Barack Obama’s place in history was secured the moment he was sworn in to office. No one else will ever be America’s first black president.
But that’s not the legacy Obama wants. He came to office riding a wave of change, promising to fix a broken Washington and move beyond the partisan politics that disgusted him as much as it did the voters who’d sent him to the White House. Faced with the greatest economic crisis in almost a century, Obama saw the opportunity to re-create while recovering, to revive the economy but also to reduce inequality across socioeconomic boundaries. He would end two wars and attempt to project a new image of America as a source of global tolerance and stability. He had hoped to bridge the divides both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had forced upon the country. His background was supposed to help bring blacks and whites closer together. Just as Reagan had moved the country squarely to the center-right, Obama hoped he could move it to the center-left.
But hope was one thing, change another. Within days of his arrival at 1600, the president found himself stymied—by Washington institutions like the Pentagon and government bureaucracy, by the petty squabbles among members of his own party, and most of all by Republicans who have sought to block even the most basic steps he wanted to take. Barack Obama wanted to soar above partisanship; instead, his time in office, so far, will be remembered as a nadir of partisan relations. This Obama is a long way from the one who proclaimed in Boston on that now-famous night in 2004 that launched his career, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.… We worship an awesome God in the blue states and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.… We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
The great promise of President Obama was rooted in that 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. It was shorthand for the outsized expectations that followed him into the White House just four years after delivering it, that he would unite this country again—a country that had been politically divided for nearly twenty straight years. And now, when he leaves, his legacy will be a generation of political division, not even close to the effect that young, skinny state senator with the funny name wanted to have on the American political landscape.
Of course, history wasn’t kind to him. The circumstances into which the Obama presidency was born have meant that for all his efforts, he could not be the president he wanted to be. He has at times hinted at a goal that would, in fact, reposition American politics the way Reagan did. In a commencement address to University of Michigan graduates in 2010, Obama laid out a case for a strong, responsive national government that could help its citizens; perhaps it was a hint at the presidency he wanted to have, not the one that was foisted upon him.
“When America expanded from a few colonies to an entire continent, and we needed a way to reach the Pacific, our government helped build the railroads,” he said.
When we transitioned from an economy based on farms to one based on factories, and workers needed new skills and training, our nation set up a system of public high schools. When the markets crashed during the Depression and people lost their life savings, our government put in place a set of rules and safeguards to make sure that such a crisis never happened again, and then put a safety net in place to make sure that our elders would never be impoverished the way they had been. When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us. Government is the police officers who are protecting our communities, and the servicemen and women who are defending us abroad. Government is the roads you drove in on and the speed limits that kept you safe. Government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them. Government is this extraordinary public university—a place that’s doing lifesaving research, and catalyzing economic growth, and graduating students who will change the world around them in ways big and small.
Government shouldn’t try to dictate your lives. But it should give you the tools you need to succeed. Government shouldn’t try to guarantee results, but it should guarantee a shot at opportunity for every American who’s willing to work hard.1
That May afternoon in Ann Arbor was a startling defense of government from a politician representing a party that shies away from its reputation as the party of big government. It was also a defense Obama never made again. Perhaps not coincidentally, he gave that speech on one of the slowest news days of the year—a Saturday, and not just any Saturday, but the day Washington turns into wannabe Hollywood, the day of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. That speech got almost no media pickup; it never made the evening news beyond the fact that he was in Ann Arbor. Instead, the next day on the Sunday shows, it was Obama’s stand-up routine at the dinner that was noted. He says privately he would give the speech again, and make the case for a smarter government of necessity—if his political advisors would let him. But no Democratic consultant would ever advise any president or any major candidate to make the case for government and use it as a centerpiece argument.
Such comments reveal an aspect of Obama that his congressional opponents recognized: no matter his hopes to reform politics, he is deeply political—even if inexpert in politics.
