Sunday 14 February 2016

How seven years of Obama created Trump

Telegraph

America has been run for nearly a decade by a clever incompetent. It's hardly surprising that the voters are revolting..... I had seen Obama at the primaries, and at the Democrat Convention. I had waited for him to speak intelligently and practically about the state of America and how he would put it right, but I waited in vain.  ......His stump oratory – especially his convention speech, delivered from a preposterous mock-Grecian stage set in Denver – was vacuous. He is clever and has a way with words: but his words contained little.   .......Racial tensions, which a black president was supposed to heal, seem worse than ever – remember Ferguson – and Mr Obama’s interventions have often been clumsy and grandstanding. He has failed to control immigration, even though (unlike in Britain) he has the sovereign power to do so. And America has largely rejected Obamacare, which displays all that can go wrong with massive state intervention. But if Mr Obama’s economic legacy is poor, his other achievements – or failings – are alarming. He has largely removed America from international conversations. After the disastrous interventions in the Islamic world after 2001 it is quite right it should think more deeply about such expeditions: but that does not mean the superpower’s global responsibility can be abdicated completely. ......Mr Obama’s international legacy is the repulsive sight of Vladimir Putin, whom he underestimated, ruling the roost, the barbarians of Isil (for dealing with whom he had no strategy) and a Europe mired in introspection.......
For much of America, Barack Obama is the last straw. He is the creator of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. If one of them becomes president – and I wouldn’t rule it out – and the world doesn’t like it, they know whom to blame."