8 Years After Hope and Change, Voters are Angry, Anxious

The title above was featured on the Drudge Report recently — it linked to an Associated Press article which began with this:

Eight years ago, Barbara Conley was one of the millions of Americans swept up in Barack Obama’s promises of hope and change when he accepted the Democratic nomination at a packed football stadium a few miles from her home in the Denver suburbs.

But those optimistic days are almost unrecognizable to Conley now.

The article included this:

A stunning 79 percent of Americans now believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, a 15-point spike in the past year, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll.

In a related article, Silvio Canto, Jr. writes in a post titled “Iraq and race relations dominate in year eight of Obama“:

We are counting down to the end of the Obama presidency. Only six months remain.

I wonder who voted for Obama in 2008 thinking that Iraq and race relations would dominate the front pages at the end of his presidency. In other words, this is not what “hope and change” had in store for year eight.

And, Canto writes, that on “race relations, the situation is even more disastrous.”

With race relations, polls tell us that things are really bad. Over in Iraq, U.S. troops will face combat again.

This is not what they predicted back in 2008!

Here is the title and subtitle of a piece over at The Federalist by Ryan Hammill:

How Obama’s College Turned Me Into A Conservative
Discovering that much of what the Left proposes to aid poor and marginalized people ends up hurting them drove me away from leftist politics.

Under the subheading “People Who Really Experiment Find the Old Things Are True,” Hammill writes:

I had the good fortune to find a friend’s copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book of letters, essays, and notes, “The Crack-Up,” left forgotten in my living room. Thumbing through it, I found this fragment: “You and Seth can be radicals and show your children how you look in the bathtub, because you’re both so good, but people who really experiment with themselves find out that all the old things are true.”

The fragment conveys so much: the utopian naiveté of radicals who trample on the good sense of tradition, and are convinced they are “so good” nothing bad could come of their experiments. It also expresses the hard-won realization of someone who has really experimented with herself, and found that the good sense of tradition, that old wisdom, was right all along.

It’s been a painful seven and a half years of the Obama presidency, and a lot of people have come a long way.

Image credit: The White House.