The Crybaby
But when we see at the last half year of his term, it looks like a worst book end any president could have. He could have hung around and remained neutral in the upcoming elections. This would have added so much to his legacy as well as made his actions against Russia more believable.
The political progression
It is a well known pattern in US politics. There is a definite handover of power between parties every eight years. Only an exceptionally successful President can push for the next candidate from his own party. Only an exceptionally bad president loses the second term. You need extra ordinary proof on you side if you want to rule out this thesis.
Even exceptionally successful presidents, who have done two consecutive terms and still remain popular, generally prefer to remain mostly aloof from the electoral process. One of the major mistake Obama made was ignoring all these inputs.
Never wrestle with a pig
I think this involved a large amount of miscalculation on his part. Instead of walking in the sunlight with his head held high, he got pulled in the mud by Trump. And as it generally happens, the pig won. It is not the pig's fault that the fight happened at all. It was complete miscalculation on the second party that got in the mud.
Difference between election and party
There is no new proof that the actual electoral process was affected by Russian hacking. As the clip above shows, it is also really difficult to actually impact the actual election process. Words matter here. This is nothing but a very clumsy effort of diverting the blame. Only thing that was hacked was the party's and Podesta's personal emails. The only thing that was leaked actually showed lacked of democracy within the democratic party.
Only thing Obama is achieving by raising these issues is to land another foot in mouth. His priorities here should have been to (a) Take the foot out of his mouth AND/OR (b) Firmly keep the mouth closed so that nothing else can enter there again.
My conspiracy theory
Here is my contribution to the whole discussion :). I have my own pet theory why things turned out the way they did. In my opinion there are three major possible reasons for it:
Trump is firmly under Obama's skin Trump has got under Obama's skin since the time he started making allegations against him. This is justifiably so. I personally think the Donald played a really dirty game there. But Obama allowed him to get under his skin and did not actually take the "high road" as his better half keeps reminding. And the first chance he got, Obama had to pay Trump back.
It is all $$ If you remember correctly, Obama's campaign was one of the most funded ones. He raised more than 600mil dollars. Hillary Clinton also shared more or less the same bunch of sponsors. Obama owed this to his masters and he did not have a way out. Also once they did not need him, he did not have a lot of investment in making him look good. As soon as the backing went away, his feet of clay were visible.
He made a deal with the devil Hillary's support for 2008 run after she lost the nomination came with a bunch of riders. That's how she got the secretary of state nomination.
What ever may be the reasons, this has left this great country in an unenviable position.
Post-fact world
Every one is trying to out-Trump Trump. Wrestling with the pig.
But the fact is that this post-fact world is not ushered in by the Donald. He just introduced to world to the possibility.
The media took it up whole heartedly. Instead of being a mirror to the people, they tried to become the opinion makers. They lost grasp of the the facts and objectivity. They manipulated their numbers
to align with their political leanings.They whole hearted followed him to the post-fact world.
But the credit of making this a highway goes definitely to his predecessor - Barak Obama.
