None of us quite knew what we were getting when Barack Obama first became president but now we have a rough idea. I try not to criticize his foreign policy because from the outside looking in it's impossible to be sure of the ramifications about which we only learn if we live long enough to read the history books. Suffice to say that at the moment it looks confused and bewildering. His main domestic policy stands or falls on 'Obamacare' in which he invested the full weight of his presidential authority. I cannot comment because, like most Americans, I suspect, I simply don't understand it. Only time will tell but I fear the worst!
However, there is one area of his reign which can be assessed with confidence and that is his policy on black/white race relations. Big Fail! Given his own mixed blood antecedents there was a hope that he would use his office to move both blacks and whites out of the past and into a new and better future. It never happened, in fact, it was the opposite that gained traction during his reign. It has become clear that he was from the beginning a more or less willing prisoner of the progressive Democrat party whose leaders have invested heavily in the establishment of a black underclass whom they have succeeded in keeping in poverty whilst filling them with an unrequitable feeling of resentment and entitlement. Needless to say, they keep telling their black suckers that their only hope of receiving these unearned entitlements is to keep on voting Democrat - and they do, despite the evidence of crumbling destruction in all those many big cities which have been captured by the Democrat party for the past few decades - think Detroit!
A truly great president might have had the courage to tell it the way it is by telling the truth to his poor black constituents, something along the lines of, get a haircut, get a suit, get a job, get a wife, get a child, stick together as a family and earn what you deserve, don't ever expect it to be given to you! And above all, stay legal because if you break the law it will descend on you with a vengeance, not because you are black but because you are bad! Well, of course, I don't really think he would have said any of that but he could have used his power and oratory to begin to shift poor blacks back into the real world. He could have pointed to the very many middle-class black families who by their own efforts have worked hard and prospered.
That he more less willingly allowed himself to be captured by the Marxist apparatchiks in his regime tells us all that he is not very intelligent but more importan that he is a feeble man. He has ignored Machiavelli's precept that a prince must choose between being loved or feared - and feared is best! Obama is simply despised.
