Loving the Alien: The Barack Obama Record (Intro)

It is an open secret that Barack Obama is a huge ‘Star Trek’ fan. In particular he is said to be particularly fond of the starship Enterprise's half-human, half-Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock. This is not hard to fathom. Obama prides himself on his emotional control, his preternatural “cool,” a consistent tendency to always come across as the “adult in the room.” He appears to be remarkably self-contained, impervious to the emotional succour and cravings for constant reinforcement fellow politicians need. Yet this natural propensity for internalized distance has prevented him from cultivating precisely the type of relationships he needed with important figures from his own party and the opposition Republicans.

Feeling jilted, un-courted, and thus unappreciated, congressional Republicans doubled down in relentless opposition the president’s plans. By the time Obama learned that good ideas and persuasive public oratory could only go so far, and that the politics of persuasion requires the type of personal face time cajoling he obviously finds personally discomforting, it was too late for both sides to clasp hands across the yawning communications chasm that had opened up.

Thus, over the past seven-and-three-quarter years, Americans have heard an awful lot from each camp about Barack Obama and his presidency, but the actual substance of his domestic policies and their impact on the country remain poorly understood, buried by the thick fog of Republican attacks and Democratic counter attempts at hagiography. In fact, he has engineered quite a few quiet revolutions—and some of his louder revolutions are shaking up the status quo in quiet ways. He is often deservedly taken to task for failing to deliver on the hope-and-change rhetoric that inspired so many voters during his swift ascent to the presidency. But a dispassionate review of his record shows that the Obama era has produced much more sweeping change than most of his supporters or detractors realize.

It’s true that Obama failed to create the post-partisan political change he originally promised during his ‘Yes-We-Can’- fueled pursuit of the White House. Washington remains as hyper-partisan and broken as ever. But he also promised dramatic policy change, vowing to reinvent America’s approach to issues like health care, education, energy, climate and finance, and that promise he has largely kept. When all the legislation from his frenetic first two years is looked at and all the methodical executive actions from the past five years (after Republicans blocked his legislative path) this has been a domestically consequential presidency, engineered by relentless government activism, which represents a profound course correction from eight years of relative stagnation. As a candidate, Obama was often dismissed as a big talker, a silver-tongued political savant with no real record of achievement. But ever since he took office during a raging economic crisis, he’s turned out to be much more of a quiet doer, an action-oriented policy wonk who has often ironically failed at effectively communicating his accomplishments.

What he has put in place is altering the way in which energy is produced and consumed, how doctors and hospitals treat patients, the academic standards in the long suffering school system, and perhaps most significantly, the long-term fiscal trajectory of the nation. Gays can now serve openly in the military, insurers can no longer deny claimants coverage because of pre-existing conditions, credit card companies can no longer impose hidden fees and markets no longer believe the biggest banks are too big to fail. Solar energy installations are up nearly 2,000 percent, and carbon emissions have dropped even though the economy is growing. Even Republicans like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who one day hope to succeed Obama (Donald Trump notwithstanding), spent 2016 on the campaign trail warning that he’s accomplished most of his agenda.

So there has indeed been change, though it is clear that many years will pass before more people actually comprehend the exact nature of it.

In a conflict-obsessed media environment that is neither geared toward substantive policy analysis nor Socratic discourse, Obama’s technocratic brand of change has tended to be more opaque than, say, Donald Trump’s plan for a wall along the Mexican border or Bernie Sanders’ promise of free college for all. At times, its very complexity has camouflaged its ambition. At other moments, its ambition hasn’t matched to Obama’s soaring rhetoric. For example, he talked a good game about eliminating wasteful programs, but other than killing the F-22 fighter jet, an absurdly expensive presidential helicopter and an unknown bank regulatory agency called the Office of Thrift Supervision, he hasn’t done much of that.

The most obvious thing Obama hasn’t done is usher in a new era of public enthusiasm for government action and the Democratic Party. He was re-elected by a comfortable margin, but conservative Republicans took back both houses of Congress and made impressive gains in statehouses on his watch, riding a powerful wave of hostility to perceived federal overreach. That political legacy could imperil some of Obama’s centre-left policy legacy now that Trump has been elected to succeed him. It has already stymied gun control and immigration reform, while forcing Obama to accept deep spending cuts he didn’t want.

The simple truth is that Obama is truly bipartisan in that he is not so much a party man, but a man of ideas, whose idealistic poetry was instead hammered into the dull prose of everyday governance. He is a cerebral, intellectual man whose professorial mien was never entirely suited to his role. Not quite a philosopher king in the mould of Pierre Elliott Trudeau or a hard-headed visionary like Lee Kuan Yew, but someone who aspired to be a Nelson Mandela and float above it all.

