Audacity How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail by Jonathan Chait, Harper Collins

Bark Obama .The Most Successful Democrat Since F.D.R.???

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.

Suez Crisis 60 years Later

• Ike's Gamble:America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East By Michael Doran, Simon and Schuster
• Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace by Alex von Tunzelmann. Harper Collins Publishers

Ariel Sharon, left, during the Sinai campaign in October of 1956. During the campaign, Sharon made the controversial decision to take the Mitla Pass. Thirty-eight Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting and Sharon was reprimanded by his superiors. He was later accused of provoking the battle unnecessarily.

Suez war began, the world was transfixed by an anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary. Moscow sent tanks to crush the rebellion, demonstrating that the ostensibly anti-imperialist USSR was itself a brutal imperial power. But whatever moral advantage the West could have derived from this event was lost, because at the same moment Britain and France were invading Egypt for their own purposes.

When a furious Eisenhower sent his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to the United Nations to denounce his own NATO allies, it became clear that the Suez adventure was doomed. (Matters weren’t helped when the Soviets, in an ambiguously worded statement, seemed to be threatening Britain with nuclear war.) The British and French aborted their limited invasion, Israeli troops withdrew, and Anthony Eden resigned from office in disgrace. It was an unmistakable lesson in Cold War geopolitics: The old empires were impotent, and the new superpowers were in charge.

What lessons can we take from the Suez Crisis, six decades later? Von Tunzelmann and Doran offer contrasting answers; the major difference between them has to do with their assessments of Eisenhower, the key decision-maker in the crisis. Von Tunzelmann’s view is captured in the subtitle of Blood and Sand: “Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace.” In her view, Eisenhower is to be praised for stopping the invasion of Egypt: “He had publicly taken a stand in favor of what was right, though that meant opposing two major NATO allies, Britain and France, as well as the United States’ best friend and protégé in the Middle East, Israel.”

Eisenhower, on this view, recognized the legitimacy of Egypt’s claim to the Suez Canal, and of Nasser’s claim to embody the spirit of Arab independence. He was true to the United Nations and its principles, which he himself had done so much to establish in the Second World War. There is a strong suggestion in the book that, if America had kept on the course Eisenhower set in 1956, the rest of the world—especially the Arab world—would be better off today. In particular, Von Tunzelmann admires Eisenhower for distancing America from Israel: “Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were unusual in the 20th                                                          century: an American president and secretary of state who were able and willing to say no to Israel.”

Yet as she observes in the last pages of her book, it was Eisenhower himself who abandoned the neutralist position America adopted in Suez. Just one year later, he announced the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” which committed the U.S. to intervene in defense of any Middle Eastern government threatened by communism. For Von Tunzelmann, this was the beginning of a disastrous period in American Middle East policy that continues today: “Nations and peoples were used as assets or weapons. The enemies of enemies were falsely considered to be friends. Lines were drawn in the sand, blown away, drawn again. All of this was done with precious little foresight about where it might lead.”

Blood and Sand, with its narrow focus on Suez, can do little to explain why Eisenhower’s “campaign for peace” took this turn. But that is Doran’s whole purpose in Ike’s Gamble, whose title turns out to bear a surprising implication. If Eisenhower took a gamble for peace in 1956, Doran believes that it was ultimately a losing one. Ike may have thought he was affirming the power of the United Nations and the independence of the postcolonial world. But, in fact, by empowering Nasser, he ended up damaging both the Middle East and American interests.

The root of Eisenhower’s mistake, Doran argues, was to see the Arab world as a monolithic entity, with Nasser at its helm. In order to appear as an “honest broker” in the Middle East, Eisenhower distanced the U.S. from its traditional allies in order to accommodate Nasser, which he believed would win America the affection of the Arabs at large. What this failed to account for, Doran believes, is that the Arab world was itself riven by national enmities, power struggles, and ideological disagreements. As it turned out, boosting Egypt meant that, less than two years after Suez, the governments of Iraq and Syria were overthrown by Nasserist, pan-Arab movements. (Syria was briefly merged with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic.) Egypt’s rise meant trouble for Saudi Arabia, which since the days of FDR had been America’s most important Arab ally (and oil supplier). And it spelled disaster for Israel, which was forced to fight much more serious wars against Egypt in 1967 and 1973. Neither the U.S. nor the region reaped any benefits from the Nasserist order that Eisenhower helped to sponsor.

Doran spends some time at the end of the book arguing that Eisenhower himself came to regret his position over Suez. He speaks of a notional “Ike of 1958,” whose views had become more realistic about American interests than the Ike of 1956. This idea rests on fairly slim evidence, however, and Doran seems to invest it with more importance than it requires. Really, it is Doran, not Eisenhower himself, who is making the argument that Ike’s gamble was a losing one.

In doing so, he is also making an implicit but unmistakable argument about America’s Middle East policy today. Any reader of Ike’s Gamble who is even a little familiar with the current situation will be able to draw the lines connecting Ike with Obama, and Egypt with Iran. Once again, Doran implies, an American president has fallen prey to the delusion that favoring one particular Muslim state is the same thing as being honest broker with the Muslim world. And once again, this approach has succeeded only in emboldening America’s enemies and endangering its friends, especially Saudi Arabia and Israel. This makes Ike’s Gamble a timely intervention into current debates. Obama won’t read it, but Hillary Clinton should.