As A Lifelong Democrat... Are You Satisfied With The "Hope And Change" That Was Promised In 2008 ???

[frazzled]

16. When I look back on it ...

I am actually rather amazed that despite the incredible obstacles he's faced--from the recession and two wars he inherited to the most intransigent Republican obstructionism I've ever witnessed--that some of the biggest things have been accomplished of any administration since Johnson's.

And in many ways, one might liken this administration in many ways to Johnson's (except for the obstructionism--Johnson had huge majorities). The Affordable Care Act and the civil rights advances in gay rights are very parallel to what Johnson did with Medicare and the Civil Rights Act. I can think of nothing in the Carter or Clinton administrations that even begins to match the magnitude of these two things alone. Indeed, nothing of real and lasting import, I'm afraid to say, really came out of those administrations, much as I liked both presidents.

Like Johnson, however, Obama has had failures and painful mistakes: Johnson in escalating the Vietnam War; Obama in failing to rein in the security apparatus sufficiently (though it has been reined in in many ways from the initial Bush policies). I saw a documentary on the 1960s recently that included footage of the daily WH protesters yelling "Hey Hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today!!" And it reminded me how absolutely hated Johnson was by the left. None of the rest of it mattered at the time, and perhaps rightly so. Obama's transgressions seem to pale compared to the errors of Vietnam and the toll in human life it took. But I see them both as somewhat tragic figures. Presidents end up owning both the things they have done and the things as well that simply occurred during their time in office. Obama certainly didn't create or cause income inequality, which has been in the works for decades, but because it has reached its peak under his administration, he will have to own some of that, too.

But in the end I think history will treat both Johnson and Obama as among the important presidents of the postwar era. And of course, his legacy is not yet completed. There are three more years ... and if he were to succeed in bringing Iran back into the circle of nations, it will be huge.

We carp, we complain: but this president brought us back from the brink of a Depression, fought to enact the first universal health care legislation in the nation's history (which, hopefully, when tweaked and improved over the next decade or so, will be seen as a true milestone), has accomplished real and lasting legislation in women's rights and gay rights, has been as forceful as is possible for the Executive branch (no hope for Congress here) in addressing environmental/climate issues, etc., and later this year, will have brought two wars to an end. And there is one thing that no one here can discount: he was the first black man to be elected president, and he did it twice. You cannot dismiss that, and you can't say that that has not brought hope, in some ways, to an awful lot of people in and of itself.

When Obama adopted the "Hope and Change" slogan in 2008 it was a call for a pivot from the Bush years. He did not know that the biggest recession in nearly 80 years was about to put a knife through the heart of all his plans. He did not yet know the degree of obstruction with which his agenda would be met. He did not know that the world would begin to roil with uprisings across northern Africa and the middle East that would change the entire geopolitical landscape. I don't think presidents ever get to accomplish what they thought they would. They are, sometimes tragically, at the mercy of events not of their making.