Obama, the Great Divider when in office, lacks the credibility to lecture America

“ It did not start with Donald Trump,” former President Barack Obama said last week in his melodramatic speech on the current divisions in American politics. “He is a symptom, not the cause.”

If Obama had stopped there, he might have been right. He was trying to describe American politics as suffering a crisis of “division and resentment and paranoia.” Indeed, it is, and indeed it didn’t start with Trump.

It didn’t start with Obama either. But Obama played a key role in making it much worse than it had been before him. Obama governed as an uncompromising ideologue and a hard partisan for eight years. And his desire to antagonize political enemies, above and beyond the meeting of his policy goals, was a critical factor in the election of President Trump.

More