Topic: Decline of the West
Great historical turning points are sometimes obvious only in retrospect. For those living through the history in question, a turning point can be passed with little notice. This may just have happened in the case of the Obama presidency.
The thing about turning points is that there's no turning back from them. When Lee lost at Gettysburg, the fate of the Confederacy was sealed. When Nixon approved the Watergate cover-up, he destroyed his presidency. History permits no do-overs.
Barack Obama may in fact have ruined his own presidency by the manner in which he made himself president. Presenting himself to gullible voters as a post-partisan national savior, he raised expectations to a stratospheric level that he and his administration never had a hope of meeting. More than one year into his tenure, the oceans have not receded, the terrorists have not beaten their suicide vests into iPods, and the atmosphere in Washington is more virulently partisan than ever. Even so, had he followed a sensible, moderate course, the President could have recouped. But sensible and moderate are two words that no objective observer would use in describing the Obama Administration. Instead we have witnessed hubris harnessed to incompetence. And now we see their inevitable result.
I think that future historians will cite the first three months of 2010 as the time of turning that ruined Barack Obama's presidency. The failure his his grandiose health care "reform," the collapse of climate alarmism, and the impending graduation of Iran to the status of a nuclear power refute every premise on which the Obama Administration is founded. I'd be glad to be proved wrong—Obama is President of the United States, after all, and his fate is to some extent ours. But I'm pretty sure that he's blown it. And the only thing that surprises me, frankly, is how little time it took him to screw everything up.
