Yes He Did. Judging Obama's Legacy - By Joe Klein
"My name is Barack Obama, I’m a black man and I’m president of the United States,” Obama once told his staff, as he pondered a risky domestic policy choice. “Of course I feel lucky.” This was unusual. Obama was not one for melodrama. His presidency was historic—and implausible—because of his ethnicity: his middle name was Hussein, and his last name was easily mistaken for that of Osama bin Laden. He governed through memorable crises, domestic and foreign. There were landmark successes and some notable failures. But all of these happened within the context of regular political order. Obama’s campaign promise of “hope and change” seemed pretty dramatic at the time; the expectations ran as high among liberals as they would later for Donald Trump’s populist radicalism among some conservatives. And yet, Obama was not a radical. He was an adventurous moderate at home and a cautious realist overseas. He was careful, sometimes to a fault, thoughtful, subtle, and restrained at a time when those qualities were not highly valued by the public or the media.
It is, of course, far too early to give a measured evaluation of Obama’s presidency. But intrepid journalists always try to sum things up. (I did, too, at the end of the Clinton presidency). Peter Baker’s Obama is a coffee-table book, chock-a-block with stunning photos, that rises above its genre thanks to the quality of the author’s reporting and analysis. Baker had a front-row seat for the Obama presidency, as White House correspondent for The New York Times. Jonathan Chait’s Audacity is a smart, partisan account of Obama’s domestic successes—and of the political forces, on the left and the right, that prevented a rational accounting of his achievements as they were taking place. Michael D’Antonio’s A Consequential President doesn’t break new ground, but it gives a more human cast to Obama’s presidency than Chait’s austere and policy-centric portrait.
WONK IN CHIEF
Chait does get the nature of Obama’s domestic policy right: “Many of Obama’s policies borrowed from and updated the moderate Republicanism that its old party had forsaken.” The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, took its core principles, the individual mandate and health insurance markets (called “exchanges”), from the conservative Heritage Foundation. Obama’s quiet but profound shift away from fossil fuels had its roots in the environmental policies of Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush. His essential foreign policy realism also flowed from Bush the Elder’s administration. The Obama Doctrine—“Don’t do stupid shit”—was the foreign policy equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, a welcome humility after George W. Bush’s naive idealism and military overreach. Obama’s failures, in Libya and Syria, came when he wandered away from his doctrine. Obama didn’t break up the behemoth Wall Street banks, even after they had demonstrated their tendency toward moral hazard; he chose instead to regulate them, a policy that elicited some initial prudence from the banks but will be judged fairly only in the fullness of time. His greatest success, the 2009 stimulus plan, was a carefully constructed, centrist combination of tax cuts and public works.
But D’Antonio notes that the Dow Jones industrial average dropped some 300 points the day the stimulus was passed, and Chait notes that in a 2010 Pew poll, only a third of Americans asked said they believed the program had “helped the job situation.” The inability of the public and the media to logically evaluate Obama’s programs when they were proposed, and even after they were enacted, was a striking aspect of his presidency. Was it racism, political extremism, or—perhaps worse—a steady decline in the American public’s ability to understand or care about complicated issues? The fact that the default position of the news media had moved from skepticism to cynicism—implying that every political act was a form of partisan gamesmanship—certainly played a large part.
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https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2017-06-13/yes-he-did?
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