America now has four former presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. There is a 2-2 party split between Democrats and Republicans.
How transformational were the two Democrat presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama?
Bill Clinton: President Clinton, a moderate former governor from Arkansas, was the last Democrat to carry the state in both 1992 and 1996. He began with a reasonably liberal agenda by the standards of the 1990s with his "It's the economy, stupid!" focus. By today's standards for many in the Republican Party, Clinton was far more conservative. He botched his universal healthcare proposal by appointing his wife to lead the initiative, which ended up being so polarizing that the Democrats killed it. Clinton was looking at becoming a one-term president when he finally realized that he should swing more to the middle.
Leading his party to a humiliating defeat in the 1994 midterm elections, during which Newt Gingrich ran a brilliant campaign to take the House with a 54-seat majority and the Senate with an 8-seat majority, Bill Clinton learned his lesson. Gingrich promised to pass a balanced budget amendment, term limits, a line-item veto, and to cut federal spending by reforming welfare. As a result, Clinton moved significantly to the right.
Clinton famously went to the Capitol during the 1995 State of the Union to declare that "the era of big government was over." He worked with other Democrats to push through a crime bill requiring the deployment of 100,000 police officers on America's streets. He proclaimed that illegal immigration could not stand. He eschewed foreign wars and rejected the idea that American troops should be involved on the ground or that Washington should be involved in rebuilding foreign nations. The Middle East was far more peaceful under Clinton's tenure.
The highlight of Clinton's term in office came in fiscal 1998. At the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the federal government returned a budget surplus of $69 billion - the first in 30 years. The government ran a surplus for the next three years—1999: $125 billion; 2000: $236 billion (the largest surplus in U.S. history); and 2001: $128 billion. Across every aspect of policy, Clinton had become a MAGA president, doing what was right for America. Had Obama and Biden learned similar lessons and implemented what Americans wanted (instead of what just the Left wanted), America would be in a far better situation today.
Barack Obama: Now, contrast Clinton's two-term legacy with Obama's. The nation's first Black president, who ran on a platform that we can all believe in change, received tremendous support from ordinary Americans, who wanted America to turn the page on race. However, Obama squandered the faith Americans put in him by openly embracing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies. His economic stewardship in the wake of the Great Recession, and focus on pushing for Big Government solutions for healthcare, led to unemployment levels unseen since the Great Depression. Were it not for the Fed's aggressive monetary policy moves, such as buying up mortgage and government bonds with nearly-unlimited injections of fiat cash through the so-called Quantitative Easing, President Obama was also looking at a single term in office.
Indeed, in 2010, the Tea Party revolution—modeled closely after Gingrich's Contract with America- gave Obama a shellacking that first-term presidents rarely see. In fact, it was Obama who first used the word "shellacking."
But Obama, who perfected the art of rhetoric while rejecting compromise, stood his ground. In this regard, he was the exact opposite of Bill Clinton. As the economy began to recover, thanks to the Fed, Obama falsely claimed that his fiscal policy of borrowing, taxing, and spending was working.
Obama tried to run on foreign policy successes, such as the killing of Osama bin Laden and claiming credit for the Arab Spring. Events took a disastrous turn when the Benghazi attack killed an American ambassador and several other Americans six weeks before the 2012 election. But running against an extraordinarily weak Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, who was never sure where he stood on anything, Obama scraped through, winning 4 million fewer votes but still securing a landslide victory. Had President Trump run in 2012, we are convinced that he could have easily won.
Armed with a second term, Obama began to unleash the change mantra to every arm of the federal government. Reckless in his executive orders, he tried to remake the very fabric of America with the presidential pen, ignoring Congress. Everything was based on race and social justice. And when it looked like Trump was going to win after all, Obama unleashed his DOJ to go after Trump in the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, and by secretly supporting the resistance in Washington and liberal capitals around the country once Trump took office.
Rather than leave Washington like every president has done, Obama admitted that he would like to be the person calling the shots for a future president who did not mind becoming a puppet. And he hatched this plan when Biden was in big trouble in the 2020 primaries, and by teaming with South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn and the Deep State, including actors like Mark Elias, who used to work for the Clinton campaign, the Obama-Pelosi-Schumer cabal secretly changed the very fabric of the American electoral system just so that Obama could call the shots for four more years.
In the November election, a generation of young voters—especially African American men—unaware of Obama's behind-the-scenes engineering rejected Obama's professorial rebuke. The former president was upset that Black voters were not supporting Vice President Kamala Harris as he expected them to. The result was a shellacking of the Harris candidacy, unseen in modern times.
We believe Obama will continue to manipulate Trump's presidency, but the left-wing media is now a weakened beast. There is nobody on the Democratic bench who is well-known and middle-of-the-road to appeal to Americans in 2028. Worse, 2028 candidates might reject Obama's interference in their campaigns.
Biden leaves office in less than 20 days. America is on the cusp of bidding farewell to the Obama-Biden-Pelosi-Schumer combine that has wrecked America. Brighter days are ahead.
