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BARACK Obama entered the White House eight years ago with an inbuilt advantage. His predecessor was George W. Bush. On any number of levels, both international and domestic, the incoming incumbent could hardly have done worse.
He leaves the presidential residence this week with another huge circumstantial plus: the identity of his successor more or less guarantees that Obama will be missed even by many of those who are unwilling to admit it right now. On the other hand, though, would it be entirely inappropriate to view Donald Trump as very much a part of Obama’s legacy? Is he not a crude symptom of the Obama administration’s inadequacies, particularly on the domestic front?
That case cannot unequivocally be sustained. After all, a crucial proportion of Trump’s support base consists of those who have consistently judged Obama by the colour of his skin rather than the content of his character. Trump himself was a leading light, so to speak, among those who questioned Obama’s birthright to be president. And all too many Americans idiotically construed him as a socialist when he was in fact faithfully abiding by the neoliberal agenda he had inherited.
Wall Street was in the doldrums when Obama acquired power. Few tears would have been shed had he allowed the wretched financiers to break their backs, and instead rescued the actual victims of the bankers’ profligacy and zeal for profiteering. Not entirely surprisingly, he chose a different course.
Most of the federal funds injected into the economy did not, naturally, trickle down to those who needed them most. Likewise, Obama’s healthcare reform extended cover to about 25 million Americans who did not previously have it, but stopped well short of qualifying as the universal coverage he had touted as a candidate.
Obama’s supporters had cause to feel abandoned.
That does not, of course, explain the hostility it stirred among those who were led to believe it went too far. Within two years of his inauguration, Obama faced an implacably obstructionist House of Representatives following huge gains by the Republican Party, and halfway through his second term the bare majority the Democrats had retained in the Senate was also lost.
In a recent interview Obama accepted partial responsibility for the congressional reverses, without explicitly acknowledging that a rather more progressive course of economic recovery from the 2007-08 crisis, clearly caused by the inevitable excesses of unregulated capitalism, may well have changed the national mood. It’s all too easy to forget that Obama’s candidacy was so successful because it acquired the trappings of a social movement.
He tapped into that mood, but failed to sustain it beyond his inauguration. His presidential victory was undoubtedly a momentous occasion, and many — but by no means all — of the expectations attached to it were unrealistic. The borderline racist Tea Party that challenged his every move could potentially have been thwarted by a counter-movement reflecting a far more decent America. And it won’t be easy to forget it was during his administration that the nation needed to be reminded that black lives matter.
The activists who facilitated Obama’s presidency had plenty of cause to feel abandoned, even betrayed. And when a similar insurgency resurfaced with the candidacy of Bernie Sanders — with its remarkable implication that many younger voters were more charmed than alarmed by the elderly candidate’s self-identification as a democratic socialist — Obama, like the Democratic establishment, chose to identify himself with his misguided first choice as secretary of state.
Hillary Clinton had been decisively outmanoeuvred by the Obama campaign in 2008. She did not distinguish herself as the new administration’s leading diplomat, and erred particularly grievously in pushing for regime change in Libya. Obama overrode his scepticism to let her have her way in that instance, but subsequently demurred when the option of direct military intervention in Syria came up.
That is all too often cited as conclusive evidence of his weakness. It may, in fact, have been one of his most judicious decisions. Syria is a terrible disaster, but would its suffering really have been ameliorated by a more robust application of American imperial might à la Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya?
Yet Obama never quite resiled from the myth of American exceptionalism. He ostensibly shut down torture, but wasn’t able to do the same to Guantanamo Bay, and scaled new heights in assassination by drones. And this week he hands over all the trappings of a rogue security state to potentially the most dangerous man in the world.
Sure, Obama has an adorable family, avoided any personal scandals, and invariably found fine words to address his nation’s woes. But eloquent oratory is never enough, and his legacy ought to have been built on stronger foundations than a hazy contrast with the depredations that preceded his tenure and those that are likely to follow.
Published in Dawn January 18th, 2017
