Obama in review
He displayed great dignity, did a lot of good and made some bad mistakes
It is a mark of my esteem for President Barack Obama that I feel it presumptuous to assess his eight years as president in a newspaper column as he leaves office.
On the other hand, I have lived through 13 presidencies and served eight presidents, Democrats and Republicans, so I guess I have some right to snap at or praise our chief executives.
What you can’t get away from in looking at Mr. Obama from 10,000 feet up is his dignity in office, supported by Michelle Obama and their two daughters, whom we saw grow up in the White House. They all kept their cool and senses of humor, even as they coped with both the adulation of the many Americans who patted themselves on the back for electing an African-American as president and the racism of many Republicans in Congress and elsewhere, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who tried to block virtually every
single thing that Mr. Obama attempted to do.
The “issue” of Mr. Obama’s race is more complex than most Americans have perceived it to be. He is half white and half black, mostly raised by whites, but, under America’s strange race rules, considered to be and treated as black. The fact that some of America’s right-wing opponents made an issue of his birthplace and nationality would have been a joke if it had not become necessary for him to prove the claim false with his Hawaii birth certificate. George Romney, a 1968 presidential candidate, was born in Mexico. John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Ted Cruz was born in Canada. But, of course, they are white.
Mr. Obama did let me down in foreign affairs, especially given his campaign slogan, “Change You Can Believe In.” For me, change meant getting out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, and not getting into places such as Libya, Syria and Yemen. All six of these wars have been unnecessary to the United States, expensive and streets without joy. Mr. Obama seems to have fallen prisoner to the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about in 1961, and he will leave us even more deeply involved in meaningless conflicts than we were when he took office.
I also hoped Mr. Obama would put a full-court press on the Palestinians and Israelis to bring an end to their explosive conflict over the territories they occupy together. He pronounced brave words on the subject, but, basically, just kicked the can down the road for another eight years while the Israelis became more hardline and the Palestinians couldn’t agree on a unified negotiating position. Both, of course, continued to get heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.
One of Mr. Obama’s major achievements was to stay afloat despite eight years of racist assaults. He has shown steady dedication to his work as president. It is remarkable that analysts often observe that he has been scandal-free. Did some think he might deal crack out of the White House? Or are they contrasting his tenure with what his successor has gotten into — stiffing contractors, pursuing policies that promote residential segregation, evading taxes or ... ?
Assessing Mr. Obama’s record in domestic policy is difficult. He must get credit for improving health care. The Affordable Care Act allowed 20 million Americans to get health insurance, erased the ability of insurance providers to deny coverage to patients with preexisting conditions and ensured that parents could keep their children on family insurance polices up to the age of 26.
I wish he had demanded more when Democrats controlled Congress in the early days of his administration — such as providing single-payer coverage and taming greedy insurers — but he has undeniably moved the ball forward on health care. Republicans may be about to learn what happens when you give the American people something and then try to take it away from them.
I do fault Mr. Obama for his inability to resist the blandishments of a rich, well dug-in, tiny American minority — bankers and other Wall Street scavengers. Forced to deal with a financial crisis and major recession inherited from his predecessor, Mr. Obama had at hand substantial resources to prevent further disaster. But, instead of doing something big with a stimulus package in terms of creating jobs, he doled out a lot of it to the bankers and Wall Streeters. The Federal Reserve lined their pockets even more generously with some $3.7 trillion in “quantitative easing.”
All in all, I’ll miss the presumption that a person of integrity is in the White House trying to call the shots as best he can. Donald J. Trump has been coarse and oafish during his 10 weeks as president-elect. Like Vice President Joe Biden, I hope that Mr. Trump grows up once he takes office on Friday.