150 Reasons Why Barack Obama Is the Worst President in History (13 page)

Unity and bipartisanship have been themes of Obama’s speeches since his first appearance on the national stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, when he declared he didn’t believe in a “red America” or a “blue America” but in a “red, white and blue America.” He would keep promising to bring this country together and end bitter divisiveness while running for president.

But, once elected to the highest office in the land, Obama became the most bitterly divisive president in American history. Throughout his presidency, whenever Obama has had an opportunity to bring both sides of the aisle together for the sake of the American people, he encouraged gridlock and partisan fingerpointing.

Even on issues of race Obama was a divider. He nominated individuals with divisive racial views, turned a blind eye to racism against non-minorities, and publicly made premature judgments on high profile cases involving unproven accusations of racism. Obama may have managed to build a large, loyal coalition of people to come out and vote for him (twice), but he has done so at tremendous cost.

118.
Officially The Most Polarizing President… Ever

Obama campaigned on a promise to unite the country, and began his first term with approval ratings over 60 percent.
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Unfortunately, he quickly squandered the goodwill of those who took him at his word, and would have the largest partisan gaps in approval of any president.
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The partisan gaps for Obama, according to Gallup:

Year 1: 65 points

Year 2: 68 points

Year 3: 68 points

Year 4: 82 points

Obama’s partisan gap in approval for his fourth year in office is the
largest
gap ever recorded.
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According to Gallup, “Obama’s ratings have been consistently among the most polarized for a president in the last 60 years.”
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This may be a reflection of the political environment in the United States, since the partisan gaps for George W. Bush were also high (but not as high as Obama’s), but Obama certainly deserves a huge chunk of the blame. He started his first term with high, bipartisan approval, but his party had majorities in both Houses of Congress, so he didn’t need Republican support for his agenda, and didn’t bother seeking it out. After Republicans gained control of the House in 2010, he still didn’t seek bipartisan support. Instead, he blamed Republicans for not falling in line with his agenda. Perhaps if he entered office in 2009 with divided government he would have learned about the concept of compromise and been a less divisive president.

119.
Jumping To Race-Based Conclusions

When asked about the Secret Service prostitution scandal, White House press secretary Jay Carney said “it would not be appropriate” for Obama to comment on it while the investigation was ongoing.
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And he was right. Unfortunately, there have been times where Obama has inappropriately commented on ongoing investigations, and perhaps not coincidentally, each case has alleged racial components.

Less than a month before the Secret Service prostitution investigation, Obama felt it was proper to weigh in on the ongoing investigation of the shooting death of Travyon Martin. Obama claimed that the nation needed some “soul searching” over the shooting death of the young African-American. He added towards the end of his statement, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,”
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essentially giving credence to the unfounded allegations that Trayvon’s race was a factor in his being shot and killed.

This was not first time Obama jumped to conclusions about a racial motive in an ongoing investigation. In July of 2009, Obama spoke out about the arrest of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who had been mistakenly arrested while he was trying to enter his own home. Gates had been struggling with his door and a 911 call had been placed by a neighbor who thought they were witnessing a break-in attempt. Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department responded and when the officer arrived Gates initially refused to provide identification and so was ultimately arrested for disorderly conduct.

A week later, Obama said that Crowley “acted stupidly” by arresting Gates, who is African-American and cited “a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” Obama said all this, despite admitting that he didn’t know all the facts or “what role race played.”
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His comments brought even more controversy to the situation, prompting him to invite Gates and Crowley to the White House for a “beer summit,” in an attempt to diffuse the controversy he made worse.

Obama has been very selective in what cases he finds it appropriate to comment on and make hasty judgments about. It’s extremely unfortunate that the nation’s first black president would so irresponsibly jump to race-based conclusions on cases he admittedly didn’t have all the facts on.

Obama ran in 2008 as a man who promised to improve race relations in the United States but he has been an instigator of racial animosity among the American people. In fact, some polling indicates that Americans are more racially divided now than they were when Obama took office.
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120.
Racism in our Supreme Court

If a white male nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States was ever revealed to have said, “a wise white man can render a better decision than a Latina woman,” he’d be labeled a racist and forced to withdraw his nomination. The judgment of the president who nominated him would also be called into question.

So, what happened when it was revealed that
Sonia Sotomayor,
Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court Justice, had, on several occasions, stated that a she hoped “a wise Latina woman” could reach “better” decisions than a white male? Sotomayor wasn’t shamed into withdrawing her name, and Obama even defended his choice.
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Obama’s defenders argued her choice of words were merely poorly stated. Never mind she made the same comment several times over a number years.
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But, her past writings and associations certainly raise questions about her attitude towards race and equal justice under law.