Though his 2008 campaign was based on breaking from the era of George W. Bush, the two men have several traits in common. Both men faced crises early in their first year in office that would come to define them—the September 11 terrorist attacks for Bush, the economic recession for Obama. They both chose to address those crises by tackling something that, though tangentially related, didn’t share a direct relationship to the immediate concern: Bush went to war in Iraq as a way to address the global war on terrorism. Obama addressed health care reform, a fundamental element of the economy, in the course of rebuilding from the recession. In explaining their decisions, both made the case that if the challenges they chose to tackle weren’t addressed in the short term, they would fester and become long-term threats to the nation. And when their decisions became unpopular and took a political toll on their own parties, both men found they had few allies.
What makes both of their decisions all the more ironic for historians is that neither had run on either issue they took up. Pre-9/11 Bush, campaigning in 2000, talked about a reserved foreign policy, one that did not believe in nation building. Obama stumbled into health care; it was never the issue for him, not in the primaries against Clinton and Edwards, both of whom were much more passionate about the topic, nor in the general election. And yet it’s now his signature achievement. “Obamacare” is a thing—probably the last issue candidate Obama thought he would be best known for when he was first trudging through the snow in Iowa.
Chief among the political traits Bush and Obama share is the ability to figure out a way to win by any means necessary. At key junctures during Obama’s career, he has manipulated the rules in ways that benefit his own ambitions, to the detriment of the higher ideals he espouses. He got a rival for a state senate seat kicked off the ballot. He decided not to take public matching funds for his 2008 campaign, the first post-Watergate candidate to opt out of a system that was supposed to control the amount of money in politics, even after pledging to abide by the rules. He promised to change the tone of politics while running two of the most negative presidential campaigns the nation has ever seen. He strongly opposed Super PACs and outside groups that pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to back their favorite candidates, then tacitly approved of those same groups when it was in his political self-interest to do so.
That doesn’t mean Obama has no principles. He feels the need to change Washington at his core. But the paradox that has defined Obama’s tenure is that winning office by any means necessary undermined his ability to actually effect that change. During the 2010 health care debate, Obama famously told ABC News, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” It’s a claim every president makes publicly, but they are just words. Does Obama want to believe that? Of course, but history doesn’t look kindly upon any one-term president who fails to win a second term. Still, had Obama been less concerned with winning a second term (which would also have meant being less concerned with his fellow Democrats winning re-election), he would have shown a reformist’s courage that, even if it could not possibly have transformed the system, would have served as a beacon for future efforts to do so. And such courage might have resulted in re-election, too; we’ll never know, because in politics as in so much in life, there can be no control group. One can’t run war-game scenarios when it comes to political what-ifs.
Of course, some things could not have happened without working with Congress and the existing bureaucracy. Whether because of the immediacy of the economic recession, the maneuverings of a clever bureaucracy, or the simple influence of the interest groups that helped him win office, Obama and his team decided to work within the system, rather than blowing it up and starting over from scratch. His legacy in the long run may have bright prospects, but as it stands in the near future he will be a president whose potential wasn’t realized. He nudged the political spectrum to the left, without changing it. He began a recovery, without completing it. He passed major legislative initiatives by compromising some of the values he held dear.
Both Clinton, the Democrat who pledged to shrink government, and Bush, the Republican who promised a new era of compassionate conservatism, left office under clouds of partisan division. Obama will almost certainly leave office the same way. And the divide between whites and blacks is as stark as ever, as Democrats rely on growing numbers of minority voters while Republicans become an ever more homogeneous party.
So Obama will never be known as a president who managed Congress effectively. Indeed, some of his legislative successes resulted simply because Republicans on Capitol Hill took their visceral hatred of the president too far. His great victories in Congress—health care reform, financial regulatory reform, the economic stimulus plan—came solely in his first two years in office, when his party controlled the entire apparatus.
