The lost promise of the Obama presidency
Photo: Darren Hauck / Getty Images
He
always had style. Even his sternest critics might concede that. Barack
Obama’s final speech as president of the United States of America was a
microcosm of his presidency: elegant and intelligent but still leaving
you wanting just a little more.
Presidencies
are a question of context, however. The Obama years might easily –
perhaps too easily – now be seen as an eight year interregnum between
disaster and folly. George W Bush, a decent but incurious man too secure
in his own certainty, was over-matched by the presidency; Donald J
Trump has not yet given any indication he’s remotely ready for the job
with which he is, god help us all, entrusted. If you measure Obama
against his predecessor and successor, he begins to look like Gulliver
in Lilliput.
Context
matters too. Bush’s presidency was lost in the sands of Mesopotamia and,
then, in a final flourish bequeathed the gravest economic crisis in
half a century to his successor. America was in a deep funk and an even
deeper hole when Obama assumed office. Digging out would take time and
prove an expensive business, burning through Obama’s political capital
before he had a chance to spend it on his own ambitions.
And yet,
there were achievements too. Obama was elected on a promise to end
America’s participation in the war in Iraq. He did that. He was elected
on a promise to fix, or at least stabilise, a crippled economy. He did
that too, even if the Obama years have never been as fat-filled as
either he or the American people desired.
Median wages
have stagnated and the American middle-class, perhaps for the first
time, peered into the future and saw a less prosperous future for their
children’s generation. Still, a deep and painful recession did not
become a depression on Obama’s watch and that should count for
something.
Even so, the
lost promise of Obama’s presidency may be measured by the fact that,
despite orchestrating a bail-out that “saved” America’s automobile
industry, Hillary Clinton failed to win Michigan last November.
Gratitude has a shorter than ever half-life these days.
But the
sense the people of Michigan should be grateful to their president was,
in its way, also part of the Obama problem. Obama, always aloof, never
bothered to hide his conviction that, on any subject in any room, he was
likely to be the smartest man present.
His
presidency was perfumed by the idea the American people were lucky to be
led by Barack Hussain Obama. He was the special one. They should be
grateful for the service of this chosen man.
Obama could
reasonably point to the fact he was consistently opposed by a Republican
congress that had no intention of compromising with their president.
Indeed, trench warfare began in Congress as soon as Obama swore his oath
of office. Nevertheless, he often seemed puzzled, even affronted, by
the fact some people dared to take a different view from him.
For all his
talk of being a unifying president – a bridge between red and blue
America – he never quite appeared to appreciate that not all opposition
to his proposals was self-serving or illegitimate. His White House often
operated on the presumption that if only his unreasonable critics
ceased being so damn unreasonable then matters would be easily and
better arranged.
The wages of
expectation are paid in disappointment. That, too, is one lesson to be
drawn from Obama’s presidency. The world – or at least most of it –
celebrated his victory, seeing the election of America’s first black
president as a magnificently symbolic repudiation of the Bush years.
No president
in living memory, not even Kennedy, arrived with so much hype. Some of
this, it must be said, had been encouraged by the candidate himself. His
election, he once suggested, would be recalled as the moment the
world’s oceans ceased rising. Even allowing for the conventions of
outlandish campaign exaggeration this was strong, but also risible,
stuff.
Reality is a
stubborn mistress, however, and the excitement which accompanied Obama
on his journey to the White House became a burden. One made heavier
still by the ludicrous and premature award of a Nobel peace prize before
he had barely begun his work. If you are led to expect $100 you will be
disappointed to receive just $50. Obama never quite managed to balance
results with expectations.
Even so,
there were results. Obamacare, his flagship domestic legislation, was a
startling political achievement. Every president since Richard Nixon had
tried to expand the United States’ healthcare system so it might cover
every citizen. All of them failed. But Obama did it.
The
permanence of this achievement, however, remains in doubt as the new
Republican administration promises to repeal and replace Obamacare. By
doing so, they will wipe Obama from history. It will almost be as though
the new Republican administration will declare Obama a “non-president”.
Given the
manner in which conservatives sought to strip away Obama’s legitimacy
from the outset, this would be a grimly appropriate conclusion to his
time in office. Trump, who rose to political prominence on the back of
wholly unfounded assertions that Obama was not a natural born American
citizen, is the anti-Obama in every imaginable way. Obama’s eight years
in office were remarkably scandal-free; it is not obvious anyone will be
able to say the same about his successor’s tenure.
There were
other achievements, too. Only time will tell if the opening to Cuba and
the nuclear deal brokered with Iran will hold; but if it does Obama’s
often-maligned foreign policy may yet be reconsidered. Elsewhere in the
Middle East, Obama’s approach was cold-blooded to the point it began to
freeze. Accepting that the American people had no desire for fresh
foreign entanglements, he adopted a hands-off approach to Syria’s civil
wars.
If Saudi
Arabia and Iran wished to conduct a proxy war in Syria then so be it;
let them exhaust themselves there, so long as the killing was contained
and did not spread across the region. The audacity of hope was tempered
by a chilly realism.
That was
Obama’s style, however. He was a president unusually aware of
trade-offs. You never get everything you want, hard choices cannot be
avoided, but every choice you make spawns a reaction you cannot
necessarily control. No wonder policy wonks and the guardians of civic
virtue loved him.
If Obama was
just another white guy, just a regular president of the usual sort, his
record in office would be more easily measured. A president who did
some good things and some less good things. But the point of Obama, of
course, was that he was not just a regular president of the usual sort.
That was why, and how, he was able to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2008.
Being black trumped being a woman in the race to make history.
His election
was supposed to be a watershed; a closing of one chapter and the
opening of another. Symbols matter but they’re not enough. Obama knew –
and often said – that electing a black president was something large but
not enough to draw a final line under America’s long and painful racial
history. Indeed, it unavoidably drew attention to that history. At
least part of Trump’s victory last November can be understood as a white
backlash against the horror of a black president.
But if you
only appreciate what you had when it’s gone then Barack Obama’s eight
years in office are already looking better than ever. He signed off by
asking Americans to remember they are the agents and creators of their
present circumstances – and their future. The buck stops at the White
House but citizens have duties too. Not the least of which, right now,
is to remember Benjamin Franklin’s warning: “A republic, if you can keep
it”.
Alex Massie is a political commentator
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