We are near the end of the seventh year of Barack Obama’s presidency, and by any measure the United States is a fractured nation.
Its people are more divided politically than any time in recent memory.
Personally, many are anxious, angry or just down.
Whatever Mr. Obama promised in that famous first Inaugural Address, any sense of a nation united and raised up is gone.
It’s a sense of bust.
...Hope and change was the promise.
What happened?
...Iran’s ayatollahs got the Obama message, though, and that deal is the legacy.
The other half of the non-domestic legacy is supposed to be climate change.
Anyone watching the angular figure of the American president...had to be struck by a sense of what the French would call tristesse, a melancholy, even pathetic sadness.
...Liberals think the right is gloating at Mr. Obama’s end-of-term difficulties.
No one is gloating.
The nation is either furious (the right) or depressed (the left) at eight wasted, wheel-spinning years whose main achievement is ObamaCare—a morass.
Mr. Obama will go off to do something else, but he leaves behind a country littered with public and private institutions in disrepute.
...Instead, Mr. Obama spent much of his presidency vilifying the private sector—banks, insurers, energy producers and utilities.
...Mr. Obama has repeatedly mocked institutions he didn’t control and abused the powers of those he did.
Almost always, the ridicule and condescension came in front of cheering audiences..."
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