Obama’s Legacy Has Already Been Destroyed

New York Magazine ^ | May 18, 2018 | Andrew Sullivan

[re_tail20]

In one respect, it seems to me, the presidency of Donald Trump has been remarkably successful. In 17 months, he has effectively erased Barack Obama’s two-term legacy.

I don’t want to say or face this. I still want to believe my colleague, Jonathan Chait, whose thesis is that the changes Obama made in his difficult but tenacious eight years in office are too great to reverse. And there are a couple of shifts that do indeed seem to be as permanent as anything is in politics: marriage equality and legal cannabis. But neither, one recalls, was a signature goal of Obama. He began as an alleged opponent of marriage equality, even though, of course, he was bullshitting. He wouldn’t touch the marijuana issue in his entire term and even at one point dismissed it as trivial. As for the rest, in specific policy terms, Trump and the Republican Congress have succeeded in undoing Obama’s work to an extent I barely anticipated.

In economic policy, Obama’s slow winnowing of the deficit even in times of sluggish growth has been completely reversed. We too easily forget that the biggest accomplishment of Trump’s term in office so far — a massive increase in debt in a time of robust economic growth — is the inverse of Obama’s studied sense of fiscal responsibility. Nothing in modern fiscal history can match Trump’s recklessness — neither Reagan’s leap of faith nor George W. Bush’s profligacy — and it’s telling that the Democrats and the liberal intelligentsia have accommodated so swiftly to it. Nothing is so unfashionable right now as worrying about debt.

The fiscal vandalism is also a massive U-turn in terms of redistribution. If Obama managed to shift resources, ever so incrementally, toward the middle class and the poor (by allowing Bush’s tax cuts for...

[Ohioan]

Obama was the mortal enemy of the middle class or mainstream Americans in general. His "legacy" was one of sabotaging a trust. Hardly a legacy, in the ordinary sense. Virtually every thing the man touched was part of an ongoing Leftist War On Social Continuity.

[Ohioan]

Nazis were extreme Socialists--to the Left of everything but the Bolsheviks in Europe.

Obama borrowed much of Hitler's playbook, in the 2008 campaign, (Leftist Chickens Coming Home.)

[bkopto]

is the inverse of Obama’s studied sense of fiscal responsibility.

You mean the the guy whose FLOTUS was raping the taxpayers with her extravagant vacations and soirees? Obama was a financial pirate.

[Brilliant]

He’ll always be the first Kenyan born US President.