8 years Later: What Obama “Unaccomplished”?

1. He withdrew prematurely from Iraq

And some even say that he is responsible for the formation of the Islamic State.

Obama was so eager to materialize his Nobel Prize that he pulled all of our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, and then totally ignored the country. For most of the time, he foolishly downplayed the rise of the Islamic State. Even as Kurds and the Iraqi government issued increasingly panicked warnings, and the Islamic State took over more and more territory, he let the problem get worse for months.

Bush went into Iraq with multiple UN resolutions, congressional approval, a broad “coalition of the willing,” and the resolve to use whatever means were necessary to prevent a terrorist state from establishing itself there. Obama is going back into Iraq with none of that.

2. He made America less of a Global Power

Obama’s failures result from taking no stand and just letting events drift. Certainly, in a lot of these cases, Obama has given speeches or press conference to announce his enlightened intentions, then done nothing to plan for how to actually achieve his goals.

But if he is irrelevant, that makes America irrelevant. We can look back at the Arab Spring, at Ukraine, and at Iraq

3. He campaigned on the promise that America would be more respected in the world, but did exactly the opposite.

Make no mistake, I am proud to be an American. But Americans no longer think President Obama commands respect on the world stage. According to a recent poll, a majority of Americans (53 percent) don’t think the president is respected by other countries.

To quote the Judge Jeanine Pirro:

“There was a time when the United States was both respected and feared. “Today however in the eyes of the world, we are neither respected nor feared. And it’s Obama’s feckless foreign policy that’s diminished our stature on the world stage. That policy mimics a paper tiger. Seemingly dangerous, but in truth, timid and weak.” (Source)

4. Obama failed to reform immigration

This is where the respect and fear should come into the equation. If Mexico and the Central American countries from whence most of these illegal immigrants are coming from respected our borders, they would do something about this. Instead, they act as if it is our fault and that we have an obligation to their people to let them across the border. Never mind that they are breaking our laws when they do so. I would point out that Americans can’t even cross into Mexico accidentally without the fear of imprisonment for an unspecified amount of time. I’ve never been able to figure out why this doesn’t go both ways.

If America was still feared, the illegal immigrants coming across our border would not be so willing to come up to the Border Patrol agents, turning themselves in and demanding medical treatment.

We have a crisis at our Southern border that stems from the White House. I am not naive enough to believe other administrations were not at fault for our lax immigration policies, but it has gotten much worse since President Obama took over.

5. ObamaCare

The disastrous launch of ObamaCare was a reminder of everything that’s wrong with big government. It turns out that when we warned health insurance would be run as well as the Department of Motor Vehicles, we were too optimistic. And no one was ever held accountable for that fiasco.

When ObamaCare was passed, we were assured that it would provide insurance for 32 million people who didn’t have any coverage. Four years later, it looks like ObamaCare has covered far fewer new people, between 10% and 20% of what was promised, and about half of those were through an expansion of Medicaid which is a burden that will eventually bankrupt the states, rather than through ObamaCare’s insurance exchanges.

Most of the people buying insurance through the exchanges are those who were kicked out of their previous health insurance plans by new regulations. It turns out that if we liked our health insurance, we couldn’t keep it. For some of us, this will be bad. For others, it’s much worse.

6. Financial reform that failed to reform

The Dodd-Frank financial reforms didn’t really reform anything. They created a couple thousand pages of new legislation and many, many more new executive-branch regulations, which have helped to muddle the rules rather than clarify them. But these regulations have never really resolved any of the pre-crisis problems.

The old system in which a handful of giant financial institutions were considered “too big to fail” and thus could depend on the rest of us to bail them out? That system is alive and well.

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