The Obama legacy
Americans did not have to wait for the inauguration of their 45th president to fully grasp what they are losing with the departure of the 44th. President Obama’s farewell address on Tuesday night highlighted far more than his considerable policy accomplishments. He once again demonstrated the depth and dignity that has remained resolute through his eight years in office, through the frustrations of partisan gridlock, the futility of entrenched bureaucracies and the horror of mass casualties from war, terrorism or gun madness.
He was grayer and wiser than the 2008 candidate whose campaign of “hope and change” carried the aura of endless possibility. Yet, still, his idealism was intact, his ability to inspire by appealing to the angels of our nature was threaded throughout the narrative. His were words to soothe the angst of a nation that had just endured one of the meanest and most dispiriting presidential campaigns in modern times.
That the Obama way was absent in the 2016 election does not mean that the example he set would not resonate in the quality and character of Americans called to public service long after he leaves office.
“Let me tell you, this generation coming up — unselfish, altruistic, creative, patriotic — I’ve seen you in every corner of the country,” Obama said in his Chicago speech. “You believe in a fair, and just, and inclusive America. You know that constant change has been America’s hallmark, that it’s not something to fear but something to embrace. You are willing to carry this hard work of democracy forward. You’ll soon outnumber all of
us, and I believe as a result the future is in good hands.”
Even the harshest of Obama’s policy critics must concede that he occupied the Oval Office with the level of uncommon grace and rectitude that Americans desire in a president. In modern times, second terms have too often been mired in drift, scandal or both. President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace after Watergate, President Ronald Reagan was tainted by the Iran-Contra scandal, and Bill Clinton became the first president to be impeached since Andrew Johnson after the Civil War.
By contrast, Obama’s tenure was free of significant scandal. He set a tone of seriousness and propriety that pervaded all levels of his administration. No one could accuse the Obama White House of a second-term malaise. If anything, the criticism about Obama is that he became too assertive, particularly in employing his executive authority to act on critical issues — such as immigration and climate change — where Congress refused to act.
Any analysis of the Obama presidency must begin with the context of the mess he inherited in January 2009. The United States was entangled in two foreign wars and its economy was hemorrhaging jobs and drenched in desperation just months after its pillar institutions and systems began to collapse.
As Obama noted in his farewell address, the underpinnings of the economy are much stronger today, even as the recovery has not been experienced evenly among the nation’s regions, business sectors and individual workers. Overall, the economy is growing. “Wages, incomes, home values and retirement accounts are all rising again,” the president said. “Poverty is falling again. The wealthy are paying a fairer share of taxes even as the stock market shatters records. The unemployment rate is near a 10-year low. ”
Some of Obama’s economic policies are likely to come under assault in the days ahead, with Donald Trump in the
White House and Republicans in control of the House and Senate. One of the biggest targets of the new administration and its allies on Capitol Hill will be the Affordable Care Act, the expansion of government-subsidized health care signed by Obama in March 2010. Candidate Trump routinely derided it as a disaster, citing the huge jump in premium increases in certain states announced in 2016. It’s not perfect, but it has extended coverage to 20 million Americans and — as Obama pointedly observed — health care costs are rising at the slowest rate in a half century.
Trump has assured Americans that he would maintain some of the most popular elements of the law: the guarantee of coverage for people with preexisting conditions and the ability of young adults to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26. Those also happen to be two of the more expensive elements of the complex law GOP critics mocked as “Obamacare,” a term the president ultimately embraced for his signature domestic accomplishment. Also well received has been Obamacare’s ban on lifetime limits in health policies. The daunting challenge for Trump and the Republicans vowing to “repeal and replace” it will be how to knock out the subsidies, taxes and mandates they deplore without depriving modest-wage American workers of the long-sought health security they gained through the act.
Obama’s adversaries will point to the fact that his health care overhaul passed without a single Republican vote as evidence of his hubris and aloofness. His admirers will mark it as a measure of his resolve and agility against partisan resistance. Historians will no doubt assess its resilience against the newly empowered Republican capital in their scorecards on the impact of the Obama presidency.
Similarly, on foreign policy, the chapters to be written will extend a reflection, for better or for worse, on President Obama’s global actions. His daring 2011 decision to strike a Pakistan compound suspected of housing Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, offered a milepost of justice for a proud nation whose sense of post-Cold-War comfort had been shattered by terrorism. However, it did not end the threat of fanaticism, as seen by the attacks here, in Europe and elsewhere. The emergence of the Islamic State, especially in Syria and Iraq, remains an elusive and potentially lethal threat to the U.S. and its allies.
No assessment of the Obama presidency is complete without acknowledging his burden, and opportunity, as the first black president in a nation whose history is shaped by divisions over the human indignities of slavery, segregation and inequality. As a candidate and then as a president, Obama seized those teachable moments to help Americans respect their differences and embrace their commonality. His 2008 Philadelphia speech in the face of controversy over the inflammatory rhetoric of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright will go down as one of the most resonant in modern times in explaining the acceptance of love and conflict in faith and family. His 2012 comments about the senseless shooting of young Trayvon Martin (“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”) put the tragedy in perspective for all parents. Too many times, he had to eulogize people killed by gun violence, as in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. America looked to their president to find the right balance of rage and empathy at the fatal encounters between police officers and the communities they were sworn to serve and protect.
He never failed to deliver the pitchperfect tone.
We disagreed with President Obama on multiple issues. One was his failure to establish “the most transparent administration” in history. His fell well short, with its record number of prosecutions against whistle-blowers and his stubborn refusals to grant reasonable access to his political fundraisers, including some in San Francisco. We had hoped he would find common ground with Republicans to take the difficult but essential steps to assure the solvency of Social Security and Medicare for future generations. We faulted him in our 2012 re-election endorsement for his inattention to climate change; in his second term, he became a global leader on the issue. His executive actions have helped put this nation on a course to seriously take on the challenge of our times, if only the new president and Republican Congress will not undo this covenant for future generations.
This was a presidency that made America proud. That it accomplished only a modest fraction of its aspirations is not a sign of failure, but a reflection of its audacious ambition and a measure of the power of the checks and balances in our system when an opposition party controls one, if not two, of the other branches of government.
The Obama presidency ends, as it began, endowed with idealism and enshrined with the certitude that public service is a noble calling. The United States of America needed this presidency: for calming an economy that was on the brink of abyss, for restraining the instinct that military force could bend the world toward our will and values, for bringing an aura of class and competency to the White House.
If only President Obama could bequeath these attributes to his successor, the future could be as productive as the past eight years.