power to look out for itself. Especially under liberals, it only admits failure to demand more power.

This is no small feat. Consider that way back in the reign of George W. Bush, it was universally accepted that a president ought to be held accountable for national problems. A war that didn’t work out as planned, a natural disaster or an economic one all fell on the head of the occupant of the Oval Office.

But Obama and his apologists cleverly reversed the dynamic. Now the American public is to blame when things go wrong.

It’s because people are “deplorables” or some other ignorant form of life that leads them to resist wise choices government makes for them. If only the people were smart enough and honest enough to understand how lucky they are, the country would be better off.

Throughout this interview and others, it is clear that Obama is leaving office with both his worldview and his prejudices firmly intact. Recall that during the 2008 campaign, talking to donors in San Francisco, he said that white working-class people in Pennsylvania and places like it were falling behind economically and “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s the most quoted part of his remarks, but the rest of it was equally snobbish: Those same people, he said, also cling to “anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Imagine if Obama had listened to those people, instead of shutting them out as noise. Imagine if he had seen their problems as legitimate, instead of seeing them as backwoods bigots.

But he didn’t, and so he leaves the country more bitterly divided than when he began. And, as I have said before, Trump’s rise through his focus on immigration and trade are a big part of Obama’s legacy.

Obama often said he wanted to transform America. A President Trump is certainly not the transformation he had in mind, but it may be the one he gets.

Imagine that inauguration.

http://nypost.com/2016/10/04/obamas-...-as-president/

Obama often said he wanted to transform America. A President Trump is certainly not the transformation he had in mind, but it may be the one he gets.

Imagine that inauguration.

He did transform America. He transformed one of the greatest nations ever to exist into a Corrupt, Bankrupt, Third World, Banana Republic with an FBI that's now on the same footing with the KGB.