Meet the new boss, evaluate the old boss: Obama's political balance sheet

By Charles Jeanes

The Art of the Possible

Politics has been called an art, at universities it’s called science, but whatever we call it, its fascination is perennial. Aristotle simply summed up we humans as “political animals” and that seems appropriate.

With those few observations in mind, I will devote this column to an American president who has held Canadians’ attention for his eight years in office. There is even a way in which President Obama is a model of our own young Prime Minister; Justin Trudeau has come to power with the glamour of popularity and celebrity for his image and style, reminiscent of some of the compliments that were paid to Barack Obama in his early years. The glamour has worn very thin by now, for both leaders. Justin has many more years left to polish his.

On Facebook I have read several pieces about Obama. Two I will mention by name: “The Beatification of Barack Obama” and “50 reasons why Obama was a great President.” Serious journals and  newspapers also inform my perspectives here. “What went wrong?” by David Baumgart in Harpers’ magazine is an excellent starting point, and the Focus piece in the January 7 Globe and Mail is a fine study by a Canadian, Adam Radwanski. More acute writing about Obama has lately graced the pages of Rolling Stone, Atlantic, and Esquire.

A President, not a Messiah

Evaluating the presidency of Barack Obama is never going to produce a consensus. It is not about partisan politics, this inconclusive discourse on the subject of how good Obama was as president; there will never be much good said about him by Republicans, as expected.

But among people generally well-disposed toward him, as I am, it is still not a straightforward matter to decide where to place the emphasis for a fair conclusion. How good a president was Obama?

In my lifetime no president has had higher expectations placed upon him the day he won election. Obama was the first black African-American man ever to be president, and that fact released a flood of hope no other candidate could have released. He inflated that expectation with his flights of rhetoric and his slogans: Yes We Can, Change, Hope.

I recall very well an advertisement by Lululemon on the back of an Utne Reader issue, of Obama in yogic lotus pose floating above the floor. Liberals, progressives, feminists, black civil-rights activists, environmentalists, the LGBTQ community, and anyone in the centre or left of the political spectrum felt an enormous uplift of optimism when Obama won in 2008.

I remember my own feeling that this was a great good, that his victory would be a beginning for several positive trends. I knew he would bring some form of health care for Americans that might bring the USA into some harmony with the rest of the Western world in providing healthcare services for the poorest Americans. I was sure he would end American intervention in Iraq and downsize its war in Afghanistan. I believed he would close Guantanamo.

Soon he had won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2008. Then he dealt with the Wall St. meltdown, saving corporations and banks with trillions of dollars, and sending no one to jail, while not re-regulating the markets as strictly as the situation demanded. From the reading I have done, I am left with the rather uncomfortable conclusion that his solutions were mere band-aids, and the same kind of fraudulent market games that crashed the world economy in 2008 can, and will, do so again. But the next time, the solutions will not be as effective as the quick fix Obama and other leaders applied to the 2008-09 crash by the massive infusions of cash charged against national public debt.

From this point on, I began to doubt this messiah could ever deliver on the promises he held out for fulfilment.

Wall Street, capitalism, and “compromise”

Obama had such enormous opportunity in the collapse of the economy caused by Wall Street’s market manipulations that I for one expected him to make significant and radical transformations in American capitalism. He did not.

No one has missed the fact of his remarkable moderation in easing the way out of the Great Recession for the capitalists of the economy. America has apparently recovered from that collapse in better fashion than Europe, all agree. Steady job growth and deficit reduction are pluses in Obama’s legacy. Yet it is clear he might have let some corporations and banks face the consequences of their insane risk-taking, and allow them to fail. He might have prosecuted some bankers and speculators for their criminal schemes to make money out of illusory paper assets. Obama is a moderate, a natural compromiser who wants to find the middle way, get the best out of everyone, and punish no one.

There are several accounts of how Obama dealt with the men who caused the crash. The one I find compelling is in the pages of Thomas Frank, author of the book Listen, Liberal. The quotation I recall clearly is Obama telling the most powerful men in several banks and corporations that “I am the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” And he promised them to be co-operative with them, to work with them, not to punish but to salvage.

Thus, the once-in-a-century chance handed to him to fundamentally re-structure the economy and make it more fair in distributing wealth to all classes, was not taken by Obama. Obama’s moderation in the crisis is astonishing, to me. Capitalism-as-usual motors on, the blemishes on its record already fading from memory.

Obama poured money in at the top of the pyramid, hoping the men at that peak would save the economy and the money would trickle down to average workers as new jobs. He also gave government offices of some importance to men who were themselves not blameless for policies that contributed to the meltdown. The trillions of dollars added to the US public debt will burden Americans for generations to come, so that the giants of the economy could be saved by loans and bail-outs. Americans who lost all their invested savings, their homes when their mortgages defaulted, their pensions which lost all value – these people were not saved by Obama’s actions. Their money is gone, period. Many tens of thousands of people now will postpone retirement due to these losses. Houses without owners now litter parts of the American landscape.

