obama's legacy seen from afar

[Vince Koloski]

This recent article along with Jack's comment about Obama's bathroom initiative pushing all his legacy chips onto the table made me think about what his legacy is.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/27/silencing-america-as-it-prepares-for-war/

Aside from not being Bush, passing an affordable health insurance act, moving forward on some LGBTQ issues, stopping a pipeline which moves the environmental risk of hydrocarbon transport onto an aging rail system and nominating supreme court justices who expanded the court color spectrum and gender representation, many of his accomplishments seem to serve the purpose of proving to the oligarchy and the military and foreign policy hawks that they have nothing to fear from a president who doesn't look like them.

Pilger, admittedly a liberal, does a nice job of elucidating this and defining some of the issues not being discussed in this cycle so far.

[jack saunders]

Both parties seem about equally (meaning, *significantly*) burdened by the decibels of their extreme wings.

Republicans are never satisfied.  Granted, Bush was a bit promiscuous on the spending side as that party sees things.  The drug benefit was something he seemed to just throw in without even being asked....which sent true believers up the wall.

And very liberal Dems still find much to denounce about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

How could we expect anything else?  From their standpoint, it's always "virtue Lite."  

Well, course course.  The Xtreme dose is never administered, almost by definition.

But at the end of the day, the *loud* and the outraged simply get a lot more ink than the quiet strategists who probably see Obama succeeded by Hillary as a truly watershed event in the evolution of public policy in this country.

I hate to attach age considerations to this analysis, because I strenuously eschew the "cry baby" metaphor. Thank God for the passiionalte seekers of justice.

It's more about hopes and realism.  I shudder to wonder how many millions of millennials imagined Obams's first inaugural as day one in a long stream of obviously enlightened "orders" from the White House:  Such as, zero tolerance for racism.  Zero tolerance for poverty.  Zero tolerance for homelessness.  etc, etc.  It was never going to happen.

When we nibble the tasty bait of politics at age 17, we have just ordered up disappointment, which soon be coming in the headlines.

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