Imagine the hysterics if Tea Partiers had conducted themselves similarly in the wake of Obama's reelection in 2012, yet all we're getting today from much of our news reports are the cold, hard facts. No hand-wringing about what these riots portend for our democracy. No blistering indictments of the thugs roaming the streets looking for Trump supporters to pummel. You'd think that the media and the left would know better. After all, it was revulsion at media hypocrisy and gratuitous violence organized and subsidized by the left that drove many Trump voters to the polls in the first place.
But there were lots of other factors that motivated people to vote for Trump. In fact, Robert Tracinski at The Federalist argues that Donald Trump is actually Barack Obama's legacy. He suggests five facts about, or aspects of, Obama's presidency which inspired people to reject the woman who would have given us an Obama third term. He writes:
[W]hat most people haven’t realized yet is the extent to which this election loss is also the legacy of President Obama, on five different levels.The five levels he alludes to, with my summaries of them, are these:
1. Obama discouraged more electable alternatives to Hillary Clinton. Under Obama the Democratic party has moved substantially leftward which makes it very difficult to appeal to a center-right nation. Obama is without doubt the left-most person ever to occupy the White House and his influence has spread throughout the party.
2. Obama’s mania for unpopular policies ran his party into the ground. The mid-term elections of 2010 and 2014 when Obama wasn't on the ballot saw his party lose hundreds of elected officials - governors and state legislators - largely as a result of the ham-fisted fashion in which Obamacare was rammed through the legislature, so that the party today has a very thin bench. As weak and unappealing as she was, Hillary was about the best candidate the Democrats had to put up against the Republicans in 2016.
3. Instead of transcending racial politics, Obama revived them. The Democrats have made a bet that minorities will soon be the majority so they've put their hopes on dominating that minority vote. This strategy backfired in 2016, however, since large numbers of whites resent the tactic of racial divisiveness that they see the Democratic party fostering.
4. Obama’s stagnant economy bred hopelessness. Tracinski writes: President Obama came into office at a moment of financial crisis, and he promised that government “stimulus” would get the economy moving again. But the stimulus never really stimulated, and the economy has just dragged along in the slowest and most lackluster recovery in memory.
Instead of “Morning Again in America” where we experience a burst of 7 percent annual growth, we have yet to regain even the old long-term average of 3 percent growth. The result is stagnant wages, high unemployment, reduced labor force participation, and more people on welfare and food stamps. These problems have been particularly devastating for non-college-educated, blue-collar whites, feeding an atmosphere of rage and hopelessness.
5. Obama cultivated the sense of a diminished America. His foreign policy often seemed confused, weak and inconsistent. He threatened Assad with retribution if Assad used chemical weapons on his people, but when Assad crossed Obama's red line the United States essentially did nothing. His Iran nuclear deal seems to be little more than a $100 billion bribe to Iran to put off for a time the day when they annihilate Israel with nuclear weapons. Benghazi was a disaster. His precipitous withdrawal from Iraq left a vacuum that ISIS rushed in to fill at the cost of thousands of lives. And so on.
Tracinski does a good job of developing these five failures and his article is well-worth reading. Check it out.