Obama himself shoulders some of the blame. He takes personally the criticism that he doesn’t play the Washington game, and he knows it’s true. The late Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post famously compared Washington’s political ecosystem to high school, which meant, among other things, that the town is small and suffused with insecurities. That’s why things that seem trivial—and did seem trivial to Obama—are actually crucial. Obama did reach out to a small number of Republicans, like Olympia Snowe and, once the GOP won a majority, John Boehner, and he held dinners with small groups of Republican and Democratic senators alike in the first year of his second term. But after the series of cocktail parties held for members of Congress early in his first year in office, and the occasional football game, the White House stopped sending out invitations.
There was never a full-court press, nor the constant flattering of attention or base-touching that has marked legislative relationships between other presidents—and by now it is clear that there will not be. Obama has put in just enough effort to assuage the allies pushing him to do more, but no one would accuse him of being relentless. There’s another saying in Washington when things are tough with the other party: you always want to be the one who gets caught trying. The public will reward you for it. But there did come a point when many around the president as well as Obama himself believed they were wasting their time. It really is one of the great differences between Bill Clinton and Obama. Both faced recalcitrant Republicans; Clinton even saw his enemies impeach him. But Clinton was obsessed with winning these Republicans over again, with finding any legislation to pass with them. He just never stopped. Obama’s wired differently; he believes the rational should overcome the superficial.
A part of the reason is that Obama doesn’t care terribly much if his rivals don’t like him. The same insecurities that make most of official Washington need and pine for presidential attention are not in Obama’s DNA. While Clinton craved adoration or respect, Obama doesn’t share that yearning. Even Bush, while being wired more like Obama than Clinton, understood the backslapping part of the game; then again, Bush had been a governor who’d had to deal with lots of little state legislator egos. Bush did enjoy the banter, the small parts of the Washington game that, even if he didn’t crave them like Clinton, he understood—perhaps because his dad, “Bush 41,” actually did have that trait. Certainly those down the way on Capitol Hill, and nearly all of Washington, find it mind-boggling that Obama doesn’t get this. More than a few of his advisors, even those closest to him, have wondered how someone who disdains retail politics could have risen so high up in the ranks. “It’s like Bill Gates,” said one former aide, “not liking computers.”
But there’s a big difference, of course, and it speaks to an impossible dilemma: Americans believe politics is corrupt, that politicians care about almost nothing beyond their own power, getting rich off the perks of office, and fighting with those who don’t agree with them, to the negligence of the country. So, to a great extent, does Barack Obama. But there is no other sandbox to play in, and because he played the political game early, the public began to view him as just another politician.
Obama’s big promise on the world stage was to improve America’s image around the world, to essentially repent for the sins of the war in Iraq. Certainly the world believed he would do all that and more; why else did the Nobel Committee award him the Peace Prize for feats he had not yet accomplished? The blame does rest on him—that is, if you blame him for raising expectations. For example, his promise to shutter the Guantánamo detention center was abandoned, a hypocrisy that undercut his claims that his would be a more moral and just foreign policy. He wanted to be the president who focused on Middle East peace at the start of his term, not the end. But that didn’t work out. He wanted a reset with a former Cold War rival, Russia, but Putin’s return to power ended any hopes of doing that. If anything, tensions with Russia are coming to define just about every foreign policy rabbit hole the president finds himself in during his second term.
In a world without twin superpowers, spurred by social media uprisings and growing threats to American dominance in Asia and Europe, America’s place is as uncertain as it was before World War II. Of course, no president can handle all conflagrations; there will always be corners of the globe marked by horror and bloodshed and an absence of freedom. And there were numerous successes: the most important to the American public, getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But even those voter-demanded successes appear questionable. Is it Obama’s fault that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan appears ready to stand on its own without U.S. help? Some Republicans want to blame him, but no one can discount the mismanagement of both wars that took place before he took office. To an extent nearly unimaginable only a few years earlier, the United States has engaged Iran. Diplomacy might fail, but it’s the first option again. There was progress on arms control, one of those issues that the American public hardly notices but has significant global ramifications. But these successes on the international front also served to reinforce Obama’s sense that Congress was hardly worth engaging; he got stuff done when they had little say, and got almost nothing done when they did (internationally, Syria being an example of the latter). And the Middle East is so on fire that it’s very likely that the region will actually be more unstable when Obama leaves office than when he took it. Is this Obama’s fault or simply historical bad luck? Only time will tell. The second-guessing of his Arab Spring decisions could easily become a big part of the foreign policy debate that will take place in 2016.
