Obama's Legacy: Lost Opportunity

For a man who spent the last eight years fretting about his legacy, President Obama leaves office with a lackluster list of achievements that will tarnish his carefully nurtured image.  Even his crowning glory, the passage of the onerous health care reform bill, is in imminent danger of extinction.

In his long goodbye, the president has taken to the airwaves and the stump to pat himself on the back for economic recovery, climate change progress, improved foreign alliances, a nuclear deal with Iran and normalization of relations with Cuba.  He even brags about a scandal-free administration.

The president must reside in some alternative universe.

The facts show the U.S. economy has suffered through eight years of anemic growth.  Terrorism has spiked at home and around the world. Big city crime is soaring.  Fewer percentage of people are in the workforce than at any time in recent history.  More people are living below the poverty line.

The rest of the world is a boiling cauldron of unrest.  Syria is killing hundreds of thousands of its citizens.  Iran is seeding its brand of terror across the Middle East.  Russia annexed part of Ukraine while the world sat on its hands.  Terrorists attacks are the subject of daily headlines in Europe.

Apparently, the president also has a short memory.  His administration oversaw the biggest scandal in history when the Internal Revenue Service was used to throttle conservative organizations.  This egregious abuse of power went unpunished and largely ignored.

He departs the White House with a closet stacked with other skeletons. The Justice Department secretly obtained phone records of journalists. The administration falsely blamed a video for the attack on a U.S. Embassy in Benghazi.  The ATF supplied weapons to Mexican drug lords.

It makes you wonder about the president's definition of scandal.

But none of the aforementioned tops his most glaring failure.  Barrack Obama, the first African-American elected president, had an opportunity to write a new chapter in race relations.  He was the face of what was possible for every child of color in the United States.

Instead, the president wasted his good fortune.  His first foray into race relations set the tone for his tenure.  In 2009, he railed that police 'acted stupidly' in arresting a Harvard University black professor at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He spoke before all the facts were known.

Mr. Obama tried to smooth over the incident by hosting a beer summit with the local police officer and the educator after an investigation proved law enforcement people acted reasonably.  This was to become a pattern throughout his eight years in the Oval Office.

He weighed in on the Trevon Martin shooting before the investigation was complete.  He blasted police in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting of a black man.  Mr. Obama lectured Americans on the legitimacy of the Black Lives Matter movement after the slaughter of five Dallas cops.

The president never let the facts stand in the way of jumping to conclusions about police brutality. As a result, 2016 saw a dramatic uptick in police shootings.  Perhaps, it is unfair to blame the president, but his incendiary rhetoric inflamed negative attitudes in the black community about the police.

During his presidency, the plight of African-Americans did not improve. Black homicides rose. African-American unemployment eclipsed all other ethnic groups.  Blacks have the highest rate of poverty.  High school drop out rates among blacks remain higher than whites.

A poll last year conducted by Pew Research Center found deep racial divisions in the country.  Nearly nine in ten blacks says the country needs to do more to help their race obtain equal rights.  Only eight percent think the country has achieved racial equality.

Mr. Obama's election as president was historic.  It should have been the tipping point for charting a new course for improved relations among the races.  The president choose instead to further divide the country and pit one group against the other.

An opportunity like this may never come again.  It is a sad postscript to a presidency that began with such high expectations and ended with lost opportunities for elevating the race discussion in America.