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Word to the Unwise: Black Voters Will Reject Any 2020 Democratic Candidate Who Trashes Obama to Appease the Far Left[/h]
Look, Obama, like every president who came before him, was imperfect. I personally wanted him to go bigger during the height of the financial crisis and spend billions, not just shoring up Wall Street—a necessary evil, given the state of the economy in 2009—but directly bailing out individual homeowners. And I wanted some high-profile perp walks of corporate executives, which we never got. Those were Obama policy failures, and they weren’t the only ones. He made mistakes on immigration and in foreign policy. His biggest regret is how he handled Libya. I questioned his drone war, knowing it was negatively affecting and killing too many innocent people, although I never saw someone describe an equally-effective alternative in the war on terror. I am partial to the idea of universal health care, given what I know about a system that still leaves too many people behind. And I didn’t appreciate some of the language in his speeches about absentee fathers.
We all know Obama isn’t Jesus. And we never wanted nor expected him to be.
But too many far-left liberals, many (but not all) of them white, seem so focused on his imperfections that they have all but ignored his enormous accomplishments, which include his helping stave off a second Great Depression; a health reform law that has literally been saving tens of thousands of lives every year, while improving millions of others, since it was adopted in 2010; saving a couple of million jobs by saving the domestic auto industry; establishing a consumer protection bureau that has saved everyday Americans billions of dollars; commuting more prison sentences than all previous presidents combined while beginning criminal justice reform efforts that are beginning to bear more fruit; and overseeing an economy that went on the longest monthly job creation streak in history and produced the largest annual increase in income in the nation’s history, with most of that increase going to the poor and middle class. Those are among the reasons he was one of the most progressive presidents this country has ever known. And he did more to fight inequality than most of his predecessors.