Team Obama’s Third Term in the White House Has Been a Disaster and an Insult to Britain

COMMENTARY Progressivism

Team Obama’s Third Term in the White House Has Been a Disaster and an Insult to Britain

Aug 24, 2023 3 min read
COMMENTARY BY
Nile Gardiner, PhD

Director, Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and Bernard and Barbara Lomas Fellow

Nile Gardiner is Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and Bernard and Barbara Lomas Fellow.
President Joe Biden and former U.S. President Barack Obama as seen at the Liacouras Center on November 5, 2022 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mark Makela / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

Both Obama and Biden advanced presidencies that have been the antithesis of practically everything Churchill stood for as Britain’s great wartime savior.

America’s friends have been treated with barely disguised disdain and contempt from Israel to the UK.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden share the same big government elitist mindset, with a sneering disregard for the plight of ordinary Americans.

It is no coincidence that both Joe Biden and Barack Obama began their presidencies by unceremoniously throwing the same bust of Winston Churchill out of the Oval Office. Obama hated Churchill’s role as Prime Minister in responding firmly to the exceedingly violent Mau Mau uprising in colonial Kenya in the 1950s. Biden, for decades a supporter of Irish nationalism, also abhors Britain’s past, and clearly views Churchill as the embodiment of what the woke Left like to call “British imperialism.” 

Significantly, both Obama and Biden advanced presidencies that have been the antithesis of practically everything Churchill stood for as Britain’s great wartime savior. They are two of the weakest leaders in American history, who have done more to promote America’s decline than any president in the modern era, including Jimmy Carter. They clearly could not stand the sight of Churchill watching over them, as they did all they could to tear apart the U.S./U.K. Special Relationship and drag down the world’s superpower.

In so many respects the Biden presidency has been Obama’s de facto third term. As USA Today reported back in June 2021, a staggering three quarters of top aides to Joe Biden appointed in the early months of his presidency had served in the Obama administration. Barack Obama has loomed over the Biden White House to an extent that no previous ex-President has before, even overshadowing the present incumbent at a White House reception in April last year, where Biden was pictured wandering around seemingly lost and largely ignored while his predecessor was mobbed by an adoring crowd of supporters.

>>> From Land Acknowledgements to Zombie Lies, Biden’s State Department Pushes Divisive Diplomacy

It is hard to imagine a U.S. presidency that could be more weak-kneed, ineffective, and destructive than the one led by Barack Obama. But this is the harsh reality with Joe Biden in power. Biden is Obama 2.0 with the same broken left-wing policies, an incredibly dangerous addiction to spending taxpayers’ money and generating government debt (now standing at an astonishing $32.7 trillion), and a willingness to grovel to America’s enemies and throw its allies under the bus.

The Obama era was a tragedy for the United States on the international stage, with the president of the most powerful nation in the world embarking on an embarrassing apology tour, spending much of his time condemning the history of his own country to foreign audiences from Paris to Cairo, while strengthening the hand of America’s adversaries. Biden has simply doubled down on the Obama approach by kowtowing to Communist China, overseeing the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and failing to do anything at all to prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, America’s friends have been treated with barely disguised disdain and contempt from Israel to the UK. Strikingly, Obama and Biden have headed outright anti-British Presidencies that have treated America’s closest partner with a complete lack of respect. Barack Obama famously intervened ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum, warning the British people they would be at “the back of the queue” if they dared to vote to leave the European Union. In a similar vein, Brexit-hating Joe Biden issued menacing threats to sink a U.S./U.K. trade deal if London did not cooperate with Washington over the issue of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

In the wake of the U.S. president’s incessant knifing of Britain in the back, I have not heard a single positive word said about Joe Biden from any British Member of Parliament I have spoken to. Biden is widely viewed by America’s British allies as hugely incompetent, rude, hostile, and frankly out of his mind. The increasingly common view of Joe Biden in London and many European capitals is that he is an embarrassing buffoon who should be nowhere near the White House.

>>> Biden’s Incoherent Energy Policy Continues

At home and abroad the outlook for the world’s superpower is grim. Having lived in Washington through all the years of the Obama and Biden administrations, I can attest that the overwhelming sense of direction is the same. As the latest RealClear Politics polling average shows, a significant majority of Americans today believe the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction. It was the same throughout much of the Obama presidency. Americans are disillusioned with the Obama/Biden approach. Their prosperity is declining, their taxes are rising, their debt is forever growing, and economic freedom is rapidly diminishing.

There is a real sense of malaise across Biden’s America, clearly reflected in the soaring crime, homelessness and lawlessness evident in every major city run by the Left, from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Chicago and Philadelphia. The second Obama era with Joe Biden as President has been a complete disaster.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden share the same big government elitist mindset, with a sneering disregard for the plight of ordinary Americans. They are two of the most arrogant and out-of-touch world leaders of the modern era. Their shameful joint legacy has been a testament to failure, despair and American ruin.

This piece originally appeared in The Telegraph