So what will the Obama legacy be? Is he simply a minor hiatus in the decades-long feud between the Bush family and the Clinton family that has devolved into the partisan warfare that defines us as a nation, with Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton simply waiting in the wings to fight the next battle? Or is he something more, an innovator who really has pushed American politics left of center and hastened the evolution—or perhaps even the destruction—of his opponents across the aisle?
The deepest depths of a recession he didn’t cause came just a few months into his term, at a time when the government was pumping massive amounts of money into a system in desperate need of the influx. Preventing a depression, in favor of a terrible recession, is the sort of success that is only evident to a select few, often with PhD’s, and usually not fully recognized for decades. But it can be a crowning legacy. In the near term, the focus that work required certainly handicapped countless Obama initiatives, as did the tremendous costs of the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. It is hard not to wonder about the world Barack Obama might have helped make had he not been tied down by the world he inherited from George W. Bush. This is certainly something that creeps into the president’s mind every so often. Then again, would Obama have gotten traction without a public so fed up with traditional politicos like Bush and Clinton?
One thing that seems certain is that Obama has changed the way campaigns are run and elections are won. Obama’s team, driven by groundbreaking consumer research and voter targeting based on a nationwide network of volunteers, used the newest technologies to capture and turn out every possible friendly voter they could find. And they adapted to the rapidly changing technologies of the moment: In 2008, the campaign collected cell phone numbers of volunteers and supporters; by 2012, the techno-wizards were asking those supporters to allow them direct access to their Facebook pages in order to push messages to individual friends, a sort of hub-and-spoke system for the digital age. No presidential campaign will ever again be based on antiquated voter files and paper records. The divides between digital teams, field teams, fund-raising teams, and direct-mail strategists will come down, as they did in the Obama campaigns. Such integration is now the only way to run a national campaign. And Obama’s incredible ability to raise money has turned political campaigns into a multibillion-dollar industry as Republicans are now doing whatever it takes to catch up. To think that in 2000, Bush and Gore together spent just over $125 million. In 2012, Obama and Romney together spent over $2 billion. That’s some rate of inflation.
In two ways, the Obama presidency has changed the Democratic coalition. While Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton relied on a large number of white voters to win the presidency, Obama’s focus on lower-intensity voters in traditionally underperforming minority blocs has given Democrats a new advantage in national and statewide elections. The Democratic coalition is increasingly reliant on minority voting groups that are growing rapidly. White voters have declined as a share of the electorate in every election since exit polls began measuring it; Obama’s focus on underrepresented minority groups likely sped that decline. Now that less than three-quarters of the electorate is made up of white voters, and given that an increasing share of minorities are voting for Democrats, the coalition Obama has established appears unassailable. Democrats are drawing more and more from a growing pool of voters, leaving Republicans to scramble for a larger share of a shrinking pool. What would have been an inevitable shift toward the Democrats over a period of decades was accelerated by Obama.
Obama will also leave a more homogeneous Democratic Party, ideologically. Once riven by disagreements between liberals and conservative Blue Dogs, the party is now remarkably monolithic in terms of its beliefs. Candidates who just a few years ago were nervous about speaking out for gay rights now openly embrace same-sex marriage. For gay Americans, Obama’s administration will go down as being as important as LBJ’s was for blacks. Democrats are almost unanimously pro-choice, almost entirely in favor of Obama’s health care reform, and almost entirely united on the role of government and the amount it spends.
