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"  Writer-at-large John H. Richardson&amp;#039;s column, &amp;quot;The Richardson Report,&amp;quot; runs right here each Tuesday. Because of the general news vacuum caused by Barack Obama&amp;#039;s inauguration, I dug through my future stories files and found this story: Dateline: November 5, 2016 After eight years, it is time to sum up the achievements and failures of Barack Obama. So much has changed, it&amp;#039;s almost hard now to conceive of the wrenching battles that followed the election of 2008: \u2022 After the first bailout failed because the banks hoarded the money in glass jars buried in the basement, leading Obama to put strict regulations on both glass jars and basements, Fox News and the National Chamber of Commerce accused him of trying to nationalize our great system of Ponzi schemes and led the first calls for his impeachment. There was no precedent, they said, for presidents actually trying to solve problems instead of just rewarding their political supporters. \u2022 When Obama put his troops to work in support of the Employee Free Choice Act, businesses argued that an economic crash was no time to encourage unions. The GOP argued that the U.S. could only compete with China if the workers of America accepted their patriotic duty to work in sweatshops for $1 a day. Taking that argument to its logical consequences, The Heritage Institute issued its famous report about how America&amp;#039;s economic might was actually built on extremely cheap labor \u2014 specifically, slavery.  \u2022 When Obama announced his plan to extend Medicare to all Americans at two-thirds the cost of private insurance \u2014 as long as they were willing to accept rationing of premium services like MRIs and liposuction, the insurance companies counter-attacked with massive public relations campaign featuring Harry and Louise as survivalist Christians on the run from liberals who want to harvest their livers (now the subject of a year-long course at the Atwater School of Campaign Technology). \u2022 Obama&amp;#039;s honeymoon with the left evaporated just as fast. They hated his tendency to split things down the middle, like when he closed Guantanamo but decided to hold the sixteen worst-of-the-worst on a reality show called &amp;quot;Prisoners of War.&amp;quot; The ACLU immediately sued, saying they should be given a chance to live in New York City and enroll in an appropriate community service program. \u2022 As to the torture investigations, they boiled down to lots of subpoenas from Conyers and Waxman, but Justice never led any major prosecutions and Obama stuck to his underlying principles that torturers and their victims have to find common ground, even if it&amp;#039;s just the sensitive skin on the insides of their thighs. The nation&amp;#039;s only real satisfaction came when the Commission on Torture made Donald Rumsfeld sit in a very uncomfortable chair for twelve straight days of depositions. &amp;quot;Why just twelve?&amp;quot; Rumsfeld said. &amp;quot;Sometimes I hang from the strappado for eight hours a day.&amp;quot; \u2022 Obama&amp;#039;s call for a Grand Bargain with Iran started off a little better \u2014 after only three months of negotiation, they agreed that Israel and Palestine would be separate nations, Hamas and Hezbollah would adopt policies forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, religion, nationality or gender preference, Iran would stop messing around in Iraq and Russia would replace its plutonium shipments with dubbed copies of Putin&amp;#039;s kung fu instructional video. But this just led to protests all over the world as left-wingers said that giving the Palestinians their own country would interfere with their right to self-determination and right-wingers worried that too much peace would make everybody act really gay. Then things in Afghanistan went bad when Hamid Karzai asked the State Department to replace our shipments of food and arms with a billion dollars worth of gro-lights and all of Tommy Chong&amp;#039;s bongs.  \u2022 By the 2012 election, Obama&amp;#039;s future looked dark. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow gave Christopher Hitchens three weeks of airtime to promote his new book, Barack Is Not Great. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer ran regular mock trials of the Obamagram\u2122. And Fox gave him nightly beatings on the Wurzelbacher Factor (as the show became known after Bill O&amp;#039;Reilly resigned in the wake of a tragic loofah accident). The only good coverage he got was from The New York Times, which had lost most of its gravitas after becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Comedy Channel. \u2022 Then, as history tells us, Obama turned it all around. The left began to relax when they realized that Obama was only courting right-wing figures like Rick Warren in order to win elections and pass actual legislation, an unfamiliar concept in recent Democratic politics. Then he shocked the punditocracy with a 77 percent win in the 2012 elections despite polls that showed him losing by an overwhelming margin in the Real America. Subsequent investigations discovered that the Real America had dwindled to one county in southern Arkansas. Also, the 23 percent who voted for Sarah Palin turned out to be the same 23 percent who stuck with George Bush to the bitter end, even after he became a Saudi citizen and started making Laura wear that burqa. \u2022 Within months, the economy finally recovered because unionization led to a large nationwide increase in salaries. Outraged Republicans called for a special prosecutor to investigate this mysterious connection between good jobs and a vibrant economy, because their metrics clearly showed that the economy should only recover when the last American job was shipped overseas. More improvement came as larger numbers of people moved over to Obamacare, which was then able to deliver better health service for even lower prices despite advice from insurance company experts who suggested spending the extra money on a trip to Aruba and a boob job for their mistresses. Then businesses realized it was good for them too because it took health care off their books, so they issued a nationwide apology for all their years of hostile lobbying, including but not limited to their fights against seat belts, federal deposit insurance, and the comic books industry, which they honestly never saw evolving from Menace to Youth to the current boom in brilliant graphic novels. \u2022 Fortunately, Obama showed his skill at kneecapping the opposition by retaining private insurance for the rich, a small consolation given that their children hate them and their wife is having an affair with the hunky guy who cuts the lawn at the community center. The results were predictable: as Karl Rove warned way back in the early 1990s, once people got a decent health care system, they started believing in the power of government again. Some even began investigating the rumors that the early American pioneers bonded together in collective fashion to clear fields and cross the plains and even referred to themselves as members of a &amp;quot;commonwealth.&amp;quot; All this led to the tremendous outpouring of national spirit and renewal that has come to be known as the Age of Obama.  \u2022 And Karl Rove? Funny you should ask. Most people know that he went on trial for his role in the prosecution of Don Seligman, the politicization of the Justice Department, blowing Valerie Plame&amp;#039;s cover and masquerading as a journalist. After eighteen months in a cushy federal prison, he was last seen lurking outside the gate of George Bush&amp;#039;s estate in River Oaks, begging random passersby to call him &amp;quot;Turdblossom.&amp;quot; Get Up-to-the-Minute Analysis from Esquire&amp;#039;s New Politics Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; RELATED STORIES:  EARLIER: Richardson&amp;#039;s Back-and-Forth with S.C. Governor on Bailout  EARLIER: Richardson on the Bear Who Called the Bubble  ARCHIVE: More of John H. Richardson&amp;#039;s Weekly Politics Column   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5526/barack-obama-2016-012009/>