An open letter to Barack Obama- part 2

Sir,

“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early”.

What bull.  What a rationalization.  It has nothing to do with your progressive ideas and very little to do with your skin color.  The voters gave you two terms to improve THEIR lives.  When you failed, they blamed your party’s chosen successor and went with someone who had a more drastic idea about change and how to go about it.  Look what we got.

How we got here is your fault.  You can say that Republicans are to blame, but you weren’t stuck in first line supervision or even middle management.  You had the top job and the latitude to get it done.  You set the expectation by implying that you were smartest guy in the room and had smart people working for you, but you didn’t deliver.  You wanted Republicans to like you instead of respecting you and your political power.  When liking you didn’t pan out and you failed to be a politician and campaign, you took the easy way out: Presidential Directives.  Well, guess what?  Donald Trump isn’t as smart as you, but he has smart-ish people working for him and he also knows how to sign Presidential Directives- directives that cancel yours.

You were weak, never standing up to Republicans.  You didn’t call them out and beat them over the head by reminding voters about Republican complicity in the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression.  Or Iraq.  Or Katrina.  Or anything else.  Politics just wasn’t your thing, even though Presidents are first and foremost politicians.  You wanted to make nice.  You didn’t campaign during the mid-terms and Democrats got “shellacked” both times.  In 2012, when you had to campaign to keep your job, Democrats didn’t pick up enough seats to make a difference.

It is somewhat laudable that you wanted to return our national conversation to civility, but your opposition wasn’t having any of it and neither was a good portion of the Country.  Eight years and it didn’t work, even when they had both Houses and could control the agenda for the last two.  And they weren’t showing any indication they would change if Hillary had won.  Expecting a different outcome when doing the same thing is a definition of insanity.

You were the wrong guy for the wrong time.  But enjoy your $40,000,000 book deal.