THE TRAGEDY OF AN IRRELEVANT PRESIDENT

One of my all-time favorite television series is The West Wing.  As anyone who watched it knows, the last season had an entirely different feel, as it covered the presidential race between the two contending successors of President Jed Bartlett.  Any time that the story returned to the White House, there was an undercurrent of frustration in the remaining, second-string staff and the President himself.  The source of that frustration was the increasing irrelevance of the incumbent president.

The inexplicably stupid decision of the Obama administration to take action on a non-problem that was sure to inflame the passions of the American people --the “school restroom letter” – reminded me of The West Wing.  This action seems to me to be an effort by one of the most arrogant administrations in history to force the spotlight back on President Obama.  He and his staff seem to be set on finding something –anything—to remake what will surely go down in history as a failed presidency.  A generation from now, when the first true historical analyses of the Obama presidency are written, I suspect that they will focus on the strange case of wasted opportunities to make real progress and a perverse concentration on non-problems that divided, rather than united the Nation.

President Obama’s first, and most important, two years in office were wasted on forcing down the throats of the American people a “health care” program that they neither needed nor wanted.  Millions were out of work and had been promised that the President would be laser focused on “Jobs, jobs, jobs!”  Instead, while unemployment continued to sky-rocket, he frittered away an opportunity to be a second FDR simply to satisfy the left-wing loonies of the Democrat Party.  That “Obamacare” is still disliked by more than half the electorate—a level that will undoubtedly increase when the major premium costs and the decrease in options hit in November of this year-- is the greatest evidence of Presidential hubris in action.

An abysmal second term in which unemployment was decreased by smoke and mirrors doctoring of the definitions of “unemployed” by the Labor Department and wages remained stagnant was focused instead on placating the most dangerous enemies facing this Nation since 1940.  The myth of the “Iran Deal” was written, probably with fingers crossed that the mushroom cloud would appear over an American city during some other President’s term, to paint the President as a great statesman.  Chamberlain probably had the same hope on his way back to London from his German effort.

And then, when all eyes were drawn to the 2016 race, the first in American history, in which both candidates each had a greater “unfavorable” than “favorable” rating, the President decided that the most important issue still facing the Nation was forcing the people to allow people of one gender to use restroom facilities of the other gender—and to use as the laboratory for this exercise in social engineering the Nation’s public schools.

“Why?” one asks.  Why do this and do this now?

I can only assume that it is one last effort to return the national focus to Barack Obama.  He cannot stand his impending irrelevance and will do anything, no matter how dangerous or outrageous, to stay in the spotlight until the bitter end.