The ideological divisions that used to exist within the Democratic Party have been driven out, at least in part, by Republicans. The election of 2010, in which voters so handily punished supporters of President Obama’s health care overhaul (and even Democrats who didn’t support it), took its deepest toll among Democrats in marginal seats—the very members who tended to be the most conservative representatives of the party’s House caucus. Today, there are only a small handful of white Democrats who represent southern House districts; the vast majority of Southern Democrats hold seats where minority voters make up a majority of the voters. Obama has helped unify the Democratic Party ideologically, ironically, by shrinking the variety of its membership.
Perhaps the only major disagreement that remains between the Democratic elites is over entitlement reform. And, in another moment of irony, this time it’s Obama who finds himself out of step with the rest of his party. Though Obama has long said he would like to revise the social safety net programs that suck up so much of the federal government’s money (an issue on which he could find common ground with Republicans), many Democrats, particularly the ones in leadership, have made it clear they have no intention of allowing benefit cuts. They have made it clear that, in that particular case, Obama is the one taking the more conservative stand. At some point, Republicans are going to rue the day they didn’t work with Obama on Social Security. He was their “Nixon goes to China” Democratic president.
In the eyes of historians, any president’s legacy can be ratified by voters who elect his successor. Since the Civil War, only two presidents, Ulysses S. Grant and Ronald Reagan, have served two full terms then given way to another member of their own party, winning a veritable third term. (Franklin Roosevelt, of course, won four terms on his own and saw Truman, arguably, win a fifth term for him.) And while most presidents have one obvious successor—usually the vice president—Obama has two: his vice president and the woman who almost beat him lo those many years ago.
When Joe Biden was elected to the Senate for the first time, in 1972, Obama was just eleven years old. But Biden and Obama enjoy an unusually warm relationship, and the president likes offering his vice president the occasional advice about how to run in the future. While some vice presidents, like Al Gore, have distanced themselves from their bosses in preparation for their own runs, Biden is much more likely to attach himself to Obama’s legacy: Biden’s innate loyalty almost requires that he not jump ship, and his political instincts tell him his best chance (scratch that: his only chance) to win comes from inheriting the Obama coalition, both in the Democratic primary and in the general election.
The only thing standing in the way of Biden’s third run for the White House is Hillary Clinton. Clinton fought the Obama team to a near draw, a bitter contest that, despite outward appearances, continues to fuel grudges within the Democratic Party. Already, the old Obama 2008 team has not been shy about criticizing Hillary’s early 2016 moves, warning her that she’s making the same mistakes she made in 2006 and 2007, which led to the vacuum that was filled by Obama. But while those differences are there on the staff level, the two principals have patched things up, by necessity: Obama needed Clinton to make sure the Democratic Party wasn’t divided as he began governing; and he needed someone of her stature to manage foreign affairs while he handled the economic recovery. (Obama also needed Clinton to be on his team, rather than a constant source of criticism from her powerful perch on Capitol Hill.) Clinton needed Obama, too, to bolster her own legacy, and to leave open the option of running for president once again. Projecting a chummy relationship between the president and his former secretary of state is mutually beneficial, both in the short term and in the future. Interestingly, though, the two have forged a real bond; whether it’s a true friendship, only the two of them know for sure. But there is mutual respect. Hillary and Obama are more alike, something the two figured out after spending time together. Realize that all the same criticisms many make of Obama when comparing his political style to Bill Clinton’s can easily be made of Hillary. At their core, neither Hillary nor Obama enjoys the game. Hillary, though, came to appreciate the game while watching her husband. Obama, too, has grown to appreciate Bill Clinton’s political gifts, but only later in his presidency, perhaps too late to make a big difference in terms of managing Washington.
