The Lamest Duck
By Victor Davis Hanson
PJMedia.com
President Obama is boxed in a state of
paralysis—more so than typical lame-duck presidents.
His hard-left politics have insidiously eroded
the Democratic Party, which has lost both houses of
Congress and the vast majority of the state
legislatures, state elected offices, and
governorships. Obama has redefined the black vote,
as a necessary, no-margin-of-error 95% bloc majority
to offset his similar creation of an increasingly
monolithic 65% bloc white vote. We are no longer
individual voters, but, in Chicago-politics style,
merely faceless “Latinos,” “Asians,”
“African-Americans,” “gays,” “women,” and now
“whites.”
Obama issues a new
initiative—and the nation snoozes. He wastes the day
on the golf links—and the nation snoozes. He smear
his critics, invites a rapper to the White House
whose latest album cover
has a dead white judge lying in front of the White
House—and the nation snoozes. He cozies up to
America’s enemies and snubs our friends—and the
nation snoozes. For the nth time, he blusters about
closing down Guantanamo—and the nation snoozes. He
opens the border even wider to welcome in more
illegal aliens and future constituents—and the
nation snoozes. Lame duckestry means not even being
able to wake up your opponents.
There is so far no Obama
legacy,
except the creation of Donald Trump, a $20
trillion debt and zero interest rates—and the gift
of flat energy prices that came despite not because
of Obama’s efforts. Almost every major
bureaucracy is awash in scandal or charges of
incompetence. The common theme of the disasters at
the GSA, EPA, ICE, IRS, NASA, Secret Service, and VA
is ideological subversion and ingrained hostility to
meritocracy. Would anyone be surprised that another
government official pled the 5th, created
fake email personas, resigned at 5 PM on a Friday
afternoon, declared a foremost mission Muslim
outreach, or withheld subpoenaed documents?
Obamacare, borne of rank partisanship and serial
mendacity, can survive until 2017, only by bailouts
and executive-order manipulations. We now call
health care affordable by ignoring the new
astronomical deductibles: we pay premiums of $6,000
a year and forget that an annual $4,000 “deductible”
ensures no one thinks the real cost is $10,000. Is
that a small price to pay to ensure granny has
contraceptive coverage?
Americans shrug that Obama has left the world
abroad a far scarier place. Libya has been
destroyed. We can see in Iraq what Obama would have
done to South Korea had he been in Eisenhower’s
shoes. Syria’s death toll is nearing Saddam
Hussein’s. We gave up our golden special
relationship with Israel for one of dross with an
Islamist and roundly disliked Turkey that,
logically, now dislikes us.
What was astonishing about Obama’s empty red
lines that finished off any lingering sense of U.S.
credibility and deterrence in the Middle East was
that after issuing such threats and then ignoring
them, Obama then blamed the UN and the U.S. Congress
for setting them!
But then again, he blamed congressional
Republicans for opposing the Iran deal and compared
House members to Iranian theocrat hardliners, in a
way his team earlier had compared them to suicide
bombers. Even Neville Chamberlain did not blame
Winston Churchill for the “peace for our time”
travesty. In a tragic sort of way, Obama has
reminded us how savage is human nature, by
demonstrating that a vicious thug like Putin won
more of an amoral world’s respect for his savagery
than a whining Obama earned pity for his diffidence.
While the Middle East is
aflame, China is marking out new atolls to control,
like toll pirates of the 17th century,
European-Asian sea traffic. Russia is eyeing
neighbors, unsure only whether gratuitously
embarrassing Obama is worth the hassle of another
annexation. Is the solution to global tensions
really a trip to Cuba or shutting down Guantanamo by
executive order? When Castro soon harangues Obama in
Havana for his country’ sins, will he, as he did
after Daniel Ortega’s April 2009 dressing down in
Trinidad, sheepishly reply with, “I’m grateful that
President Castro did not blame me for things that
happened when I was three months old”?
Obama cannot address the massive debt he has run
up. He cannot address entitlement reform. He has
neither the imagination to offer solutions, nor the
disposition to share accomplishment with any other
than himself—even if he had the political clout to
compromise and reach consensus. For the next nine
months the Obama presidency will be mostly
teeth-gnashing and petulance. He will offer
executive orders and do his best to incite division
and rancor from a somnolent public, the more the
better to please his hard-core base, and to pave the
way for a lucrative (and iconic) post-presidency
among leftwing foundations, universities,
non-profits, foreign governments, sports, Hollywood,
Goldman Sachs progressives, and the media.
