President Obama in 2015. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he understood, without quite saying it, that there had been no highly successful Democratic president in decades.
Bill Clinton made the country a better place, but his biggest legislative plans failed and he was beset by scandal. John F. Kennedy, though popular in retrospect, had his agenda stalled in Congress when he was killed. Harry Truman left office deeply unpopular. Jimmy Carter lost re-election.
And Lyndon Johnson, despite grand domestic achievements, was driven from office. The chant “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” doesn’t exactly suggest progressive heroism.
This history of liberal disappointment was the subtext of a revealing early comment from Obama: “Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” The history also led Obama to reject the advice of his first Treasury secretary that their legacy should be preventing another depression. “That’s not enough,” Obama replied.
It wasn’t enough because of the depth of the country’s problems. Soaring inequality. Unregulated Wall Street. Underperforming schools. Millions lacking health insurance. Climate change.
More than a few times during Obama’s presidency, he has seemed to be following the pattern of liberal disappointment. The left would despair that he was too soft, while the right would cast him as either evil or hapless. Just when he seemed to have conquered his critics, the most shocking threat came along: the election of Donald J. Trump.
Three days from now, Trump and congressional Republicans will have the power to begin undoing Obama’s presidency. And yet they are going to have a harder time than many people realize.
A clear explanation of why appears in a new book, “Audacity,” by Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, one of today’s must-read political journalists. He documents the scale of Obama’s domestic policy, on health care, taxes, finance, climate, civil rights and education. Chait also explains why it won’t simply disappear.
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While Trump will obviously be able to reverse some policies, he will also face obstacles. First, some of Obama’s changes are popular, even if passing them was hard. Look at Obamacare. Republicans promise to repeal it, but have accepted Obama’s terms of the debate: They claim that they won’t take health insurance away. The baseline has been reset.
Second, Obama’s presidency unleashed changes that Washington doesn’t control. Many states have become less tolerant of poorly performing schools. Climate policy helped make clean energy increasingly cost-competitive, on its own.
Third, Senate Democrats still have the ability to filibuster some Republican wishes, including the reversal of financial regulation. “The fatalistic conclusion that Trump can erase Obama’s achievements is overstated — perhaps even completely false,” Chait writes.
The book is a brave one, because journalists are usually loath to call a politician successful, for fear of being branded naïve or partisan. We’re comfortable calling balls as balls, but prefer to criticize strikes as imperfect. (And all strikes, like all politicians, are indeed imperfect.) As a result, we too often give an overly negative view of current events only to wax nostalgic about those same events decades later.
In truth, Obama succeeded by taking a rigorous, evidence-based approach to government. He began trying to broker bipartisan deals and, when that failed, governed as a tough Democrat, with crucial help from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Obama’s mistakes, like Syria, were serious, but no president yet has avoided serious errors.
Obama leaves office as the most successful Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt. His effect on the “trajectory of America,” to use his benchmark, was certainly smaller than Roosevelt’s, but is in the same league as Reagan’s. Obama did more while in office, while Reagan better protected his policy changes, thanks to Republican gains in state and congressional elections — and the victory of his chosen successor.
Obama’s glaring failure on that last count leaves his allies needing to fight, hard, to defend their successes, rather than to make further progress on problems that badly need it, like climate and inequality. But it’s a testament to the last eight years that progressives have so much to defend.
“Any large scale of reordering of power and resources in American life will inevitably face resistance, sometimes for decades,” Chait writes. It happened after Reconstruction, the New Deal and the civil rights movement. But by continuing to fight, through victory and setback, the advocates of a freer, more broadly prosperous country won many more than they lost.
When future historians look back on today, they’re likely to come to a similar conclusion. They are also likely to believe that Obama’s vision of America was far superior to Trump’s. After all, a vast majority of Americans born in the last few decades share Obama’s vision. And history is ultimately written by the young.
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