Obama’s real legacy? He will be remembered as the “Potty POTUS.”
Via New York Times.
President Obama came into office seven years ago pledging to end the wars of his predecessor, George W. Bush. On May 6, with eight months left before he vacates the White House, Mr. Obama passed a somber, little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president.
If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama’s term — a near-certainty given the president’s recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria — he will leave behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war.
Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon or his hero Abraham Lincoln….
Publicly, Mr. Obama acknowledged early on the contradiction between his campaign message and the realities of governing. When he accepted the Nobel in December 2009, he declared that humanity needed to reconcile “two seemingly irreconcilable truths — that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.”
The president has tried to reconcile these truths by approaching his wars in narrow terms, as a chronic but manageable security challenge rather than as an all-consuming national campaign, in the tradition of World War II or, to a lesser degree, Vietnam. The longevity of his war record, military historians say, also reflects the changing definition of war….
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Because Obama so well understood Sun Tzu, The Art of War? He’ll be followed by, The Art of the Deal.
Just to note; There’s the number one adjective with anything Obama, ‘unexpected’. Usually, it was, unexpectedly, as in jobless claims increased unexpectedly but this time the word, legacy, is attached. No NYT, Obama’s legacy is anything but unexpected.
Remember the physical damage done to the White House and the trash and filth left behind by the Clintons ? Including removing the Ws from the typewriters and the trash left all over the place ? Obamas done that to our country. That 70×7. And he’s not done yet.
If either GWB or 0bama wanted to win this war it would have been over in W’s first term. Win their hearts and minds is about as meaningless as hope and change.