Thanks for nothing

Obviously there is a group that was unhappy to see Barack Obama go.

The button would have taken you to Organizing For Action Against America but I left it as a dead link because I don’t deal with statists.

So if you look at the Obama administration as a whole, the overall question is always whether you are better off now than you were x number of years ago. Looking at things as an American, I would answer that question with an emphatic “no!” (Maybe not to the extent of the woman caterwauling at the Trump inauguration, though. I think she was an Obama fan too.) But I live in a nation where the economy has been relatively stagnant, people who used to work full-time have been reduced to holding two or more part-time jobs, “homegrown” terrorism is a threat, those of us who believe in faith-based morality are persecuted and bullied into supporting actions and ideals we consider immoral, and the rule of law is applied unevenly, if at all. These are just tip of the spear things I thought of off the top of my head.

Yes, there are good things that happened as well, particularly in the advancement of technology and development of energy independence. Fortunately, our system has survived an administration that, at times, seemed like it was more than willing to continue abandoning free-market principles – but not to save them.

Thus, I would not categorize America as better or stronger after the Obama administration. I’m not sure things would have been tremendously different had John McCain won in 2008, but I think that had Mitt Romney prevailed in 2012 there would have been sufficient improvement in our nation that he would have dispatched of Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat with ease for re-election. I may not have liked everything that a President Romney would have done, but the stage would have been set for continued success moreso than the morass we have now – and as an added bonus, the so-called “alt-right” would still be under their rocks.

Yet the Democrats are already on message. This was from an e-mail I got yesterday:

No matter what (Donald Trump) said in his inaugural address, we know that his allegiances are to himself — and not in the best interests of the American people.

I will give credit to Obama for one thing – he didn’t seem to act in his self-interest as much as he seemed to do the bidding of liberal special interest groups. But when he had to pick and choose, it seemed like the most radical ones won out. A good example is the Keystone pipeline that pitted Teamster jobs vs. Radical Green, with the environmentalists prevailing because they were farther left and more anti-capitalist. (Similar to that is Standing Rock, with the additional benefit to Obama of inserting race into the issue.)

Yet, having read Trump’s remarks, they are the simple extension of the populism that he won with. Put another way, he placed himself on a different side of the “us vs. them” equation which has seemed to rule national politics for most of the last quarter-century. The “us” to Trump are the “forgotten” people: blue-collar workers, small-town denizens, and those who believe rules should be applied equally and fairly. Yes, some are racist against blacks but I suspect an equal percentage of black Obama supporters have the same animus toward Caucasian “crackers” too. (The whole “white privilege” thing, you know.) Unfortunately, the politics of division doesn’t end the moment a new President enters office and it may take quite a while for the rising tide to lift all the boats – perhaps more than the eight years Trump could be in office.

While Donald Trump is certainly a flawed man, I think Americans considered him to be more their style of leader than an extension of the “pajama boy” that serves as an enduring symbol of Barack Obama. I didn’t support Donald Trump for election, but it’s my hope that he serves as the conduit to better leadership.

Can we make America great again? If we begin by making America good again, then making it Constitutional again, the answer would be “yes, we can.” All Donald Trump has to do is get government out of the way.