While Obama may never admit whom he wants as his heir, Hillary or Biden, he did give a hint when at the end of her tenure as secretary of state, he suggested the two sit down for a joint farewell interview with 60 Minutes. No other cabinet secretary of the modern era was given that kind of presidential treatment before; it’s usually reserved for spouses, vice presidents, or ex-presidents. It was Obama’s idea, not Hillary’s or any staffer’s, a gesture that Obama believed Hillary was owed for being a team player.
Their relationship will also be defined by actual accomplishments. The major, lasting impact of the Obama-Clinton partnership on foreign policy will be the redirection of American focus from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a “pivot,” in the White House’s words, toward the growing markets and militaries in Asia and away from the shrinking European Union. The initiative has focused on engaging China, opening the once-hermit kingdom of Burma to the world, and opening a new military base in northern Australia. Obama may have paid more attention to China than any of his predecessors; his decision to send three high-profile politicians—Jon Huntsman, Gary Locke, and Max Baucus—to serve as ambassador to Beijing put China on a diplomatic par with Japan, which has historically received prominent American envoys (currently, Caroline Kennedy).
Just as Bush’s legacy was shaped by the wars that began under his administration, Obama’s international legacy will be shaped in large part by how he shepherded the wars he ended, and by the night in May 2011 when a team of Navy SEALs snuck into Abbottabad, Pakistan, to end the life of the most wanted man in the world, while Obama and his war cabinet watched in the Situation Room.
Since December 7, 1941, when Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States has been almost constantly engaged in military operations of one form or another—World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, both Gulf Wars, the war in Afghanistan, countless smaller conflicts everywhere from Grenada to the jungles of Latin America and the mountains of Yugoslavia. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of the last decade have especially sapped Americans’ interest in spending the money or risking the lives it takes to be the world’s police officer. There is an increasing isolationist streak in both political parties, represented by anti-war Democrats and Republican libertarians like Senator Rand Paul, that simply wants the nation out of foreign conflicts. Obama’s failure to intervene in Syria is Example A of the ancillary fallout from America’s bloody interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The increasing use of drones to kill terrorists and militants in Yemen, Afghanistan, and the tribal regions of Pakistan, rather than using special operations forces, is another extension of war without overt risk to American lives. Yet nobody in the military would say that drones are sufficient to win a war.
Under Obama’s watch little has changed in Latin America, save a trade pact with Colombia. There has been little effort to engage or open Cuba, even as the end of the Castro brothers’ regime approaches. In fact, Cuba’s a great example of Obama’s famous caution. While he has been unusually critical of American policy toward Cuba, he won’t use his executive power to make a change. Perhaps Florida’s 29 electoral votes are more meaningful: is this a case of politics getting in the way of Obama’s principles? And while China pours money into new investments in resource-rich Africa, Obama’s legacy of engagement there hasn’t been nearly as influential as Bush’s investments in preventing and combating the AIDS epidemic. Obama’s sensitivities regarding an African legacy were on full display in the summer of 2013 when he traveled to the continent as president. Everywhere he turned, folks brought up Bush’s AIDS initiative in a positive light; many leaders yearned for something as big and bold as that, if not bigger and bolder. History will decide whether Obama’s push to electrify rural Africa is on the level of Bush and AIDS. Right now, it is not seen as that, but in a few decades if the continent’s lights are all on, then there’s a chance. Of course, Obama’s track record in Africa is, happily, nowhere as tragic as Clinton’s decision to stay out of the genocide in Rwanda. But it seems highly questionable whether he would get support for intervention in similar circumstances.
Obama, too, has been frustrated by the world leaders with whom he serves, few of whom will go down in history as world-changing visionaries. He gets along well with British prime minister David Cameron, through a mutual understanding that their relationship must work, given the special bond between the United Kingdom and the United States. He thought former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was fun to watch, and Obama and German chancellor Angela Merkel still deeply respect each other, though the NSA disclosures have really frayed their relationship. Obama developed decent ties with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, a relationship that did not carry over when Medvedev’s patron, Vladimir Putin, returned to the presidency.
