In essence, Mister President, you blew it. Obama: The First Six Years

In essence, Mister President, you blew it.
Obama: The First Six Years

Dear President Obama,

I do not know if you are astute enough to recognize it. But, when you were elected president in 2008, you were given an extraordinary opportunity that very few individuals throughout the course of human history had been given. As America’s first African-American president, you had the chance to be recognized as an exemplary leader of true vision, a statesman par excellence. Indeed, your name might have come to be associated with great historical leaders such as Lincoln (to whom you like to compare yourself), King, Churchill, Washington and others. Indeed, you could have been America’s “great uniter”.

Instead, you chose to divide us. You have bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated the United States. You have divided us along racial lines (as evidenced by the Cambridge Police and Trayvon Martin episodes) and sexual lines (the “war on women”). Instead of uniting us along economic lines, you sought to divide us by fostering unprecedented levels of class envy as illustrated by the “one-percenters” and Occupy Wall Street protests. By insisting that successful individuals have failed to pay their “fair share” in taxes, you demonized success and fostered resentment among the less successful and the downright lazy.

Instead of encouraging America and Americans to become more prosperous, you fueled our already-exploding national debt and sent it through the proverbial roof like the NASA rocket ships which no longer take us to outer space – thanks to your budget cuts. Instead of making welfare and other entitlements something to be scorned and used only in emergencies, you made it “cool” to be on the public dole.

Instead of working with both parties to improve the greatest health care system in the world, you signed a hyper-partisan bill that was unpopular from the beginning and has grown even more so since its passage. You promised that it would insure the uninsured; it did not. You promised that it would lower insurance premiums; it increased them. You promised that we could keep our existing plans and doctors; that, also, was proven to be a lie.

Partisanship and deception

You’ve used partisanship and deception the likes of which have never been seen in the history of our country. When the balance of power in the House of Representatives switched to the Republicans in 2010, you accused the GOP of being “obstructionists”, even though you, a Democrat, still held the White House and your party retained control of the Senate. When your party lost the Senate in this year’s mid-term elections, instead of acknowledging the fact that much of the country had had enough, you attempted to marginalize the votes of the opposition by saying to those who chose NOT to vote, “I hear you, too.”

Instead of using America’s military and economic might to assume the role of leader of the free world, you chose to apologize for our power. Four patriotic Americans – including our Libyan ambassador – were murdered by Muslim extremists in Benghazi. You and others in your White House told us that the murders were retaliation for some sort of a video that the Muslims found offensive. We nearly had to pry the words “terrorist attack” from your lips. After 4000 American service men and women died fighting terrorists in Iraq, with many thousands more maimed, we watched ISIS cross the Iraq/Syria border and run roughshod across Iraq using military equipment bought with OUR tax dollars. You have seen fit to release suspected terrorists even though experts say that the majority of these individuals will end up returning to their terroristic ways within a short period of time. Your policies toward terrorism have emboldened those who seek to destroy us and you’ve left most Americans feeling vulnerable in a world full of extremists who take great pleasure in cutting off the heads of Westerners.

We have sat back and watched as our national sovereignty has been compromised by waves of invading aliens crossing our southern border.  Not only did you fail to secure our border, you have, with a stroke of the pen, given legitimacy to millions of these people who failed to follow the rules. In the process, you thumbed your nose at those that HAVE followed the rules; those who have immigrated and sought citizenship legally.

When the deadly disease Ebola became a worldwide crisis, your administration decided that it would be a good idea, instead of taking the fight to the enemy, to bring the enemy here to fight it. It appears that a disaster was averted – for now. But it has left much of the citizenry with, at best, a sense of unease.

Most Americans saw a decline or, at least, a stagnation of their standard of living

Most Americans saw a decline or, at least, a stagnation of their standard of living in the first decade of the 21st century. In your defense, this began taking place prior to your presidency. However, not only did your economic policies fail to stem that tide, they actually accelerated it. We watched as more and more of our earnings, in the form of tax dollars, went to propping up the welfare state leaving fewer and fewer of our hard-earned dollars to be spent on such things as new cars. Taking the family out for a nice meal or a movie was something that Americans once enjoyed fairly regularly. Such niceties have since become quite rare for most families as they struggle to pay their monthly bills.

Then there are the allegations of NSA and IRS spying on private citizens and political groups that your administration finds threatening. Your administration’s actions in this regard make Richard Nixon seem downright saintly by comparison.

Had you decided from your first day in office to actually practice what you preached during your presidential campaign, you might well HAVE gone down in history as a president of vision, leadership, and unprecedented prosperity. Instead, you chose to ram your leftist policies down America’s collective throat through deceit, thuggery, and political chicanery. You left over half of the population with a bad taste in its mouth not just for your signature health care act, but for virtually all of your policies.

In essence, Mister President, you blew it.




James Sharp is a middle-aged, middle-class, middle-management salesman who believes in secure borders and fighting our enemies with a strong military.  He also believes in limited government, free markets, and unlimited opportunity and personal liberties for all citizens of the U.S.

James can be reached at: sharpestjim@gmail.com