“Don’t take the foot off the gas pedal.”
President Obama issued that directive to his circle of advisers last week, proving that he intends to fight tooth-and-nail to retain relevance in 2016. Increasingly pushed out of the spotlight by Donald Trump, Obama will take the stage Tuesday night to lay out his vision for the new year and brag about what he has accomplished over the last seven. Desperate to avoid lame duck status, he will use what will likely be his final State of the Union address to prop up that which is most important to him: his historical legacy.
“He has a decision to make,” Sen. Rob Portman told the Associated Press. “Is he going to run his last year of his presidency in a political manner or is he actually going to focus on getting stuff done?”
Oh, that decision was made a long time ago. Obama has never shown the slightest interest in putting the good of the country ahead of his leftist agenda. He wants to go down in history as the president who refused to compromise his beliefs. He thinks stubbornness is a virtue. No amount of evidence can convince him that he has ever been wrong on anything. That’s why pollster Matt Towery predicted that Obama’s SOTU speech would remind viewers of Alice in Wonderland.
“What’s up will be down. What’s right will be left and vice-versa, and it will be like going through the looking glass,” Towery told Newsmax. “That’s what’s it’s been in the past few years and it’ll be like that again.”
Americans, longing for a leader who will finally do something about the Islamic State, will be treated to another round of We’re Winning from a president who would rather focus on anything else. Perhaps he’ll even use his network television time to repeat his thoughts on cable news and how it has frightened the country into thinking that terrorism is a greater threat than it is. Maybe we’ll hear once again that we should instead focus on gun control. If there’s any irony to this juxtaposition, don’t expect any liberal pundits to notice.
According to the AP, “Obama is emboldened by recent successes that formed one of the most productive stretches in his presidency.” They expect him to crow about the Iranian nuclear deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, unemployment rates, and the climate agreement forged in Paris last month. It will be left to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, delivering the Republican rebuttal, to explain why Obama should not necessarily tout any of these accomplishments as successes.
By all rights, this should be a time for optimism and anticipation. At long last, the end is in sight. But even if we didn’t have to worry about the looming darkness of President Hillary Clinton, we would be unwise to let our guard down. Obama has done unconscionable damage to this country over the last seven years, but he has not “fundamentally transformed” America the way he’d hoped. Don’t think for a moment that he’s done trying.
