Barack Obama’s consequential presidency draws to a close
washington — History will remember Barack Obama as America’s first Black president. But his eight years in office have throroughly shaken up America’s role in the world and the political spectrum at home.
“How’s that hopey-changey stuff working out for ya?” sneered Sarah Palin, the defeated 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee.
It was February 2010, scarcely a year after Obama swept into the White House. He had promised halcyon days of hope and change — an end to partisan gridlock and bloody expeditionary wars — but he was struggling to live up to his own hype. Obama’s first year in office saw four million Americans lose their jobs. Hundreds more lost their lives in “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans and Democrats seemed as dislocated as ever.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell set the tone at the outset: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Obama had tried to temper expectations. “We are living through difficult and uncertain times,” he said during an inaugural congressional address that surprised with its gloominess.
But his own soaring rhetoric — at times on par with Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy — had set the bar too high. He wasn’t helped by the Nobel Committee, which made him a peace laureate months after he took office.
“I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated,” he said accepting the prize in Oslo.
Fast forward to the end of Obama’s labors and the economy is in a slow but steady convalescence.
Massive fiscal stimulus and historically unparalleled monetary easing — what former Treasury secretary Tim Geithner would describe as a “wall of money” — ameliorated the crisis, but the recovery was uneven.
The threat of militant attacks continues and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rage, but with a much lighter US footprint and toll in blood.
If George W. Bush’s unilateralism had made him an international pariah, Obama’s pledge to cooperate and restore America’s reputation helped make him a rock star. —