First off, the good.
- Unemployment is back down to a more historical norm of 5%. Sure, there are still a fairly high number of long-term unemployed, but even there, things are better. Considering where we are, and where we were, the President's economic policies worked. At a minimum, they didn't hurt.
- The Affordable Care Act provided 17 million people with health insurance through last year's enrollment period. It has slowed the increase in rising costs and provided millions of previously uninsured people with care. It isn't perfect, but it's good on the whole.
- His administration has committed unprecedented funding for green and alternative energy, helped secure a global climate change agreement this year in Paris, and reached an unprecedented climate change deal with China, to name some of his achievements to protect our environment. While doing so, gas prices have fallen to $2 an hour, we are at record highs for domestic oil protection, and now will even export domestic oil. Not bad.
- Marriage equality is now the law of the land- just a dozen years after George W. Bush rode opposition to marriage equality to re-election. Part of why this happened is the two Supreme Court judges this President put on the bench.
- Iran just handed over enriched uranium to Russia, as the Republicans said they would never do. It turns out that his Iran deal was the smart, mature, strong thing to do.
I could go on and on. President Obama's policies have worked. If I wanted to write that kind of puff piece, I'd keep going, praising the policies that I already agreed with. This President has been a very, very good President, one who exceeded my original expectations of him, and who deserves to be remembered fondly, and who will be once the "Trump generation" is gone, and his record is viewed by historians and future generations.
The bad though is very bad. I was in Iowa in 2007 and early 2008. I remember "Hope and Change." I remember the plan to change American politics. I remember the promises of no "blue America and red America, but the United States of America." That never happened. Most of that is not President Obama's fault. Sure, he deserves blame for having too much belief in his own abilities to unite, for underestimating the racism that is out there in America, and for underestimating how far the GOP would go to destroy him. Beyond that though, most of the blame falls with all the people he underestimated. Seven years later, we have Donald Trump, we have Ted Cruz, we have Marco Rubio- and none of that is good. These are people calling for walls along the Mexican border, a "clash of civilizations" with Islam, war crimes, and banning Muslims from entering the country. We have Chris Christie calling for not accepting any refugees from Syria, "even five year old orphans." We have Jeb Bush calling for a religious test on refugees. This is real life in America in 2016- really, really bigoted, crazy voices have risen on the American right. The white electorate has gone off the rails conservative. The Democratic Party is not a competitive party outside of big cities and inner suburbs, and is at it's lowest level of elected officials in this country in decades. While President Obama's successor is at least 50/50 or better to be a Democrat, the country's politics have gone off the deep end. It's almost all identity politics now, and that isn't good. I don't really blame the President for the Republicans enabling this breed of crazy, but it happened anyway.
It's just hard to have imagined at the time the profound impact the election of Barack Obama would have on America. He has made the country a far better place than when he came to office. We are governed by a responsible administration of smart people. I have to admit, I thought the President would have trouble living up to his own hype. He didn't. I also didn't imagine we'd be fighting with this form of conservatism either though. We are. Seven years later, a lot has changed. This has been a transformational Presidency.
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