As a college student, Sotomayor described herself as a Puerto Rican nationalist, had clearly negative attitudes toward the United States, and favored Puerto Rican independence.
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According to Obama’s own Department of Homeland Security, Puerto Rican nationalists are potential domestic terrorists.
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Sotomayor later became a member of the radical National Council of La Raza from 1998 to 2004. She also served on the board of directors of the Latino Justice/Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund from 1980 to 1992. Both organizations oppose securing the border and the enforcement of immigration laws, while supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants.
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Sotomayor’s radical views on race, combined with her apparent opposition to America’s immigration laws, not only cast significant doubt on her ability to objectively interpret the law, but also on Obama’s judgment. Despite these concerns, Sotomayor was confirmed, and her radical, racialist views will influence the Supreme Court for as long as she remains on the court.

121.
Blaming Bush and Congress

Every president casts at least some blame upon his predecessor. It is a natural inclination to ascribe any particularly thorny issue to the policies of the man who came before. But for President Obama, blaming his predecessor has become an exercise in the absurd.

Over the course of Obama’s first term, he blamed Bush for the economy, for the botched Operation Fast and Furious, for the massive deficits, for our nation’s plummeting national wealth, for our problems in the Middle East – for just about everything which has gone wrong. At one point, President Obama was blaming President Bush for things while standing right next to President Bush.
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It must have become so reflexive that he didn’t know what else to say. Regardless of whether it was his first day, or the end of his first term, Obama hasn’t taken responsibility for the outcomes of his policies.

Obama’s administration even tried to blame the Solyndra scandal on Bush, even though Bush’s Energy Department
denied
Solyndra’s loan application two weeks before Obama took office.
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Obama rarely took responsibility for his failures, but often took sole credit for accomplishments he should not have, like healing one of the victims of the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado who had been shot through the head.
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Obama likes to talk about the bad economy he inherited, but he never credits Bush for the military and intelligence agencies he inherited that were far more able to fight terror and analyze threats effectively than they had before 9/11.

When Obama wasn’t blaming Bush for his problems, he was blaming Congress—particularly the Republicans in Congress. When Obama first took office, he was in a position in which he did not have to work with both parties to achieve his agenda. Obama could have done whatever he wanted, and the Republican Party was nearly powerless to stop it.

And yet, four years later, while running for reelection, Obama spent lots of time blaming the GOP for his own lack of accomplishments, particularly on domestic issues. The economy was still limping along, despite his stimulus and Obamacare, both of which were supposed to stimulate the economy and job growth. According to Obama, there was progress made on the economy, but he needed more time to get what he wanted done because Republicans were blocking his agenda.

He blamed the Republicans for his failure to pass immigration reform.
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He blamed the Republicans for his unwillingness to compromise with Republicans.
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He blames Republicans for his plans to ignore Republican desires.
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He even threatened to blame Republicans for the failure of the fiscal cliff negotiations in his 2013 State of the Union, despite the fact he was the one not willing to compromise.
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122.
Encouraging Voter Intimidation

In the days of Jim Crow laws in the South, African-Americans were often kept from the polls by sheer terror. It would be nice to believe that such practices, that were commonplace before the Civil Rights Movement, would be kept in the past. But, under Obama, such things have are happing again, and unfortunately, condoned by the Obama Administration.

On Election Day 2008, members of the notoriously racist New Black Panther Party (NBPP) were videotaped wearing paramilitary clothing and carrying clubs in front of polling places. The NBPP intimidated potential voters from entering polls. A clear case, one might think, but not for the incoming Obama Administration. After a bit of “investigating” Obama’s Justice Department decided not to prosecute any of the NBPP members. Just imagine what it would have looked like if Klansmen dressed in white robes and hoods wielding clubs stood out in front of a polling place, ordering black people off. The lack of action by the Obama Administration was shocking, but apparently just the beginning of separate forms of justice for whites and non-whites under the leadership of Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder. By the summer of 2010, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declared there was evidence of “possible unequal administration of justice” by the Justice Department.
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123.
Racial Quotas for School Discipline

In the summer of 2012, Obama issued an executive order that effectively called for racial quotas in school discipline policies. The executive order, titled “White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans,” links the high dropout rate of African American students with “methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.” and establishes a new bureaucracy to enforce proportionate outcomes in school discipline policies based on race.
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The problem is that Obama basically
assumes
that schools discipline students differently based on race, and thinks he can solve the problem by mandating that schools discipline students based on the color of their skin, not by the content of their character.

According to Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, Obama’s executive order has missed the mark completely, and ignores the true source of the problem. Clegg told
The Daily Caller
, “A disproportionate share of crimes are committed by African Americans, and they are disproportionately likely to misbehave in school… [because] more than 7 out of 10 African Americans (72.5 percent) are born out of wedlock… versus fewer than 3 out of 10 whites.”
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Michael Meyers, the executive director of the New York Civil Rights Commission, said of Obama, “With the stroke of his presidential pen Obama has ignored and denies the substantial and irreversible racial progress we as a nation have made; with great alacrity, and without any shame, he has embraced the separatists’ mission, credo and agenda that dictate blacks should be regarded as and educated differently, and treated differentially, from all other American students.”
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