2017

I have many contemporary writers that I look to for ideas, inspiration and focus.  One of those is Victor Davis Hanson.  This guy has a pretty impressive résumé.  The part I like best is that he's a Professor at Stanford, a prolific and award winning author, and a farmer in the Salinas valley.  Talk about perspective!

He wrote a piece this week for Real Clear Politics that seems to me to be a very insightful analysis of the Obama Presidency.  You can read it here.  He takes a look back at the legacy that Obama leaves from the perspective of 2017.  Like any prophesy, there is a bit of wishful thinking, a bit of guessing, and a healthy dose of projecting what is a disastrous Presidency into the future.

Of course, economics plays a big part of the prediction

There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10 trillion will have been added to the national debt during the Obama administration, on top of the more than $4 trillion from the prior eight-year George W. Bush administration. That staggering bipartisan sum will force the next president to be a deficit hawk, both fiscally and politically

In addition, there will be no huge new federal spending programs -- no third or fourth stimulus, no vast new entitlements. The debt is so large and voters so tired of massive borrowing that the next president will talk not of "investments" but of balancing the budget. In 2016, President Hillary Clinton or President Marco Rubio will tell us that cutting spending and living within our means is the new cool.

President Clinton or President Rubio.  Hmmmmm...I'm sure there are miles to go before we get there.  But I have to admit (and I can't believe I admit this) I'd take Bubba's wife over the great divider that we have now.  But it's 3 years away...anything can happen.

I also have to admit that the prediction I really (and I think many people really) hope comes to fruition is this one

Obamacare may remain in name, but in fact most of its provisions will be discarded or amended. Its full implementation next year will result in almost everything that was not supposed to happen: higher health-care premiums, rationed care, scarcer doctors and fewer jobs. Obamacare will mostly go the way of the Defense of Marriage Act -- officially the law of the land, but its enforcement simply ignored by the powers that be

 And this one has to happen.  If it doesn't, well...then we're not only doomed, we're stupid.

Despite an increase in carbon emissions since 2000, the planet did not heat up in the last 15 years. Scientists will continue to argue over global warming, but politicians will not talk much more of implementing costly cap-and-trade policies. They will still praise green energy as the way of the future, but they will not continue the massive subsidies to substitute it for far cheaper fossil fuels.

Instead, expect a renewal of federal oil and natural gas leases on public lands. There is too much newly discovered recoverable energy on federal property to continue to delay its full production -- and too much of an upside in cheaper gas at the pump, more independence from Middle East autocracies, more jobs, more money and more economic growth.

And the absolute worst part of who Obama is will hopefully fade away without doing irreparable harm on the country...

The next president will jettison the sort of class warfare that has led only to short-term political gain and long-term polarization. Obama's "fat cats" and "one percenters" will disappear from the presidential vocabulary. We will hear no more accusations that the successful really did not build their own businesses, or that they should have known when it was time not to profit because they had made quite enough money. Expect just the opposite: a Bill Clinton-like schmoozing of small businesses to please start buying, hiring and expanding again.

And while I think this is true, I also think it's sad...just really sad

Barack Obama is a landmark figure: young, charismatic, seemingly post-national and supposedly post-racial. For those reasons alone, he enjoys a level of unshakeable political support not predicated on the actual record of his tenure as president -- in the manner most remember fondly that he won the Nobel Prize but don't quite know what he did to earn it.

Obama's economic record will be dispassionately acknowledged to be similar to that of Jimmy Carter. But, unlike Carter, Obama will remain a mythical figure in liberal circles.

To borrow a line from a classic Western, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." And so we will do just that.