But at least Obama was an
iconic president, who transformed racial relations?
Not really. Perhaps no single individual has done
more to erode racial reconciliation than did Barack
Obama. The
racialism of the 2008 campaign — the nativist
clingers of Pennsylvania, his “typical white person”
grandmother who did so much to ensure his own
upper-middle-class prep-school existence, the savage
anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism of consigliore
Rev. “audacity of hope” Wright, the childish calls
to “get in their faces” and “bring a gun to a knife
fight” — really was the foundation for the next
eight years of Trayvon Martin as the lost Obama son,
the Ferguson mythologies, racism explains all
opposition to Obama, the beer summit, “punish our
enemies,” and Eric Holder’s “nation of cowards” and
“my people.”
Obama’s racial legacy is
the strange phenomenon of whiny, wealthy black
elites—whether a Skip Gates, Spike Lee, Melissa
Harris-Perry, Will Smith, or Chris Rock—acting hurt
and oppressed if rewards to elites such as
themselves are not doled out on the basis of racial
percentages. When
Oprah feels disrespected at a Zurich boutique
called Trois Pommes for not being shown quickly
enough a $38,000 crocodile-skin handbag for sale by
a European clerk, we are supposed to feel across the
Atlantic the ripples of Jim Crow racial
psychodramas.
America is now supposed to work on a strict 13
percent racial spoils system, everywhere except in
non-disparate impact professional sports or federal
employment. Complaining that an awards show this
year only had 10% black nominees in the top
categories (3% short?) is about like whining that
the secretary of State was either black or female or
both for over 15 years between 1997 and 2013. Who
knew, who cared? Will the NFL face court orders to
recruit Asian-American split ends, with outreach,
mentorship, and proportional representation writs?
Are there no talented Hmong or Vietnamese athletes
in a nation of 330 million who can run, catch, and
hit? Or are the criteria for NFL participation
arbitrary and likely culturally constructed? In our
sick society, is cultural appropriation white
rappers with cornrows or black opera singers with
blond Scandinavian-like streaks in their hair?
Neither or both?
Christians are baited at their prayer breakfasts
with pseudo-historical snipes at the Crusades.
Cairo-speech mythohistories pass for foreign policy.
Euphemisms about terrorism only empower radical
Islam. The mythologies of Ferguson are canonized at
the UN. All that can be said for all this and more
is that our enemies were put off guard and confused
that a president of the United States seemed so
intent on deprecating his own country and
traditions, and thus could think Obama’s sermonizing
might really be some elaborate hoax, con, or Trojan
Horse.
Nothing in the last eight
years is sustainable or can be emulated. Race
relations will change after Obama for the simple
reason that if they were to continue on his
segregationist trajectory we would quite soon end up
like Bosnia or Beirut. Fiscal policy will change,
because if we followed Obama’s
all “by his lonesome” Bank of China credit-card
binge borrowing of another $10 trillion in the next
eight years, the country would implode. Monetary
policy will change because eight more years of zero
interest would wipe out the age-old idea of the
wisdom of saving money altogether. Government policy
will change because the bureaucracy cannot endure
legions of more Lois Lerners, Lisa Jacksons,
Kathleen Sebeliuses, Hilda Solises, or Eric Holders.
Health care will change after Obama, because if
Obamacare were to persist, the entire country would
turn to cash-only concierge medicine. Foreign policy
will change after Obama, because to persist with his
policies would lead to four or five major theater
wars, a nuclear Middle East, Russia in the Baltic
states, and Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as client
states of China.
Immigration will change, because to follow
Obama’s open borders policy is to arbitrarily
declare federal law null and void, and to establish
the roots of a new third world country, neither
American nor Mexican, along the border, but inside
the United States. The media will change after Obama
because it is about to be enshrined as an
embarrassing government Ministry of Truth. It cannot
again proclaim that the next president is the
smartest person in the history of the presidency, a
veritable god, a wizard that can lower the seas and
cool the planet or send tingles down our legs or
make us wish to press our pants just like the
commander in chief. At some point, journalists will
get back to sniping that the next president should
know that there are not 57 states, that “corpseman”
is not the proper pronunciation, that the trilled
politically correct name for the Falklands is not
the Maldives, and that presidents do not normally
make fun of the Special Olympics.
We are witnessing the lamest of the lame-duck
presidencies, with the power neither to act nor
inspire—nor even to shock or surprise.