But Japan, long a close ally of the United States, has gone through five prime ministers since Obama was inaugurated. The structure of the Chinese government and society, and the decennial leadership transition that took place in early 2013, has prevented Obama from forming close personal ties to any particular official. Obama admires Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, though India has not taken its place on the world stage. “We have not been blessed with the best crop of world leaders,” said one top foreign policy aide, offering one specific example: “When Yitzak Rabin is prime minister of Israel, you can accomplish great things.” Certainly Obama’s relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who all but openly rooted for Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign, is strained by a lack of personal chemistry.
At home, Obama’s legacy will be defined by the recovery he has built. Obama, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner were at the wheel of a messy, uneven, and unequal recovery: the unemployment rate lags among minorities even while overall employment is back to pre-Obama levels and the stock market booms; and Congress debates cuts to food stamp programs while increased tax revenues mean the deficit is falling. Income inequality is worse than ever; perhaps Obama’s only chance to create change is to highlight the issue and begin a conversation that leads, years if not decades down the road, to real action. Raising the federal minimum wage was a step in that direction, and the Democrats are still seen by most voters as more likely to search for a solution—to an extent. And the problem is massive: During Obama’s presidency, the Great Recession fundamentally reshaped the relationship between Middle America and the major cities on both coasts. Many big towns and small cities with populations from 25,000 to 500,000 residents have seen the manufacturing-heavy industries they’ve relied upon for a century wither and die. As their economic centers collapse, increasing numbers of Americans slip into poverty, with the gap between rich and poor widening. It was only a few years ago that the phrase “the 1%” would have meant nothing to nearly all Americans; now it is recognizable shorthand for a manifestly unjust arrangement.
The transition from manufacturing-based economies to service- and government-based economies, which began decades ago with the dawn of the Information Age, is completing itself under Obama’s watch. It’s an evolution that is inevitable and, in many places, excruciating. The success/failure divides are stark. Silicon Valley thrives, while nearby Oakland suffers terrifying child poverty rates. Obama speaks at the University of Michigan in flush Ann Arbor, while, not many miles away, Detroit, once one of the largest cities in America, corrodes and reverts to grasslands. Middle America is suffering, angrily so in some places, while the two coasts thrive economically. There are truly two Americas—and it is divided by the 5s, as one Republican consultant likes to say. Between I-5 out west and I-95 back east there is an America that is waiting for the recession to end. West of I-5 and east of I-95 there is an America that is taking off. If the coasts (and some of the thriving big cities in between) can’t bring the rest of America along, the country’s politics is in for a rocky ride for some time.
A full recovery is years, if not decades, away, and there’s not much the White House can do about it. One irony of an administration blasted by its Republican critics for growing the size of government in an effort to speed the recovery is that the sheer size of the government workforce when Obama leaves office is likely to be smaller than when he started. But such is the nature of today’s Republican opposition: perception trumps reality when espousing a good talking point.
The battle to reform health care didn’t end when Obama signed the legislation. As the measure is implemented over the coming years, its success or failure will weigh heavily on the president’s legacy. It may be a decade or two before the law’s full impact—how much it actually bent the cost curve, how many uninsured Americans were able to get coverage, how many lives were saved in the process—is really measurable. The botched launch of Obama’s prime initiative was ample evidence of his management weakness, and implementing the law is going to be made all the more difficult by continued Republican efforts to block the bill. But there is no doubt that a corner has been forever turned, and that in some form national health care will now be part of American life. That the breakthrough will be known as “Obamacare” may indeed be the president’s most lasting legacy, a branding that ultimately obscures so many of the administration’s other frustrations and failures. The irony is there: the greatest first aid provided by Obamacare will be to those it helped—and one of those millions may actually be a reputation, that of Barack Obama.