The recovery has been unable to replace the jobs that disappeared in 2009 with jobs of equal earnings potential, and precarious employment is the new normal. A jobless recovery is not much of a recovery, yet the stock markets have shot up to record levels since this crash. The Dow Jones is likely to reach 20,000 this year. That used to be unthinkable. What the Dow says has little relevance to the security of real working Americans.

Foreign Policy, Guns, Healthcare: did he have other choices?

On foreign policy, there is so much to say and so much already written that I will rein in my comments. Everyone notes that Obama has used drone strikes to kill jihadis and other labelled terrorist leaders and soldiers with insufficient regard for the collateral deaths of hundreds (maybe thousands) of civilians; more drones were used by him than by Bush and Clinton combined.

His lack of action in Syrian and I. S. crises has been savaged by many critics, allowing Putin and Assad to begin winning the civil war, yet I agree that the diplomatic and military options were never obvious for alternative action. He admits his Libyan policy was disastrous; why did he lack the foresight to know that, and to oppose Hilary’s hawkish aggression? Why did he not take the golden opportunity presented by a general’s thorough review in 2009 to withdraw from Afghanistan? And why did he win the Nobel Peace Prize?

Obama’s feeble foreign-policy record reminds me of a great liberal American president, Lyndon Johnson, whose domestic policies were admirable in several ways but whose war policy in Viet Nam obliterated his better legislation from the memory of his single term in office. Obama will be remembered as the leader in the time of the Syrian civil-war and I.S. challenges, who did not do much to prevent death and destruction over a wide area of the Middle East.

Under Obama, the rate of occurrence of gunmen running amok and killing people in random attacks rose. Each time, he spoke eloquently about the need to limit guns in America, and each time US gun laws remained lax to a degree we in Canada, or citizens of Europe, find inexplicable. Blame the Republicans? Maybe that is enough. But Obama had a Democrat majority in the first two years of his first term and did not vigorously pursue gun control legislation.

His signature legacy was to be Obamacare, but it is clear as I write this that the new president will repeal that initiative with the enthusiastic support of the Republican majorities in Senate and House. The plan was hobbled by the private-insurance industry from the start, ensuring Obama could not push through a “public option/ single payer” process, yet 20 million Americans now have healthcare due to Obama who lacked it before.

Is it Obama’s fault that his plan will be scrapped? That is an unfair conclusion. In this matter, I see that he tried diligently to find support for the plan from moderate Republicans, but none of them would stand up for the essential benevolence of this project. Even Mitt Romney, who as governor of a state had brought in a decent healthcare bill, would not renounce the Republican war on Obamacare. Americans themselves will have to force their rulers to provide a better system. With far-right zealots like the Tea Party faction ready to denounce anything that seems like Big Government, it seems very improbable that Republicans will bring a better healthcare system into being in the USA.

The “character issue”: Obama as a person and its effect on his actions

Some of the best writing about Obama has been done by journalists who dig deeply into his past as a young community organizer in the inner city of Chicago, interviewing people who knew the man who would be president when he was just beginning his political career. Their descriptions of him frequently employ phrases such as “rational and pragmatic” and “cool-tempered” and “middle-of-the-road.” The young man was idealistic and optimistic, but he was not ideological or doctrinaire, people who knew him agree. He believed firmly in the essential decency of people active in political affairs, with whom he could surely always find shared American values and consensus about what is the common good. He wanted to find the good in his opponents and bring them to see how they could work together on issues they might disagree about.

This optimism, about the good in those who opposed his perspectives, has stayed with Obama throughout his presidency. His choice of Hilary Clinton to be his Secretary of State in his first term astounded me. Her campaign against him for the Democratic nomination had not been fought cleanly, by obvious measures. Yet Obama saw merit in having a cabinet of people who were established political figures with known reputations for positions at odds with some of his stances. No ideologues, just pragmatists and realists, seemed to be what he wanted. And he would preside over them, with his cool, rational and measured eloquence, his dignitas, his intelligence, humour and grace – qualities he had developed to a high pitch over the course of his career.

When Bill Clinton was President, journalists often wrote and commented on what they called his “character issue” – meaning, Clinton had a defective character, especially around his belief in his charm and his weakness for using his power to seduce women. No one has ever criticized Obama for his weak character. His term in office have been exemplary for lack of scandals and his personal conduct, physical fitness, his style, his oratory, and his wonderful social poise. His family and marital life brought him great credit.

Character being so clearly significant when we evaluate a president, we must bear character in mind when we attempt to criticize Obama for not acting in ways that were simply at odds with who he is. Not being passionate in public about a cause, not showing anger, emphasizing the rational and pragmatic sides of his policies over emotive and idealistic angles, are true to his established patterns. The genuine Obama is a temperate, moderate, man.

