The morning after Barack Obama was elected, in November 2008, I put the television on in my hotel room in New York to watch the reaction. Fox News was putting on a brave face, though the sourness and anger were barely contained: but MSNBC, an avowedly liberal network, was in a state of almost convulsive ecstasy.

As dawn broke a woman, interviewed outside her run-down house somewhere upstate, shed tears while telling an interviewer what the victory meant for her. “I now know,” she sobbed, “that my house won’t be foreclosed on.” I hope she was right: but the evidence of the seven years since Obama the miracle-worker took office suggests she may have been disappointed.

America was angry after two terms of George W Bush. Though he could not stand, his party’s candidate would be punished for how Mr Bush and the lunatics around him had made America an international pariah. The financial crisis of 2008 – the collapse of Lehmann Brothers came between the conventions and polling day – was the last straw.

I had seen Obama at the primaries, and at the Democrat Convention. I had waited for him to speak intelligently and practically about the state of America and how he would put it right, but I waited in vain. The cliché at the time, which became more relevant later, was about how he campaigned in poetry but would govern in prose. Some prose can be magnificent: but not his.

His stump oratory – especially his convention speech, delivered from a preposterous mock-Grecian stage set in Denver – was vacuous. He is clever and has a way with words: but his words contained little. He entranced audiences, first in his own party – which is why he beat Hillary Clinton, arrogant and boring then as now, for the nomination – and then in the wider electorate. John McCain – old, white, Republican and with the media’s hate figure, Sarah Palin, as his running mate – didn’t have a prayer.

http://www.istylmagazine.com/news/across-the-world/how-eight-years-of-barack-obama-created-donald-trump/