Don’t get me wrong — basically, I’m a fan. And I understand that all presidents are flawed. But before the hagiography gets fully underway on January 21st, I want to remind people of some things. And I want to suggest that if we measure a president by his legacy, then the things that I’m going to detail below are particularly crucial to any assessment of Obama as a ‘great’ president. Where he has failed are precisely in categories and with policies that have left us weaker, and left the weakest even more vulnerable. So, in no particular order:
Drone policy — As Jeremy Scahill states in The Intercept’s “The Drone Papers,” “Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination.” We can’t even know how many actual terrorist targets have been taken out. In fact the range of civilian casualties vaguely sits somewhere between 493 and 1,168 in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia alone. And, as Adam Gallagher puts it in The Prospect, the policy (when one was finally set out in 2013) is basically that “all adult males killed by drone strikes are considered terrorists — unless proven otherwise, after they’ve already been killed.”
Surveillance — Obama has pursued policies that have created the most powerful and unaccountable surveillance state the world has ever seen. We may hand-wring over Putin’s electoral exploits, but it is the NSA and all of the other intelligence organizations of the US that have been exponentially strengthened over the last eight years. And responsibility sits with the president who seems so sure of his own goodness that he doesn’t see the inherent evil in policies he sets. So now, he is handing over agencies over whom oversight has been weakened to the point of laughability. As Stephen Walt argued in Foreign Policy in 2013, even before Snowden’s NSA revelations, covert surveillance means there is never the opportunity for a citizen to confront his or her accuser, making it therefore, unconstitutional, a priori.
Refusal to engage in politics — Supporters of Obama like to lay full blame for any failures to get legislation passed at the feet of the Republicans. But that’s convenient amnesia. We need to remember, for example, that the ACA was passed in December 2009. It went into effect in March of 2010, with a series of legislative changes that occurred at regular intervals — after 90 days, 180 days, 6 months, start of 2011, etc. And finally, on October 1, 2014 we arrived at the start date for the HealthCare.gov website.
Throughout that entire period, if people are honest with themselves, there was intense frustration with Obama and his administration because they refused to try and sell the program: tout its benefits, point out successes as they started to happen. For example, groups like Kaiser polled and found a majority of Americans in 2010 were actually in favor of the law and strategists implored Obama at the time to stump for the program — and he never did.
Refusal to get his hands dirty — The stuff I described above was all once the ACA was passed. Many Dems also like to forget the fact that when the law was being crafted everyone knew it was never going to be supported by Republican lawmakers and yet he kept trying to make it more appealing in hopes of a bipartisan win. In other words, Obama’s obsession with the possibility of consensus (ie. his pathological aversion to using the power of his majority when they had it) meant that the ACA was already less than it could have been when it was sent to the Republicans in the first place because he kept trying to find some ‘middle ground,’ by making concessions without anyone even asking for them!
Closing Guantanamo — Obama stated that one of the first things he would do was close the prison. He never did. Now, people will say, “it’s complicated.” Yeah. No kidding. They will also suggest that he’s been diligently trying. But that’s also a convenient rewriting of history. In the summer of his first year in office, Obama stated quite clearly that he accepted the fact that the prison couldn’t and shouldn’t be closed because it posed too much of a security risk. As Karen Greenberg sets out in a lengthy piece in The Nation in April, there has really never been a message that this was a driving imperative. Obama and Holder both backed down on multiple occasions regarding procedure, military courts, etc.
Red lines — This is symptomatic of a larger problem. For a president who has consistently been described as a “man of conviction,” Obama has repeatedly and frustratingly changed a very clearly stated position. Now, I’m the first to agree that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, but there has been a troubling tendency to find that inconsistency more often on positions of principle — like Gitmo, or chemical warfare in Syria, or intervention in Libya.
Foreign policy — I am not an interventionist when it comes to foreign policy. I firmly believe that one of the best things that Obama has done is resist the temptation to strap on the six-shooters when it’s the politically easy and expedient thing to do. The United States is going through whatever the opposite of growing pains are — as the great empire shrinks in power and influence it is very tempting to throw the patriots some red meat to ease their sense of growing inadequacy.
But two major events were massive miscalculations that Obama supporters like to minimize. The first is the invasion of Libya without any subsequent follow through. To be fair, he is totally aware of the failure there — according to an Atlantic piece by Dominic Tierney, he himself called it a “shit show.” Under cover of UN resolutions and NATO coordination, Obama and Cameron thought that a quick and easy regime change was possible. They flouted the embargo that they themselves had supported, thereby actually escalating events. And they both hid behind — and thereby weakened — two institutions that Republicans and foreign enemies like Russia already criticize.
And Syria. Well. For the most part there is no right answer and there hasn’t been since the beginning. But one very, very wrong move was the two steps forward, one step back dance of hawk to dove and back again that occurred from August to October of 2013. And of course a central part of it was the infamous drawing of the red line of intervention in the event of chemical attacks against civilians, and then reneging on that. He should never have said it. By doing so, he set up false hope within the ranks of the rebels. Beyond that, he perhaps actually insured that the attacks happened.
In all fairness, Derek Cholet, who was an Obama advisor, has written a lengthy defense in Politico of Obama’s strategy during that time. And who am I to naysay the insider. But in the essay, Cholet is solely focused on the White House’s actions as part of a strategy to get Assad to admit he possessed chemical weapons. And boy, they sure were successful. But at what price? And purely on the subject of moral equivocation that I mentioned above — it bothers me that Obama’s persona is that of the quintessential man of principle. And yet, it is precisely in that area that he has often shown his weakest self.
So what’s the legacy?
We won’t know for a while. But two contradictory behaviors over the past eight years have left the office, the nation, and the world, quite vulnerable. Obama has permitted himself to stray over moral lines repeatedly. Without claiming to peer into his soul, it seems that his abiding faith in human decency in general, and his own in particular, have been his enablers in this. And yet, on the other hand, he has insisted on the rightness of his position, and refused to compromise his principles, get down and dirty with the other politicians and engage in the proverbial sausage making.
This paradox — that he has found wiggle room when grappling with his own conscience but rigidity when engaging with anyone else’s — will leave a destructive legacy. The rightness of his drone and surveillance policies — just as two examples — are predicated on the president and the leaders of the military and intelligence apparatus being people of principle. And the imperious style and greater opacity of his administration, which has repeatedly been excused by supporters as necessary because of the recalcitrance of his opponents, now appears to have conveniently set out the tools of authoritarianism for someone less upstanding to wield.
Martini Wisdom 