This is a man who would rather not be aggressive but persuasive. When people who knew him in his youth recall his early poise, some of them are mildly critical that Obama so rarely showed emotional reaction to setbacks or to unethical conduct by his opponents. He set his thermostat at “cool” and would not allow himself to get fired up in the face of unpleasant pushback from his foes. Believing in their essential decency, Obama didn’t get nasty with any of his political enemies. This is admirable in anyone, but in politics perhaps there are times when being angry and showing it are assets, not liabilities. When Obama recalls that he was angry at Wall St. tycoons in 2009, and says “I was angry” in interviews today, it lacks a punch, because we did not see that anger then. Nor have we seen him be angry when gun-control legislation failed, although he says this issue matters a lot to him.

Racism: more eruptions with a black President than with a white one

It cannot escape notice that while Americans had elected a black African-American President, they let their latent racist instincts off the leash. The journalist and writer with a reputation for “big thinking,” Malcolm Gladwell, explains American behaviour with reference to research by psychologists. People who have just done something recognizably positive, moral, ethical, are more likely to “give themselves permission” to do something less admirable in the immediate aftermath of doing good. So Americans, having elected their first black President, decided collectively that they had permission to reveal the ugly racist underside of US society under his presidency.

Accept that explanation or not, one must feel appalled to have witnessed the kind of brutality and unfairness meted out by American police to the black communities of the USA over the years of Obama’s leadership. Young black men assert over and over that they must remember to be very, very vigilant around police or face predictable consequences no other minority encounters. Young men of “Muslim” appearance are beginning to understand the danger.

What could Obama do about that? Nothing. History has a weight too heavy for one president to lift the burden of racist attitudes from the USA.

If it is a substantial argument, that Donald Trump became President on a wave of support from angry white American males, and a significant number of white American females as well – a “whitelash” in the words of a black journalist – then Obama “caused” this reactionary election result simply by his colour.

It has now been close to two centuries that America completed its civil war wherein the issue of black chattel slavery was the crucial cause. The poison of two-and-a-half centuries of slavery since the origin of the colonies still infects the United States. The Civil War did not drain the toxicity from slavery, only transformed it.

A multi-racial, multi-cultural, democratic society within a single nation-state is of course what Canada is attempting to build on liberal principles. Canada has its own shameful history where aboriginal people are concerned, but that provides insufficient insight for us when we look at America’s racial challenge.

How much time is required for the USA to cure itself of this pathology? There are reasons to say the race problem will never be entirely resolved, there will only be periods when it is quiescent before the next eruption. That is a future too dark for my prognostications.

Conclusion: the Man, but not the Moment

Barack Obama deserves a respected place in American history, but as he himself has said, he is not on the level of Lincoln or FDR. He failed to make headway in his own self-set task of making America feel less divided, and the legacy of a Trump presidency is a sad reflection on how deeply scarred the USA still is despite Obama’s efforts to raise Americans’ belief in one common good.

It was certainly time for America to prove its own idealist image is real, by putting supreme power in the hands of a black African-American. And Obama performed the role with marvellous grace and dignity, no argument allowed. He was the man for the job.

But the right Man at the wrong Moment must be fatally shackled, and that is what happened to Obama. I myself, without subscribing to a conspiracy model of how American power is exercised, believe that the timing of the Wall St. meltdown to coincide with the moment Obama took power, was not accidental.

He began his term with an economic crisis the dimensions of which only Roosevelt had faced in 1932, and Obama handled it as well as any leader anywhere else in the major economies of the Western world in our time. But this basic crisis, this trembling starting-point, meant his presidency had a foundation of economic insecurity and anxiety upon which all his other ambitions for American society must be grounded. I believe that the failure of the so-called “recovery” from the 2008-09 Recession fatally compromised much of the agenda Obama wished to carry.

Climate change and fearsome weather events have also continually erupted into public consciousness and added to the ambiance of fear and insecurity that is our post-modern condition. War in Syria, the explosive, barbaric violence of I.S., the sick behaviour of individuals with guns and bombs around the world – these have been the headlines of the eight years Obama has presided over the world’s only superpower.

The Moment was awful for anyone exercising power, but Obama had a unique burden to bear in his role. Angela Merkel seems still to be well-regarded, and our own Justin Trudeau still puts a glow in the eyes of “progressives” in the Westernized world beyond Canada, but overall this is a bad time to be a liberal leader. The likes of Putin, Turkey's Erdogan, the Philippines’ president Duterte, Syria’s Assad, and so forth, are not the kind of leaders I wish to see arising, but they are.

Barack Obama deserves a large measure of respect, empathy, and appreciation for the work he accomplished and the efforts he made, notwithstanding the criticisms I levelled at his presidency in this column. He is a political giant among the inept dwarves who were president before him, and stands in starkest contrast to the one following.