Was Obama’s a Failed Presidency?

The answer is not as obvious, coming from The Sensible Conservative, as one might think.

Failure is not to be confused with unpopularity.  During most of his presidency, Barack Obama’s approval rating has been below fifty percent.

 

Doing the right thing, being effective, being successful do not automatically translate into popularity.

 

A stark, unsettling example:  Abraham Lincoln, prior to the capture of Atlanta in 1864, was considered a certainty to lose re-election.  According to historians, even the president agreed.

President Obama took office in January 2009 on a tide of (forgive me) “hope and change”.  Retrospective cynicism might dismiss the campaign slogan as a fraud.  But that would ignore the first black president’s popular promises to promote a post-racial society and to end President Bush’s deeply unpopular Iraq war.  He failed on the first but succeeded on the second. 

It’s hard to dispute that race relations have deteriorated since President Obama took office.  The President’s tendency to take sides in confrontations between white police officers and blacks didn’t help.  (The episode involving the Cambridge cop and the Harvard professor was an early episode.)  Barack Obama’s comments reinforced views held within African American communities that they remained a target of wide-spread discrimination.  And certainly some whites believed that they were being singled out for criticism by a black president because of their race.  Maybe projections of a post-racial society that did not come to pass with the ascendency of the Obama presidency generated a pessimism across the “racial divide” that exacerbated tensions.

In any event, so much for the hope that energized the Obama Administration eight years ago.  It was soon dashed. 

  

As for change, it certainly came.  Iraq was abandoned.  ISIS came into being and Syria exploded.

On the domestic front, the Democrats controlled Congress for the first two years of the new administration and approved the so-called Affordable Care Act.

In 2011 and forward, with Congress no longer hospitable to Obama’s leftist change agenda, the President focused on legislation by fiat (“executive orders”) affecting immigration and environmental policies, in particular. 

Change, however, to be of long term significance, must last.  Obamacare, approved without any GOP support, appears on life support because of its strictly partisan birth.  No Republican has an interest in its survival.  Presidential attempts to make or modify law by the stroke of a pen can just as easily be crossed out.

In retrospect, the hope for an uplifting president was either a naïve wish or a cynical promise depending on who expressed the sentiment.  But Barack Obama did bring about change.  So, in that respect, his Administration succeeded.  The unpopular wars in the Middle East no longer have major U.S. involvement and America’s health care system has been substantially revamped.

 

The Administration’s military activism – the lack thereof – was popular; Obama’s executive orders were not.  Interestingly enough, it can be argued that the Administration’s public standing, while bolstered by its “no more wars” policy, was crippled by the deceitful promotion of the Health Care Act.  That caused Democrats to lose control of the House of Representatives and insured that changes imposed by the executive alone risked being ephemeral. 

              

As for hope, it was an unrealized dream.  But, in the sense of bringing change, Obama was successful in serving his objectives.  Whether these changes were in America’s best interests is a different question.  And, of course, to the extent that they were not, Barack Obama failed as president in the only sense that really matters.