Why Clinton lost: Obama

The surprising victory of Donald Trump suggests one cause that overwhelms Trump’s caustic approach against Hillary Clinton and contrasts with her “sweetness and light” approach. It is her closeness to President Obama. Hillary was leading the earlier health care fiasco and is still pushing Obamacare, which is broken, with soaring premiums and cancellations of service by insurance companies.

And then there’s Obama’s foreign policy which had as its focus his initial statement that the “U.S. is not the only, nor leading, special nation.” This statement was followed by his stating that our foreign policy would no longer be “leading,” rather we would “lead from behind,” and then he backed down on his promise to punish Bashar Assad “if he bombed his own people,” which Assad did; thousands of Syrians died. This “from behind” policy has not served us well in Iraq nor Afghanistan, where other opposing forces from Iran, Russia and Turkey have complicated the task of leaving peaceful states behind.

Finally, there is the issue of stifling regulations. Fortune magazine’s November issue points out that 279,000 federal employees are supervising U.S. regulations. Obama issued 80,000 pages of new regulations this year; this follows the 22,000 pages of Dodd-Frank banking law regulations.

John Peterson

Spokane