Requiem for a Lightweight: Obama Out

Here is G. Murphy Donovan writing at American Thinker:

Critics often make for strange bedfellows. Louis Farrakhan and Cornell West are examples. Both argue that Barack Obama was not ready for prime time. For Farrakhan, Obama failed on race and social issues. For West, the 44th president was a sell-out to a capitalist establishment. Overall, both say the Obamas didn’t do much for blacks in particular and social justice in general. For brothers like Farrakhan and West, the last eight years were a wasted opportunity.

Buyer’s remorse may be the new “hope and change.”

There will be a black president one day – maybe not for decades, thanks to the outgoing regime. Obama had little time for pragmatism and too much to do with special pleading; identity politics; and feckless, if not sanguinary, foreign policy.

Be it race or religion, Obama’s tragic flaw was policy marked by timidity and moral ambiguity – both underwritten by the belief that he could be a racial, religious, or policy shape-shifter as the occasion demanded. Having parents on both sides of racial and religious divides allowed Obama to play race and religious cards often, yet seldom well.

As team Obama heads for the exits, the race joker is again in play. White working-class Americans and any flavor of Russians are the new bogymen for bad losers, right and left, across the land.

In the twilight of a checkered political career, Obama’s only claim to legacy might be “first black,” a dubious attribute that can never be more than a half-truth. Half- truths might be a fitting coda to an era that may go down in history as a tipping point, a juncture where “fake news” became the real news. Factual ambiguity is now viral and that cultural meme is a precedent that Obama owns.

Read more: American Thinker