Saul Alinsky Leaves the White House

The very day after Obama was elected in 2008, I predicted in this space that his team would steal the Senate by hook and crook (see: Al Franken); nuke the filibuster at least for judicial nominees; liberalize voting laws (or enforcement thereof) to make fraud easier while charging opponents with “vote suppression”; drum up spurious allegations of civil rights violations; punish anti-abortion protesters; enact “copious new regulations, especially environmental, to be used selectively to ensnare other conservative malcontents”; invasively use the IRS to harass conservative organizations; and tacitly encourage civil unrest in furtherance of Obamite goals.

All those predictions of course came true.

Obama and company also waged bureaucratic war against independent inspectors general; tried their hardest (even illegally) to hobble fossil fuels industries; evaded Congress’s intent by sending cash and uranium to a near-nuclear-ready Iran; fumbled and stumbled while veterans suffered virtually criminal neglect; wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on projects that were not “shovel-ready” and did not create many jobs; oversaw an economy in which the workforce participation rate dropped to historically low levels while real median household income also fell and personal debt rose, and in which food stamp rolls grew to a number larger than the population of Spain; horrendously politicized the Justice Department; and saw race relations worsen for the first time in decades....

If Barack Obama knew how to slink, he would slink out of the Oval Office and completely offstage, bowed and beaten by his record of scandal and failure, as much or even more of a pariah among an American majority than Jimmy Carter was in the early 1980s.