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By Shavana Abruzzo
Brooklyn Daily
The storybook election of Barack Obama validated America as being a maverick of equal opportunity.
It reinforced our belief — in a stanza of poetic justice, no less — that good times were ahead because a hip bi-racial man was now leader of the free world.
European nations jubilantly celebrated his arrival, while cynical Islamic ones coldly pledged to reserve their judgment.
At home, candidate Obama’s message of hope and change electrified the disenchanted masses. They were weary of 9-11, and craved a political contrast they hoped would be supplied by a challenger who — in the words of his own veep — was “the first mainstream African American [presidential candidate] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
President Obama was already a living legend by the time he grasped the victory mic on Nov. 5, 2008, although his public service to date had consisted of just one term as an Illinois senator. Our new C.E.O. informed us, “because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”
The last part is certainly true. Four years of President Obama has changed the U.S. beyond recognition — and irreparably for the unforeseeable future. His domestic policy has been heavy on welfare programs and wealth redistribution, but thin on the ideals of personal accountability and entrepreneurship that have made America great.
His naive foreign agenda has been a disastrous embarrassment. It has endangered the lives of Americans by denying the existence of Islamo-fueled terrorism, yet continued to fund our emboldened adversaries, even as they burn Obama effigies in the street and chant “Death to the U.S.”
His promise to create an unprecedented level of openness in government has also bombed through such internal cover-ups as pouring $535 million into a solar panel company that went bankrupt and stuck taxpayers with the bill, and directing Arizona gun dealers to sell weapons illegally to criminals in Mexico, in a baffling attempt to nab the bad guys. That failed program resulted in the death of a U.S. federal border agent, and fanned the civil war raging inside that narco-state.
Obama’s White House has been an imprudent and callous sentry for the American people. It has pared down our defense budget at a time when anti-American Iran is honing its nuclear muscle, and decided that federal contractors don’t have to give advance notice to employees being laid off, as mandated by federal law.
Through it all, President Obama has been powdered and pampered by a juggernaut of adoring groupies, including the media, limousine liberals, and vacuous young professionals, all of whom are now in disbelief as they try to figure out how and why the most powerful man on earth was reduced to Jell-O in the first presidential debate of his re-election campaign.
That answer is easy — no Teleprompter, no contest.
Follow A Britisher’s View on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/BritShavana.
Read Shavana Abruzzo's column every Friday on BrooklynDaily.com. E-mail her at sabruzzo@cnglocal.com.