What Will Be Barak Obama's Place in History

Barak Obama came to Washington to “throw the rascals out,” so to speak. He campaigned on being an outsider and on his firm commitment to end the “politics as usual” atmosphere in America’s capital. Sufficient numbers of Americans believed him and sent President Obama to Washington to get the job done.

What has happened in the two and a half years since the 2008 election is a lesson for all voters everywhere who want to believe that they have found a messiah. Nothing has happened, in fact, except to spend more money than America has on programs her citizens do not want.

Barak Obama is devoid of majoritarian ideas. He shot his minority wad in getting health care passed, and he lost his Democrat majority in the House of Representatives in the 2010 congressional election as punishment.

Since then, he has seemed to be absent. His voice is ignored, even when he might have something to say, and he has been so shut out of Washington’s power politics circle that he has to phone Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid to get anything done.

When Obama tried to negotiate a deal with the GOP in December last year to end the Bush tax cuts, he lost. John Boehner, not yet Speaker but waiting to be named by the newly elected GOP majority in the House, won the day and Obama suffered at the hands of his Democratic left wing who accused him of caving in to conservatives.

The debacle that just ended in the raising of the debt ceiling was a repeat of last December. Obama did not and perhaps is not capable of negotiating from strength. It was the Washington insiders, the very people he had come to Washington to get rid of, who saved his skin and got him a debt ceiling high enough to see him safely through the 2012 presidential election period. Without those Washington pros, Obama would have been raw meat put before the hungry lions of the Tea Party.

His platitudes about sharing the burden, which means that oil companies, business owners and wealthy taxpayers should put up AND shut up, play well to the extreme left fringe of the Democrat Party but they are anathema to the majority of Democrats and most other Americans.

Who is Barak Obama and what does he really want? My guess is that he is a lawyer-politician untrained in the practicalities of negotiation trying to run the world’s largest economic and military power. It hasn’t worked so far and it will not work in the future.

Obama may go on supporting underdog liberal causes, but he has become irrelevant in the American political process, and even if he’s re-elected because the GOP messes up badly, his briefcase is empty and his chances of making a real mark for himself, one that would put him alongside his hero Ronald Reagan, is “dead on arrival,” to quote Harry Reid.