By: Daniel J. Flynn
8/6/2012 05:40 AM
The sagacious English philosopher Eric Idle once counseled, “Always look at the bright side of life.” But too many glass-half-full Americans accentuate the negative, particularly when it comes to our president. We can’t see the success of his failures.
For decades, wonks have dreamed up ways to strengthen families, dam the flood of illegal immigrants, and bring down the divorce rate. Barack Obama has achieved all this and more in just one presidential term. Think of all that he could accomplish in a second.
Obama has brought families together in a way no Republican ever has.
The Pew Research Center explains that “large numbers of Americans enacted their own anti-poverty program in the depths of the Great Recession: They moved in with relatives. This helped fuel the largest increase in the number of Americans living in multi-generational households in modern history.” In 1980, just 11 percent of American 25-34-year-olds lived in multigenerational households. Today, the figure exceeds 20 percent. “Boomerang children” is just another way of saying “strong family.” In 1980, 28 million households featured three or more generations under the same roof. Today, more than 50 million households do. Don’t you love your grandfather enough to be his bunkmate?
Obama has halted illegal immigration in its tracks.
In April, the Pew Hispanic Center reported that “the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed.” Obama’s brilliant plan to plug up the porous Southern border involved making the United States less economically attractive than Mexico for migrant workers. It turns out that Mexicans, like Americans, have difficulty finding work in America. So, for the first time that anyone can remember, more undocumented aliens are leaving America than entering it. An 8.3 percent unemployment rate has its charms.
Obama’s pro-marriage policies have pulled the divorce rate down.
The Obama presidency has witnessed American couples reconciling their irreconcilable differences. See, divorce is expensive. Courts, lawyers, splitting assets, and even alimony will usually leave both parties poorer than they were. You don’t get addition through division. And since the Great Recession has left almost everyone with less than they had, people aren’t eager to go through a legal process leaving them with less still. So couples give it another go rather than give up. The divorce rate has declined along with the economy. Why the alienation of affection toward the president from those professing affection for marriage?
So Barack Obama’s presidency wasn’t “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” But he did reverse the flow of undocumented workers, bring families closer, and keep marriages together. The hiring market has rarely been as favorable for employers and homes are very affordable. You can buy a Flint, Michigan ranch home on eBay for pennies on the dollar.
The secret to President Obama’s success is killing the economy, which had empowered Americans to live apart from their families, attracted foreigners to our once-thriving job market, and enabled couples to part without crippling the finances.
Cynics might say the president never intended for any of this to happen. But remember who we are talking about here. Admiral William McRaven assured us that Obama is the “smartest guy in the room” and historian Michael Beschloss called Obama “a guy whose IQ is off the charts,” certainly our most intelligent president ever. We are just too dim to appreciate his brilliance.
Of course, there were unintended consequences to the master plan. In addition to the beneficial effects illustrated above, President Obama’s policies also brought forty-two straight months of unemployment above 8 percent, a gross domestic product growing at an anemic 1.5 percent for 2012’s second quarter, trillion-dollar-plus deficits for every year of his presidency, and the doubling of gasoline prices.
The man who seeks to take Barack Obama’s job promises to unleash 12 million new jobs in his first term as president. Surely this would again make us a desirable destination for illegal immigrants and tear twenty-nine-year olds from the womb of their parents’ basements.
Do we really want to go back to that America?
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To read another article by Daniel J. Flynn, click here.
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