Ronald Kessler reporting from Washington, D.C. — President Obama promised to cut the federal deficit in half by the end of his term. Instead, he has added to the federal deficit by $5 trillion and has increased the federal debt by 44 percent.
The federal debt now amounts to $49,058 per person, compared with $14,327 when Obama took office. According to his new budget plan, by 2022 the federal debt will stand at $25.9 trillion.
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| Romney supporters stand near debt clock in New Hampshire. (Getty Images) |
The budget calls for the government to grow and proposes no changes to Social Security or federal healthcare programs, the biggest drivers of future borrowing.
In essence, Obama is standing on a melting ice floe, oblivious to the fact that he and the rest of the country are about to go under.
If Republicans take control of the White House and Congress, they will begin to restore fiscal sanity and encourage businesses to grow and hire.
As Mitt Romney has said, his election by itself would “send a signal to people who hire people that our future is positive and that they’re not going to be demonized.”
But Obama’s more lasting legacy will remain: polarization between rich and poor and between blacks and whites.
To those of us who have exposed genuine discrimination against blacks, what is heartbreaking about this public emphasis on race is how it has set back race relations. If this were a truly colorblind society, no one would mention race or even notice skin color.
But led by Obama, Democrats have turned back the clock to the 1960s, when the first thing we thought about when seeing a black man was the color of his skin.
Indeed, I remember covering Boston police headquarters back then as a Boston Herald reporter. If a murder victim was black, it was called a “cheap” murder, meaning it was not worth writing about.
Now the first thought that may come to mind when dealing with a black man or woman is: Is this person going to turn on me because of some misperception that I am a racist? If so, the safest course is to keep that individual at arm’s length. Almost daily, someone in the media suggests that a harmless remark by a politician or celebrity is racist.
As noted in my story
“'The Obamas' Confirms Worst Fears About the President," confidantes of the president say he attributes criticism of his policies to prejudice against blacks. When an obstreperous black Harvard professor gave the Cambridge police a hard time, Obama took his side, saying the police “acted stupidly.”
In his speeches, Obama routinely refers to children “no matter what they look like” to suggest that opponents of his policies are racists who don’t want blacks to succeed.
For 20 years, Obama listened to the anti-white racist ravings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whom he called his mentor, sounding board, and friend. Wright portrayed blacks and the poor as victims of America’s allegedly racist society.
In much the same way, Obama has pitted the poor against the rich, undercutting the most basic American ideals. He has even endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement, which seeks to redistribute Americans’ wealth and has enshrined envy as admirable.
The fact is that more than half of Americans who start at the lowest economic levels eventually make it to the middle class or beyond. That is what America is all about. But Obama has portrayed the kind of success achieved by left-wing heroes like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, George Soros, Michael Moore, and Obama himself as worthy of scorn and shame.
The election of a black president whose success was a model for us all was supposed to mark a turning point in American race relations. It has — in the wrong direction. Beyond the mountains of debt, that will be Obama’s most enduring legacy.
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. Read more reports from Ronald Kessler — Click Here Now.
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