Michael Goodwin at the NY Post writes up a pretty damning summary of Barack Obama’s time in office as President of the United States. One of the primary criticisms of candidate Obama was that he’d never really done anything of note. He’d never run a company or tried to meet a payroll, deal with government regulations, etc. He was, critics cautioned, a politically driven empty suit. Even his experience in politics was minimal. Every political office he held he used as a platform to run for the next highest office, accomplishing little or nothing at each stop.

Those are his “chickens” and they’re certainly coming home to roost:

Obama’s sixth year in the White House is shaping up as his worst, and that’s saying something. He’s been in the Oval Office so long that it is obscene to blame his problems on George W. Bush, the weather or racism. Obama owns the world he made, or more accurately, the world he tried to remake. Nothing important has worked as promised, and there is every reason to believe the worst is yet to come. The president’s casual remark the other day that he worries about “a nuclear weapon ­going off in Manhattan” inadvertently reflected the fear millions of Americans have about his leadership. Not necessarily about a bomb, but about where he is taking the country.

Anyone who looks objectively at these past 6 years has difficulty in saying anything good about the time this administration has been in power. Clint Eastwood’s “empty chair” analogy has never been more apt. The lack of real governing experience has left us adrift in a hostile world:

The view from his faculty lounge has no space for reality. Anything that doesn’t fit the grand plan is dismissed as illegitimate. So while global hot spots multiply and the world grows dangerously unstable, the president still plans to slash the military.

Government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and EITC lose hundreds of billions to waste, fraud and abuse, but this administration chooses to balance the budget on the backs of the only institution that is Constitutionally mandated for the defense of the country during a time of extreme danger. Cognitive dissonance of the highest order.

And his “legacy” piece of legislation, forced through the Democratically controlled congress in the face of popular protest, has been a dismal failure to this point:

ObamaCare is the domestic expression of the president’s ineptitude. The law that was supposed to fix health care has become a problem for millions, and now enjoys mere 26 percent approval, a poll finds. It is proving so unworkable that the White House has given up defending it as written and instead simply changes key provisions when they prove impossible to implement or politically inconvenient. Change No. 38 came when officials extended the March 31 deadline for signing up. Never mind that those same officials said recently there would be no extension, and that the law wouldn’t allow it. Presto — the limits on his power are moot because the president says so. Meanwhile, aides claim they don’t know how many of the 6 million who enrolled actually paid for insurance..

Perhaps the most damning quote from Goodwin’s piece is this one which succinctly sums up the Obama experience thus far:

A Caesar at home and a Chamberlain abroad, Obama manages to simultaneously provoke fury and ridicule. He bullies critics here while shrinking from adversaries there. He divides the country and unites the world against us, ­diminishing the nation in both ways. His reign of error can’t end soon enough, nor can it end well.

The country must weather a little over 2 more years of this awful presidency and hope it survives it somehow. If it survives it, one has to hope that upon reflection, the voters will realize that electing a president isn’t a beauty contest nor is it a venue within which to make a social statement. “The first” this or that are not as important as the ability of the candidate to govern competently. And, it is is certainly not a position in which the incumbent should be engaged in “on the job training”.

Hopefully these lessons have been learned and, in 2016, we’ll see a resurgence of common sense among the voting public.

~McQ