If Only Obama Could Sell Insurance Like He's Selling Guns

Philip Klein thinks that Obama is the most powerful insurance salesman in the world.  He posits this to advance thesis that Obama has suffered a come down from the typical description of the US President - most powerful man in the world.

President Obama's approval rating is at or near record lows. His foreign policy has been feckless. And his recent budget proposal was virtually ignored because his domestic agenda is going nowhere in Congress. So with 2014 looking like an increasingly grim year for Democrats seeking re-election, the role of the most powerful leader of the free world has been reduced to that of an insurance salesman.

I think this is part right but needs incredibly precise parsing.  Obama is an insurance salesman for sure, and arguably merely that. And he might be the most powerful man to engage in insurance salesmanship, but clearly he is not - given his position, his incessant efforts, and the results - an effective insurance salesman.  To be clear, he is powerful and he is an insurance salesman.  Unlike, gun salesman.  There he has been enormously effective.  Which leads to this...

While it is too early to write the post-mortem on the Obama presidency (sadly, he can do a helluva lot more damage in his remaining three years), some very clear trends are in place to make some beginning assessments and the broad theme is that Obama will have left America much more the opposite of what his supporters presumably intended.

- The post-Obama American citizenry will be massively more armed than pre-Obama;
- A post-Obama America will have a healthcare system far deeper in disarray;
- A post-Obama America will less respected around the world, (considered weak by its enemies and unreliable by its friends);
- A post-Obama America will be more bitterly divided and contentious;
- A post-Obama America will have substantially more income inequality than pre-Obama America

That's a hefty amount of backfire.  Ponder that lefties.