Loving the Alien (iii) : The Barack Obama Record (Domestic Policy Summary)

<This is the fourth article in a series intended as a brief retrospective of the Barack Obama presidency. Not intended to be exhaustive (as we are still too close to the headlight-like glare of his tenure), we will return to add to this analysis as time permits and more information is released so we have the benefit of both hindsight and history. There will be one more section based on Obama's foreign policy and a new potential series on the Trump administration.>

So, yes, lots of change. Healthier school lunches. A ban on “light” cigarettes. Streamlined financial aid forms that take college applicants 20 minutes to complete instead of an hour. Reduced sentencing disparities between crack and powdered cocaine. A popular new competitive grant program called TIGER for innovative transportation projects. Immigration enforcement that prioritizes dangerous felons rather than ordinary families. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act easing gender discrimination lawsuits. New rules requiring fast-food restaurants to post nutritional information. The percentage of student borrowers getting relief through through “income-based repayment” has tripled in just the past two years. George W. Bush’s tax cuts are gone for families earning more than $450,000 a year and permanent for everyone else; Bush’s limits on stem-cell research are gone, too. Medicare will now cover end-of-life planning discussions, a shift that could help ease the pain, as well as the cost, of many American deaths.

But any evaluation of Obama’s policy legacy has to grapple with the fact that it’s been a political debacle for most Democrats who aren’t named Obama. Hillary Clinton has been vanquished as the party's standard bearer. The GOP now has an iron grip on the House and a solid majority in the Senate; compared with 2009, there are 10 additional Republican governors and some 900 additional Republican state legislators. This isn’t just a political problem: It had an instant impact on his agenda—for example, crippling his vision for a national high-speed rail network. America’s first bullet train was supposed to be operating by now in Florida, but after riding a Tea Party wave into office in 2010, GOP Governor Rick Scott killed the project. And congressional Republicans have refused to approve a penny for high-speed rail since then.

The resurgent Republicans made spending cuts their top priority, threatening to shut down the government or force it into a catastrophic default if Obama didn’t agree to a retrenchment. He grudgingly accepted a deal that included the deep cuts known as the “sequester,” reducing discretionary spending to its lowest levels since the Eisenhower era. That fiscal squeeze, along with Obama’s tax hikes and the economic recovery, has helped reduce deficits from an unsustainable 10 percent of GDP to a relatively stable 3 percent. But it also threatens the future of Obama’s progressive project—things like infrastructure and health care and education cost money.

Of course, now that a Republican will succeed Obama with a Republican Congress in place, the likely result will be far deeper spending cuts. The 2016 GOP candidates proposed trillions of dollars’ worth of tax cuts as well, and they all hope to roll back Obamacare, Wall Street reform and the EPA’s carbon rule.

Really, they hope to roll back the entire Obama era.

But that might not be doable anymore. It’s easier to prevent people from getting stuff than it is to take away stuff people already have, and even as Republicans gain full control of Washington, there are signs that they would be reluctant to kick 15 million people off health insurance and remove Obamacare’s insurance protections for everyone else. It’s also unclear that they would be able to reverse the ongoing shift in the health care system from paying for volume to paying for value—or that they would want to. Similarly, the GOP candidates would certainly be less inclined to enforce carbon regulations. But it’s tough to see how they could reverse the larger trends toward cleaner energy that began during the Obama era, as dirty power gets more expensive and clean power gets cheaper. If one lesson of the Obama era is that doing stuff in Washington is hard, another is that undoing stuff is even harder.

Nevertheless, 2016 was in part a referendum on the Obama era, even if the Democratic nominee was named Clinton. The Republicans spent a lot of the campaign season running against Obama, attacking his big-government, anti-business, climate-obsessed ways. And Hillary Clinton had, at times warily, made the case that economic indicators have improved under Obama, which is true. Unemployment has dropped from a peak of 10 percent in 2009 to 5 percent today. House Speaker Paul Ryan recently called this “the illusion of success,” but if it is, it’s an illusion that includes fewer uninsured, a better housing market and a vastly improved fiscal outlook.

Still, that raises a question: If the Obama brand of change is so great, why haven’t more Americans embraced it? Does he have a larger “Everything’s Amazing, Nobody’s Happy” problem?

The simple fact is everything isn’t amazing, especially middle-class wage growth. The president’s approval ratings are hovering north of 50 percent, better than any recent commander in chief's in this era of rigid partisan polarization. And in their focus groups, Americans respond much more positively to Obama and his achievements when they’re reminded that he inherited an economy contracting at a minus 8 percent annual rate.

That said, Obama’s 'Change We Can Believe In' is clearly less resonant today than it was as an alternative to Bush in 2008. In a recent GQ interview with Bill Simmons, Obama blamed this on bad salesmanship, saying he wished he had communicated better early in his presidency.

With all due respect, that’s hogwash. It stands to reason that, while his team was focused on policy, nobody in the White House thought they wouldn’t have to sell it. And they tried to.

It just didn’t sell.

The question is why, but a question that mattered for the 2016 election. At the time, there were all kinds of internal debates about messaging -- how much to blame Bush, how much to promise, how much to talk about jobs while jobs were still disappearing, how much to dance in the end zone once the policies seemed to be working but people were still hurting -- and none of them has ever been resolved.

But one possibility, a troubling one for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party as they were routed by Trumpism, is that Obama’s activist policies poll badly because people just don’t like them. For example, over Syria and terrorism the media consensus seemed to be that he should have announced plans to 'Take Action.' Bush was a 'Take Action' president in foreign affairs, and by most accounts it didn’t work out too well. But Americans seem to respond well when commanders-in-chief vow to 'Take Action' to keep them safe.

In domestic affairs, however, Americans often react less well to 'Take Action' promises (remember George H.W. Bush's promised 'Domestic Storm' initiatives, coming after the triumphant success of 'Desert Storm?'). They seem to suspect that when government acts, it’s probably acting to help someone else. It may be that, just as Americans wanted to 'Take Less Action' abroad after Bush, they’ll look for someone who will promise to 'Take Less Action' at home after Obama.

Then again, if Democrats had managed to hold the White House, Obama’s domestic legacy as a 'Take Action' guy would have been safe. The prevailing media narrative of his era has been all about Washington paralysis, but the prevailing historical narrative is much likelier to focus on social and economic change, for better or for worse. For those who follow policy and politics in real time, that gap between perception and reality in the Obama era ought to be significant.

This was a consequential domestic presidency.