Yet it is also noteworthy how often Obama has managed to get what he wanted, in many cases policies that Democrats (and sometimes moderate Republicans) have striven towards for decades, and how often those policies have slipped under the radar.

Obama bailed out U.S. automakers, enacted an enormous economic stimulus package, signed the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules since the Great Depression, killed the Keystone XL pipeline and issued historic carbon regulations to fight climate change. That much is well publicized. But how many Americans are aware of his administration’s harsh regulations cracking down on for-profit diploma mills, inefficient industrial practices and investment advisers with conflicts of interest? Everyone knows the Obamacare website was a disaster, but few realize that Obama impulsed some of the Silicon Valley techies who fixed it to stick around and start up a U.S. Digital Service, so as to bring government tech into the 21st century.

Internally, Obama has made a point of distinguishing his approach from Bill Clinton’s incremental style, telling aides airily he didn’t seek the Big Chair to promote school uniforms. Take that $800 billion stimulus, which set the tone for his big-thinking presidency in his very first month. Its main goal was saving the economy, but as his advisers liked to say, it was also stuffed with an entire administration’s worth of accomplishments. By contrast, Clinton fought unsuccessfully early in his presidency for a mere $16 billion stimulus, just enough to fund the high-speed broadband and high-speed rail initiatives in Obama’s package. When comparing both White Houses it seems that Clinton’s was better at touting its work, while Obama’s has been too busy doing actual work. The problem is that in politics, as in life, if one has a great idea or significant accomplishment, not communicating it invariably results in not have it recognized, or even acknowledged.

This kind of oversight is surprising, especially when taken in the context that Obama is more intellectually inclined than many of his predecessors, and is an avid student of history. The bully pulpit has to be judiciously used, lest the people tire of their president’s over exposure. However, there are times when pausing to focus on delivering positive news, framed in simple, clearly understood terms, is sometimes as important as the actual results, especially when the doom and gloom which pervades the land can be momentarily dispelled through celebrating a positive milestone. In retrospect administration officials would comment that they failed to capitalize on getting out the message because there were, “a million other things going on.’” That smacks of a cop-out and speaks of a team focused on either too many objectives or too fixated on minutiae to see the need to ensure public awareness. "Let's fix it and the public will figure out later how they benefited" is the political equivalent of sloppy thinking.

Somehow, Obama’s policy-first approach has managed both to galvanize his Republican enemies, who portray him as a European-style leftist on a big-government tear, and to disappoint many liberal elites, who see his presidency as a series of ineffectual half-measures. His administration has struggled to explain complex achievements like clearinghouses for derivatives trades, net neutrality rules for the Internet and temporary legal status for undocumented immigrants who arrived as children. It’s been hard to break through with policy details when so many eyes have been on the Great Recession, the Republican revival, the partisan budget wars that have raged since 2011 and other Washington dramas. His foreign policy, which we will examine in detail in a separate post — draw downs in Afghanistan and Iraq, messes up in Russia and Syria, launches openings to Iran and Cuba, carries through on the killing of Osama bin Laden, generates a pending Pacific Rim trade deal (the Transpacific Partnership – TPP) and the global climate agreement in Paris—and also distracted attention from his domestic work.

The data is straightforward. The economy was bleeding 800,000 jobs a month when Obama took office; it has now enjoyed 69 straight months plus of private-sector job growth, though economists disagree about how much credit the President deserves for the recovery, and in any case wage growth has been tepid. The deficit has shrunk by nearly $1 trillion, and Medicare’s long-term solvency has been extended by 13 years. The resuscitated auto industry produced 11 million vehicles in 2014. Federal contractors can no longer discriminate against gays, women can now serve in combat and the rich are paying higher taxes. A new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is policing unscrupulous mortgage brokers, payday lenders and other rip-off artists, and the financial system has much less risky leverage.

Before Obama, Americans were using more energy every year; now they use less energy overall, and more of that energy is clean. Oil imports are down 60 percent from 2008 levels, more than a third of America’s coal plants are shutting down and sales of LED bulbs have increased 50-fold. Health care inflation and the uninsured rate have both fallen to their lowest levels in half a century, and doctors now use iPads instead of clipboards. Student borrowers can now ratchet down their monthly payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income and get their loans forgiven after 20 years, rules that are gradually and almost silently easing the student debt crisis. Nine of 13 federal appeals courts now have a majority of Democratic-appointed judges; in 2009, it was one of 13.

Americans might not agree how much Obama can personally take credit for all of it, or whether that’s ‘Change We Can Believe In’. But it’s change.

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