Surveying the wreckage caused by Obama’s foreign and domestic ill-conceived policies, Victor Davis Hanson reaches the inevitable conclusion that – if the damage is to be repaired – “The Next President Is Going to Be Hated” ~

Everyone hates the sourpuss who says the party is over. The next president will have to tell the American people that a reckoning is on the horizon—and that it is not going to be pretty.

 
Thanks to profligate spending, government bloat and private sector-killing regulations under Barack Hussein Obama, out national debt is inching ever closer to 20 trillion! If we’re ever going to dig ourselves out of the abyss…

An adult president is going to have to tell the American people that a mandated equality-of-result economy is fossilized, entitlements are insolvent, the debt is unsustainable, interest rates are going up, the medical system is pure chaos, and people have to get over expecting to live off government, not because it is unethical, but because it is untenable.

 
Equally broken is our standing on the international stage. Obama has abdicated America’s moral authority (through his amoral actions) and seriously damaged our position as a world leader. Under his administration, bullies have been encouraged (China, Iran, ISIS, North Korea Turkey, Putin…) and our historical allies (especially Israel) alienated.
 

History in the short term adores appeasers. They pontificate and pose as sober and judicious humanitarians who will do anything to avoid confrontation on their watch, even as they light the fuse of Armageddon for their successors. The restorers of deterrence are always smeared as war-mongers—and only praised as Churchillian largely when they are dead. So it will be for the next president if he or she chooses to stop the decline and restore the American-led postwar order.

Hanson’s article is an honest assessment of Obama’s shameful legacy. But I’m afraid whoever gains the White House will be more likely to take up fiddle playing and stare mindlessly at the advancing inferno. In other words, the next president is only going to be hated if he’s Ted Cruz.