The scandals that marked earlier administrations have been largely absent from the Obama White House. While Obama is clearly ambitious, perhaps even overly so in the way every man who seeks to become the most powerful single person in the world must be, there are no skeletons in his personal closet, and his administration has been careful—some would argue overly so—to avoid the sorts of misuse of power that would get anyone thrown in jail. Obama will go down in history as one of the more decent people to serve in the Oval Office. The scandals that have infected the White House have had their origins far away from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Covering up the roles of CIA operatives in and around Benghazi, Libya, for example, was more a function of the agency trying to maintain the worst-kept secret in foreign policy—that diplomatic facilities are often fronts that spies and operatives can use to hide their true objectives. The close scrutiny the Internal Revenue Service gave to conservative and Tea Party groups over tax-exempt status happened in an agency that has been independent of the White House since Richard Nixon used his IRS to investigate political enemies. And while conservatives railed at the IRS, little attention was given to the many groups that were essentially trying to take advantage of a bad loophole that allowed political groups to get tax-exempt status. The constant investigations led by the zealous Darrell Issa, the California Republican who has used his perch atop the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to issue hundreds of subpoenas, haven’t cost a single political appointee in the administration his or her job. They have only served to undermine one of the more important committees in Congress, which is why Republican leaders have been eager to take the gavel away from him.
Some blame for Obama’s challenges has to be apportioned to the proliferation of hyperpartisan cable news channels or political blogs: blame Republicans, blame Democrats, blame anyone and everyone—as long as neither party has an incentive to give in, there’s no reason to believe that anyone will be able to break the fever.
And the cynical truth is that the gridlock is in the best interests of many, if not the American people. Candidates, PACs, and lobbying groups financially thrive on discontent. To a great extent, American politics is now defined by declarations of opposition instead of a search for common ground. You run against.
Here, too, Obama’s arrogance got the better of him. And at the end of the day, arrogance may be a better description than naïveté. After all, while the presidency was a giant leap for him, he was not entirely a stranger to Washington. He had, albeit briefly, been a senator, and had seen from the inside how things work. He had heard all of his colleagues voice the same platitudes about the process being broken, and seen that none of them had been able to change that. But he would, he just knew it. This was the “hope” he’d spoken about.
Despite it all, Barack Obama believes he has left the country in a position to become a better place, should his vision work. And framed that way, the future is brighter for Obama’s place in the history books. Whether it’s the energy advancements the stimulus bill funded (simply the aggressive fuel mileage standards might do the trick), the health care benefits that, no matter their birthing pains, will be available to future generations, or the engagement with an emerging China, the administration has put in place building blocks that can become a lasting legacy.
But the grand change Obama promised has not come to pass. The cesspool of Washington stinks more than ever, partisan relations are at a nadir, and more money than ever before is flowing into politics, and we know less about where it comes from. The institutions that existed long before Obama arrived in Washington are stronger than ever, and they will be once he leaves office, too.
When Obama leaves office, it’ll be twenty-four straight years of polarizing presidents, all three of whom were elected, in part, to help end some of the acrimony. It is standard for historians to point out that a president could have done more, and surely this will be said about Obama. Presidents ask the same question about themselves.
Because some of the grandest goals candidate Obama had for his presidency, most notably changing Washington and bridging the political divide, will not be fulfilled by him, he can only hope that someday he’ll be credited with being the architect of the change he promised. Years from now, it is likely that the two terms of Barack Obama will be seen in a more glowing light than they are now, and if so, that light will put into shadow some of the dysfunction he had to deal with.
Some of that dysfunction was forced upon him, some of it came from him. If a huge reason for the failure of Washington to get anything done is a focus on means instead of productive ends, Obama’s struggles came from his focus on ends to the exclusion of productive means. In that way he was indeed a stranger. In his State of the Union speech in January 2014, he told Congress that he was “eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still—and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do.”
The way to get something done, Obama was saying, was to go it alone—just as, to some extent, he always had.