The Obama Administration: An Obituary

Now that we are in the last day of the Obama Administration, it seems like time to review his presidency in full, especially since it’s likely that after January 20, Trump will end up selling the Internet to the Russian FSB.

Some have argued that the president’s biggest mistake was using up all his political capital to push the Affordable Care Act, but I think that probably would have been an issue anyway, given the costs of healthcare to the private sector, and I think Obama was gambling on the long term. As both liberals and their right-wing critics know, once a bill becomes law, it is almost never repealed, expired, or gotten rid of, even when it is flawed and unpopular. In this case, the ACA is not merely flawed and unpopular, but flawed, unpopular, and the only thing allowing a bunch of high-risk patients to get medical coverage when previously they could not.

There are some other areas where people have found flaws with the president’s policies and others where he gets probably more credit than he is due. These opinions vary mainly on one’s political persuasion. My opinion, which I think will be shared by some professional analysts, is that as a President, Barack Obama was good but could have been better, and in a couple cases was not only disappointing but created consequences that helped lead to a rather dire situation in both diplomacy and domestic politics.

It comes down to two examples, since in both cases, the fault is an assumption – possibly a naive assumption – that challenges have no meaning, whether offered against you or whether made by you.

The first challenge: During this administration, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was famously quoted as saying “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for Barack Obama to be a one-term president.” Even this matter has a certain context that we need to examine in retrospect. Contrary to popular belief, McConnell didn’t make his statement on “Day One” of the Obama presidency, but just before the 2010 midterms when the Democrats lost their Congressional majority.

Specifically, a Washington Post article examining the quote also mentioned a speech McConnell gave after the 2010 midterms, where he said: “Over the past week, some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office. But the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill; to end the bailouts; cut spending; and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things it is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things. We can hope the President will start listening to the electorate after Tuesday’s election. But we can’t plan on it. And it would be foolish to expect that Republicans will be able to completely reverse the damage Democrats have done as long as a Democrat holds the veto pen.”

Mitch McConnell has no ties to Vladimir Putin or Bashir al-Assad. Whatever you may think of him, he is an American, raised within the American political system to be a reasonable politician. Or at least he was. But then he decided to ride the tiger of the Tea Party and Trumpism, which were direct reactions to Barack Obama being president (remember, Donald Trump was one of the first celebrity ‘birthers’ demanding Obama’s birth certificate, even before running for president). And that meant that McConnell had to gauge whether being unreasonable was going to pay off. Clearly that was what the “base” wanted. But to work, that strategy had to be unchallenged by the opposition. It paid off because the Democrats under Obama’s leadership did not grasp how serious Republicans were about challenging the Obama Administration, even as they were losing the Congressional seats they needed to prevent Republican obstructionism. Indeed, gaining the majority was the major step the Republicans needed to get to where they are now. They did not actually make Obama a one term president. But if their goal was to undo what President Obama did, they had to get a Republican to replace him. It just ended up taking two terms.

When your opponent tells you what he’s going to do, take him seriously. McConnell and the Republicans didn’t actually say they wanted to stop Obama on “Day One.” But they were able to make that statement when they got a Congressional majority two years into Obama’s eight-year term. At that point, Democrats knew that Republicans were basing their campaigns on repealing Obamacare and other Obama initiatives, and that this required Democrats to lose seats in addition to the White House. That meant the Democrats had six years and three Congressional elections to react. And in response, Democrats under Obama ended up losing more House seats under Obama than under any president since Harry Truman. Moreover, between 2008 and 2015, the Democrats ended up losing a total of 10 percent of their seats in the US Senate, 19 percent of their seats in the House of Representatives, 20 percent of their strength in state legislatures AND almost 36 percent of their state governors.

Why was this, exactly? Liberals love to blame the gerrymandering of states by Republican legislatures, but this is blanking out the point that Republicans needed to win a majority in state governments to do that in the first place. A large part of this is that state populations in the Midwest and the former industrial areas of the country are becoming less Democratic and more Republican. These same areas used to be very important bases for the Democratic Party’s union support, but union jobs are not as common as they were in previous decades, which gets into the other matter that the “worker’s” party is not doing a good job of protecting workers. (Incidentally, Democrats, the fact that you didn’t get votes in the middle of the country during the last election is for the same reason you were losing seats in the previous midterm elections, independently of whether the Electoral College exists or not.) In any event, by the point of McConnell’s declaration, if not much earlier (say, when the Republicans voted to a man to reject Obama’s stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act), Obama and the Democrats should have realized that their old concepts of bipartisan compromise were not going to apply and they had to do things themselves, which ultimately means they needed to keep and get more seats in Congress. As any NFL fan will tell you, you could have the greatest quarterback in the world and it won’t matter if his offensive line is tissue paper and he keeps getting sacked.

The other challenge was the one Obama made himself and failed to back up. On August 20, 2012, President Obama commented on the civil war in Syria and Bashar al-Assad’s oppression of his own people, specifically saying, “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.” Well, in 2013, the Administration reported that Assad had used sarin gas on its own people, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel also said “We still have uncertainties about what was used, what kind of chemicals was used, where it was used, who used it.”  In other words, Obama drew a red line against Assad and allowed him to cross it without consequences.

In his defense, Obama probably could not have done much, given the depletion of our military under George W. Bush and the likelihood that Republican obstructionism would extend even to the president’s role as Commander in Chief. But in that case, he didn’t have to make a statement that would only weaken American “soft power” knowing that it was unlikely that hard power would back it up. Especially given that even now, people disregard the consequences of the Administration’s passivity in the conflict. Syria is now the main source of the wave of Arabic-speaking refugees that move primarily through NATO allies Greece and Turkey into the central European Union countries such as Germany, in such large numbers that allegedly liberal countries are obliged to deal with their own xenophobia as well as the practical limits of their public support systems. This instability in the center of the NATO alliance strengthens the position of Russia, which along with its ally Iran is the primary support for the Assad regime. That is probably not a coincidence. At least it doesn’t seem so to me, although it seemed to be a surprise to the Administration, given that it took revelations of Russian spying against Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign for Obama to increase sanctions and take action against Russian diplomats in this country- after Clinton had already lost the election. So again we have a case where the Obama Administration didn’t seriously consider the challenge against it until it was directly damaged, and even then the response was too little, and way too late.

I have often thought of Obama as a conservative. Not in the modern “we hate abortion and gays” sense of the political alignment, but in the generic sense of the word, referring to someone who plays it safe and doesn’t try to change institutional norms too much except where warranted. Overall, I consider that one of his good points. He was not some fatigue-wearing socialist trying to take everybody’s guns. He was the reasonable, decent person who was exactly what America needed at this point in its history. But that temperamental conservatism also was a weakness in that he did not challenge the institutions even when such challenge was warranted, for example in not taking punitive measures against Wall Street’s destructive financial practices at a point when that would have been popular with liberals AND conservatives.

Barack Obama was a good president, but in large measure the Obama Administration is a giant missed opportunity. This even considering that he was dealing with a Republican Party caught in a downward spiral of hatred toward him in particular, and as we now see, has no idea of how to do things better than the Democrats, because hate is all they have. But when Democrats are the only party with a policy, it still has to be judged on its own merits, and if it fails, it cannot be expected to prevail, whether an alternative exists or not. However the need to judge the relative merits of the Democratic Party seems to undermine the need to judge the objective merits of the Democratic Party, at least as far as its partisans are concerned. In other words, we can see where the Republican Party has undermined the system but liberals aren’t willing to judge where Democrats have undermined it. I intend to address this in my next post.

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