The historic milestone election of Barack Obama eight years ago was not just about breaking the ultimate color barrier in America. It was the elevation of an almost messianic figure in the eyes of many. It was about starry-eyed “Hope and Change,” it was about a grand vision, it was, to quote his nomination speech:
the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.
He spoke from between Greek columns, suggesting that he was more than a man seeking to be the 44th President. While he didn’t overtly declare himself so, his followers and supporters did see him as something greater. I am reminded of the opening paragraph of one of my favorite books, Roger Zelazny’s science fiction epic Lord of Light:
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.
Obama did indeed reach for the stars, so to speak, in his tenure as President. He sought, sometimes purely by force of will or confidence in his vision, to reshape the country and the world. He started out with the best wishes and full blessing of millions who admired him in almost hero-worship fashion.
Unfortunately for him and them, Obama ran into the hard realities of the world. He was elected president, not king, and even in his later years when he sought to circumvent them with his pen-and-phone, he ran into the hard fact of the nation’s checks and balances. He failed to convince the nation to accede to all he wanted to do, and suffered two significant mid-term defeats of his party. His eponymous legislation, the Affordable Care Act aka ObamaCare, met resistance even from within his own party, then weathered numerous court challenges, only to crash on the rocks of fiscal reality. He holds the dubious distinction of having lost more often at the Supreme Court than any recent president. Still, he tallied a number of significant achievements, and had hopes that his preferred successor, Hillary Clinton, could cement those achievements, fix ObamaCare, and assure his legacy.
Now, with the election of Donald Trump as his successor, he is faced with the humiliating reality that much of what he wrought will be unwrought. ObamaCare will almost certainly be repealed rather than rescued. The Iran nuclear deal is not likely to endure. Trump has announced his intention to withdraw America from the Trans Pacific Partnership. Obama’s climate change initiatives will be wiped away, the softening of relations with Cuba will probably be rolled back, many of his executive orders will be undone, his energy policy will be undone. The economic stimulus he enacted at the beginning of his tenure will be remembered more for its contribution to the national debt than for its impact on the economy. His actions in the Middle East will be viewed through the filter of ISIS atrocities, the Syrian civil war, the mess in Libya, tensions in Eastern Europe and on the Black Sea, and a general feeling that that part of the world remains a hot mess. His bailouts of US auto makers are already forgotten. His expansion of government regulations is viewed negatively by the incoming administration, will be reversed, and never really achieved the status of “signature achievement” in any event.
There are a few accomplishments that will endure as Obama legacies. The national legalization of gay marriage happened under his watch, and despite its seeming inevitability he will be remembered and credited for that. He kept us out of some wars, but, sadly, he won’t be remembered for that. He placed two liberals on the Supreme Court, both of whom are likely to be on the court for two to three more decades. He has more achievements, of course, and many of them will survive the next presidency. But, nothing really comes to mind as of historic significance, there is no New Deal, no Great Society, and the electoral routs that his party suffered during his tenure mean that his flavor of progressivism isn’t going to endure.
In Lord of Light, Sam sought to liberate the masses from the oppression of the ruling class, which had established itself as gods-above. Obama, unfortunately, pursued a contrary path, one of greater control. He expanded the power of government and the ruling elite. He chose a direction contrary to liberty, contrary to freeing the masses from the yoke of government and the gods-above, and was rebuffed by the voters in 2010, 2014 and 2016 for that choice.
The great promise that Obama offered, the “Hope and Change,” the plan to take this country in a fundamentally new direction, has fizzled. A divided nation rejected his policies and his vision and found no truth in his declaration that we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. We’ve had eight years of partisan rancor and discord, discord that each party blames on the other, but ultimately discord that Obama himself failed to address or resolve.
Where did he go wrong? Too often, he eschewed compromise in favor of unilateralism. Too often, he ignored the wishes of those who didn’t vote for him, who did vote the opposition party into a Congressional majority, and who bristled against his scolding and pedantic ways. A uniter doesn’t succeed by requiring compliance, but by finding common ground. He showed little inclination towards the latter, preferring instead to perpetually seek the former.
How much of this rests on the shoulders of his devotees? What role did they have in creating this sort of presidency? Were the expectations too high? Were they at odds with these realities: that the Presidency is not a throne, that the nation (as evinced by the fact that it’s not already there) not inclined or interested in becoming that which Obama envisioned, that their beatification of Obama was not universally embraced, that he is simply a man? Did the people who supported Obama embrace excessively idealistic and unattainable goals and hopes, and in doing so precipitate his unilateralism and his overreach?
Did the people who voted for Obama demand he push the nation to a place it didn’t want to go? Evidence suggests strongly that this is the case.
Obama’s greatest legacy will be his first victory, the breaking of the color barrier. It’s a shame, really, because the opportunity was there to do so much more, to be a uniter and bring the nation together after the rancor of the GWBush years. It would have been a harder road to take, but success would have put Obama’s name in the books as one of the great Presidents. Instead, he’ll be just another middle-of-the-pack with the footnote of his victory, stewarding the nation from his predecessor to his successor.
In his congratulatory speech after Donald Trump’s victory, he commented:
I think of this job as being a relay runner. You take the baton, you run your best race and hopefully by the time you hand it off, you’re a little further ahead, you’ve made a little progress.
Those are the words of someone who knows he’s not going up on Mount Rushmore, someone who understands that his transformative dreams have not come to fruition. Certainly, there are millions who will continue to regard him with messianic ardor, but they will not be representative of the nation as a whole.
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In a word: fizzled.
Thanks Peter.