The Obama era
The 44th president leaves a legacy of both striking successes and disappointing failures.
One of the most stirring images from the last inauguration day of a new president happened in 2009 not on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, but at a ball celebrating the nation’s new leader. As the first African-American president stood in a spotlight dancing with the new first lady, Beyoncé sang “At Last,” a ballad whose title carried special meaning after an inauguration many Americans thought they wouldn’t live to witness.
The words “first black president” are destined to appear in dictionaries and encyclopedias next to the name of Barack H. Obama long after he leaves office. But the history-making leader who delivered his farewell address as president earlier this week leaves behind a legacy much more dynamic than that simple phrase implies, a heritage of striking successes and deeply disappointing failures.
When he entered the Oval Office, President Obama’s most important job was nothing less than saving the nation from another Great Depression. Following the path set by his predecessor George W. Bush, he poured more than $400 billion into failing banks and automakers and implemented an $836 billion economic stimulus package. At one point in the Obama presidency, a stunning 1 in 10 Americans was unemployed. Today, the unemployment rate is less than half that at 4.7 percent, the stock market is punching into record territory and an economy that was teetering on the brink of collapse a little more than eight years ago is now, by most standards, robust. And yet, many Americans feel profoundly insecure about their own financial futures, a pessimism fueled partly by partisan anger unrelated to the economy. Nonetheless, to paraphrase another former president who led the nation through an economic boom, we are way better off now than we were eight years ago.
But the verdict on this president’s most noteworthy legislative landmark is decidedly mixed. After the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration boasted that 20 million previously uninsured Americans have signed up for health insurance. At the same time, premiums are rising by double-digits, consumers are getting clobbered by sky-high deductibles, and insurers are losing so much money many of them are bailing out of the Obamacare business. Some of the experts who’ve studied the ACA predict GOP leaders taking over in Washington will adopt reforms that basically improve Obamacare, then they’ll claim they’ve repealed and replaced it. Let’s hope so.
One of the most disappointing failures of the Obama years has been our paralyzed federal government’s inability to overhaul the nation’s immigration system. Despite his rhetoric defending immigrants, Obama will leave office with an immigration system incapable of dealing with an estimated 11 million people living in this country illegally. The outgoing president used a contentious assertion of his executive power to protect from deportation an estimated 730,000 children of undocumented immigrants. At the same time, his administration aggressively enforced the law to deport more than 2.4 million people, almost as many as his two predecessors combined.
Perhaps the strangest dichotomy of the Obama era emerged during his first year in office, when the Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to a rookie president who frankly hadn’t done anything to deserve it. The newly minted laureate would spend his entire eight-year term as a wartime president. The former U.S. senator who opposed the war in Iraq pulled U.S. troops out of that country, then slowly began sending them back. He tried to eschew conventional warfare, but he had no compunction about deadly drone attacks.
Still, it should not easily be forgotten that under President Obama’s watch and command, a U.S. special operations team hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 terror attacks. For that unmitigated military triumph, the outgoing president deserves unqualified credit.
Next week, President Obama will once again become citizen Obama, and we’ll deliberate his place in history long after President-elect Trump is sworn in. His final address Tuesday gave our contemplation an uplifting direction, reminding us that democracy isn’t in the White House, it’s in each of us and we must protect it. Yes, we can.