As the United States readies itself for another hard fought election, the character, style and record of President Obama are beginning to take centre stage. A series of high profile analyses by veteran political journalists – James Fallows, Andrew Sullivan, Noam Scheiber, Ezra Klein – have offered very different verdicts on the president’s strengths and weaknesses, but all seem to agree that he has learned from his mistakes. Likewise, they agree that his entire legacy will pivot on a re-election, for though Obama has failed to deliver anything like the ‘transformative presidency’ promised in his campaign, a second term could cement many of his most embattled achievements and turn a record that now seems provisional and tenuous into one that will appear, with hindsight, to have been strategically sound, and perhaps even inevitable.
In the plus column, Obama has managed to arrest the economic death spiral of 2008 and to get the country through a housing market collapse, a financial meltdown, widespread unemployment (job losses peaked at 750,000 a month when he took office) and a costly war came with, at best, a muddled exit strategy. His administration has added nearly two and a half million jobs to the US economy, while, proportionally, shrinking government more than was the case at the height of the Reagan cutbacks. The bailouts of Wall Street and General Motors, and the massive stimulus – each hotly debated and generally unpopular – have turned out well, and the much-maligned Obamacare reforms have the country closer to universal health insurance coverage than any previous Democratic administration would have dared to hope.
Despite sharp criticism from left and right, Obama has shown himself capable of playing a long game, resisting the temptations of the “culture wars” and staying calm in the face of great provocation. On more than one occasion he has used Republican impatience with painstaking negotiations to gain a long-term advantage. Andrew Sullivan has praised his “slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner” for producing more durable political changes than smaller, easier victories might have obtained. It hardly needs saying that many others have read the manner quite differently, and found Obama temperamentally unsuited to office and apt to overlook ways of using the crises he inherited to enact a progressive agenda. Much of Confidence Men, Ron Suskind’s damning account of the first crisis-driven years, portrayed a president lost in the details, constantly ‘re-litigating’ old arguments and diffidently deferring to advisers inherited from the Clinton years because of his inexperience.
Obama has also stocked the Supreme Court with two progressive judges, both women, and significantly improved America’s image and consequent “soft power” around the world. (The Pew Global Attitudes Project found that since 2008 the number of people with a ‘positive view’ of the US has climbed from 37 percent to 54 in Indonesia and from 42 percent to 75 percent in France – in Japan it has risen from 50 percent to 85). In contrast to his general judiciousness, Obama gambled and won handsomely on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. His quiet support of the Arab Spring, and a light-footed intervention in Libya, have both succeeded against expectations, and his adept handling of China, welcoming its rise while improving relations with Asian neighbours that fear its power, has confounded Beijing on several occasions and encouraged it to overreach politically and militarily.
A list of the Obama administration’s shortcomings would probably begin with its failure to grasp the scale of the economic problems produced by the financial and housing crises. While the world teetered on the brink of systemic failure, it dithered over, and ultimately and failed to pass serious financial reform. It gave Wall Street a free pass for the financial crisis, prosecuting no senior executives and bailing out some of the worst offenders with fantastic sums of taxpayer money. It wasted precious time and energy on fruitless negotiations with ideologically inflexible opponents. It squandered congressional majorities by being too timid and lost its way on healthcare reform and banking regulation. And it severely underestimated the need for jobs. In foreign policy, its general successes have been marred by a readiness to use the excessive executive powers from the Bush years, a reluctance to prosecute torturers, and an unconscionable use of drones and assassinations to pursue its agenda.
Taken together, this mixed record can easily go either way. If the apparent recovery of the US economy continues (Paul Krugman admitted to “guarded optimism” last month), then Obama will seem to have played a successful long game. If it falters again, it will seem to confirm the charges of inexperience or incompetence. The same holds true for most of the president’s domestic and foreign policy achievements. Looking back on the Obama record so far, the analyst Ezra Klein sagely concludes that: “For Obama’s presidency to be remembered as one of the most consequential in recent American history, he does not need a new strategy, or a new personality. He simply needs to win a second term so that he can protect the accomplishments of his first.”
