Had Obama delivered for your average American, US politics wouldn’t be in the deplorable state it is now.
By any possible progressive metric, Obama’s eight years were a disaster. The ACA was a slight improvement over what was there, but essentially a bandaid over a sucking chest wound.
He didn’t end any of the wars America was in, but instead started new ones. He pioneered extra-legal assassination of US citizens by their own government.
His stump speech in 2008 went, “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.”
He not only didn’t complete these things, he forgot about them. In 2012, he gave this speech:
We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some. So we are drilling all over the place — right now…. That’s not the challenge. That’s not the problem. In fact, the problem in a place like Cushing is that we’re actually producing so much oil and gas in places like North Dakota and Colorado that we don’t have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it to where it needs to go — both to refineries, and then, eventually, all across the country and around the world. There’s a bottleneck right here because we can’t get enough of the oil to our refineries fast enough. And if we could, then we would be able to increase our oil supplies at a time when they’re needed as much as possible. […] But the fact is that my administration has approved dozens of new oil and gas pipelines over the last three years -– including one from Canada. And as long as I’m President, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people. We don’t have to choose between one or the other, we can do both.
Obama’s administration was a complete failure for progressives, and yet they want to keep repeating his empty slogans as if they had meaning.
In a century, Obama, Trump, Bush and Clinton will be lumped into the same category — Presidents who ignored climate change in favor of war and Wall Street.
