IS OBAMA’S REAL LEGACY TRUMP?
Two sharply different views of the president’s tenure and farewell address
David:
Barack Obama is a good man. We are going to miss him. In the years since World War II, he is the only president other than George H. W. Bush whom I’d let marry one of my daughters. But you don’t judge a president by his character alone. You judge a president by the results, and Obama’s can be summarized in two words: Donald Trump.
Trump is the creation of the fear and uncertainty that Obama allowed to fester and swell for eight years. When Obama rattled off his achievements in his farewell address Tuesday, instead of highlighting strength, he showcased their shallowness.
He cited reversing a recession, rebooting the auto industry and a historic stretch of job creation. He neglected to mention eight unprecedented years of near-zero interest rates and a Federal Reserve policy that injected trillions of dollars in paper stimulus into the U.S. economy. It produced some good results, but it also gave us historically slow economic growth and paper-thin productivity gains, and left us overdue for a recession at a time when the Fed does not have access to its most powerful policy tools.
He cited Cuba relations, the Iran deal and the killing of Osama bin Laden — an irrelevancy that has yet to bear fruit, a source of fear for many Americans and one genuine accomplishment. He neglected to mention that the world is on a hair trigger for war in East Asia, a Middle East that is aflame and spreading terror throughout the West, and a resurgent Russia that invaded a country on the edge of NATO.
He cited marriage equality, which would be a historic victory if he had achieved it through democracy instead of legal chicanery. And he cited 20 million newly insured, most of them not through real reform but a Medicaid expansion that many Americans doubt we can afford.
“America is a better and a stronger place than it was when we started,” Obama said. If Americans agreed, his legacy would not be a man whose road to the White House was paved with the fears Obama left unaddressed. Jill: The world is on a hair trigger, the Middle East aflame, Rus- sia is on the move, and it’s all Obama’s fault? What should he have done? Another dozen-year war? Another futile round of nation-building? He was elected twice expressly to avoid all that, even as the destabilizing consequences of George W. Bush’s adventurism echoed around us. I never saw any good options for Obama or America. I do see praiseworthy diplomatic achievements in the Cuba opening, the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement, and the discipline to avoid more quagmires.
I don’t blame a national epidemic of fear and uncertainty for Trump. I blame Russia, the FBI, the Clinton campaign, U.S. voters who took a flyer, and Obama’s own reserve, even timidity.
He could have been a much better salesman for policy achievements that many of us view as historic. Exhibit A is the point you raise, that many Americans think we can’t afford a Medicaid expansion to cover their fellow Americans. I don’t know if that’s what people think. But it’s a fact that countries with far less wealth manage to insure all their citizens. Of course we can afford it. To paraphrase George H.W. Bush, we have the wallet, we just need the will.
Sadly, even if Obama had been a salesman on the order of Trump, he would have been speaking into a void. Democrats ran from their own health law despite the popularity of most of its components, and donors never financed the saturation ad campaigns that might have made clear what the law did. There was no daily, months-long Americaheld-hostage offensive for Merrick Garland, Obama’s doomed Supreme Court nominee. Obama was polite about Garland. He was polite when he could have and should have sounded a massive alarm about Russian attempts to swing the election to Trump.
He was even polite in his farewell address, giving his successor a great gift by referring to him as a “freely elected president.” And he hushed the boos that provoked, even as a new intelligence dossier alleged Russia had been trying to compromise and cultivate Trump for five years.
David:
Of course it is not all his fault. But when you are the president, it is all your responsibility.
Obama did not stick to his promises to extract us from war abroad. He clumsily backed us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps doing more harm than good. Now we’re involved in Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere in Africa in an ever widening war against terrorism. Along the way, Obama replaced the Bush torture policy but with a claim that he is authorized to sign the death warrants of Americans overseas.
Nothing he did during his presidency is more responsible for this Trump moment than his demonization of Mitt Romney as a racist recklessly bent on reigniting the Cold War. It surely did as much violence to our shared reality as Trump’s unhinged 2016 campaign.
Obama has made some important steps in addressing the legiti- mate concerns of Black Lives Matter activists that are shared by all decent Americans, but he also presided over a distressing decline in race relations. His words acknowledging racial progress have been the right ones, but his fundamental message has always been that race remains the largest impediment to success by African Americans and other minorities. His farewell address was no different as he struck down the straw men that white people need to get over the idea that racism ended in the 1960s. Nobody thinks that.
He could have united an America proud that it elected an African-American interracial child of an immigrant. Instead, he missed a huge opportunity to change things for the better. History will not take that lightly.
Jill:
I recall Obama’s campaign against Romney as utterly conventional and within bounds. If there was a racial element, it was in attacks directed at Obama. He was the one who got called “the food stamp president,” who endured the whole Trump-fueled birther scam to make people believe he wasn’t born in America, whose supporters Romney dismissed as government-dependent moochers.
And if it’s true as you say that nobody thinks racism ended in the 1960s, then why is there so much opposition to continued efforts to try to right past wrongs that still haunt the lives of black Americans? For instance, lingering legacies of housing, education and policing discrimination that require our attention and in some cases remedies?
Race continues to be a huge impediment to economic progress and sometimes even to staying alive. Obama recognized that reality even as by his very presence he inflamed prejudices and fears. But I am optimistic that on race, we did indeed cross a bridge of no return with his election. It’ll just take some time and perspective to settle in.
I don’t expect to ever be more in sync with a president in my lifetime, but I recognize he is in no way compatible with your way of seeing things. Obama is our great divide.
But the Trump reckoning is coming. At least on this we can agree.