HOW WILL HISTORY JUDGE OBAMA?
“Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers.” Thus began a fawning profile of Barack Obama written just before he was elected president in 2008, said John Kass in the Chicago Tribune. It was just one of many articles that portrayed him as a “political messiah” who would transform America. No politician could live up to such expectations; but who’d have guessed that Obama would fall quite so short? He leaves office with his party “in absolute tatters”. As for his signature domestic achievements, said The Wall Street Journal, they look all too “evanescent”. His health care overhaul is facing wholesale repeal, as are his executive actions on climate change and immigration. From his first day in office, Obama arrogantly pursued a partisan progressive agenda opposed by half the country, without taking on the “hard work of building political consensus”. In doing so, he built much of his legacy “on sand”.
“Obama leaves behind a trail of failure and disappointment,” agreed Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. When he was elected, 63% of Americans considered themselves middle class. Seven years later, that number had dropped to 51%. Under the watch of the “healer-in-chief”, millions have fallen below the poverty line, and the country has become more bitterly divided: a majority of both whites and blacks believe that race relations have deteriorated over the past eight years. Obama’s foreign policy legacy is even worse. “In his rush to pull US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, he created a power vacuum into which terror networks expanded and the Taliban revived.” In Syria, meanwhile, Obama sat on his hands as the uprising against Bashar al-assad “metastasised” into a slaughter. Obama came to office determined not to repeat the foreign policy mistakes of his predecessor, George W. Bush, but his “passivity” only emboldened the world’s dictators.
Historians are more likely to reach a kinder verdict, said Robert Reed, also in the Chicago Tribune. Let us not forget that when the 44th president entered the Oval Office in 2009, the US economy was on the brink of collapse: monthly job losses were averaging a staggering 772,000. Obama’s calm optimism steadied a frightened nation, and his auto industry bailout and $800bn stimulus package averted disaster. Since then, Obama has presided over 75 consecutive months of job gains, and unemployment has plunged from 10% to 4.7%, with 11.3 million jobs created. In fact, Obama is leaving his Republican successor “a pretty impressive Inauguration Day present: a strong, functional US economy”.
“For a president who allegedly accomplished little”, said Katha Pollitt in The Nation, Obama actually “did a lot”. Quite apart from his rescue of the economy and his health care reforms – likely to live on in some adapted form – he appointed two “excellent” women to the Supreme Court, regulated for-profit education, thawed relations with Cuba, and reached a nuclear deal with Iran. And he did it all while remaining a dignified, empathetic human being and an admirable family man. “He gave us eight years free of scandal and drama: no interns, no corruption, no jobs handed out to outrageously unqualified people.” He brought a sense of purpose to the office. Obama was also “an orator for the ages”, said Charles M. Blow in The New York Times. We’ve come to take his eloquence for granted, but he has a rare skill for parsing delicate issues such as race. When “Trump’s whirlwind of scandal, boorishness and vindictiveness barrels into Washington”, we will soon feel the loss of Obama’s grace and measured intelligence.