For some time now I have been thinking about the legacy of President Obama. There have been past presidents who were obsessed by their legacy – about how history would view them.
As you are all aware problems and unanticipated happenings beset a presidency. And a president is judged by how he deals with these events. Lord knows there are plenty of pundits, presidential historians and just plain folks judging and taking “pot shots” at every decision, and non decision, action and utterance coming from the White House. Nixon was criticized for lighting a fire in his office in the White House during the summer. The lesson is - No Slack!
If by some quirk of circumstance I were to be asked to run for the office (ludicrous as that is) I would rather drink raw sewage than put myself through such agony. But power (an opportunity to act on your world view - for those who have one) and a place in history is a big draw, and thus the small army of contenders arises every four years.
In some way, large and small, I honor and admire every man who has ever held the office. Even those I didn’t like and almost completely disagreed with. There is a significant sacrifice in assuming the office that is made-up, only in part, by the trappings of office and a place in history. And the proportionality and balancing the competing interest groups inherent in national and international affairs is a very heavy burden.
Not having a professional editor I often ask a small coterie of friends, whose opinions I thoroughly respect, to review a final draft of my articles. Often I get a lot of notations on typos (okay really spelling errors) and syntax errors. In this case Roy Davis took the time to give me a very different view of Mr. Obama than I presented. I thought about replying to Roy on a point-by-point basis. But then I hit on publishing his article along side mind, much like a dissenting judicial opinion. Roy makes many outstanding points and while his views differ from mine I thoroughly respect his intent and viewpoint.
The Obama Legacy: The “T” Words
A legacy is a leave behind, a trail of remembrances and happenings that follow us evoking fond, and sometimes not so fond, memories. For you and me a legacy does not usually extend beyond family and friends. For a major public figure, and especially a president of the United States numbering only forty-four to date, an historical record extends virtually forever.
We are well into Barack Obama’s second term I am still unsure who he is and what his legacy will be. Reformer, change agent, the Washington transformer, compromiser, middle of the roader? Almost five years into his presidency I do not know whether to applaud or shake my head in despair.
Watching our President hold an impromptu press conference after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin shooting, one can only be impressed by the depth and character of the man. Here was the leader of the free world, with all the majesty and trappings of power saying “That could have been me”. Thus helping white Americans understand the plight of a black man in the America of to-day. I was brought to tears hearing him speak from his heart.
Yet I am more than a bit puzzled as to why he has done certain things and, even more importantly, why he has failed to do many other things. (Yeah I will get specific real soon.)
And before you jump my bones there is little question that he is an order of magnitude better, in every respect, than his predecessor. But this is not about comparison but about the man, and the sense of betrayal and dashed expectations felt by many based upon what we thought we saw in him. In retrospect were we relying too much on the image and the spin, projecting our own unwarranted expectations onto him?
My most treasured mentor was fond of saying that dealing with clients was all about managing expectations. If a client expects a completed building or bridge at the end of your labors, and you hand them a set of drawings they will be sorely disappointed, to say the least (to say the most is that they will not pay for the work and, in addition, trash your reputation). Thus I question whether we have managed our expectations well in this regard and that this, not Mr. Obama’s failings, is the primary source of our discontent?
I am very conscious of the fact that I must take care to separate out Barack Obama’s specific promises from the wish list constructed around my expectations. And I also must take into account the fact that as president he has faced a viciously oppositional congress that, if not able to thwart every policy initiative, has been successful in making every legislative effort orders of magnitude more arduous than it should have been. More than any past president has ever faced.
Four “T” words keep popping up in my head each time I begin to assess Mr. Obama and his presidency; timidity, transitional, transformational and transcendent. It is so temptation to judge the man on a scale from “meah” or tepid, and thus forgettable in the fog of history, to a president that has changed the very nature of our Republic.
And I must ask myself; to what extent can any president actually change the nature of our Republic? Or is the office doomed to simply preside over change? Will all change be limited to simply being steered or nudged by a man (and hopefully in the near future a woman) who happens to be in the right place, at the right time?
To answer my rhetorical question, it is clear that a president can be a significant instrument of change – whether transformational or transcendent I leave up to you. And while they cannot do it alone considering the checks and balances built into our constitutional system, simply limiting the answer to the recent example of George W. Bush ensnaring the country in a horrendously expensive war on the basis of outright lies, false pretenses and “cooked” intelligence answers the question in the affirmative. Admittedly this followed the national trauma of 9/11 that allowed the Bush administration to play this con game on the American public, our allies and then get congress to follow.
In a discussion with friends on this point they were strong in their belief that the times make the man. George W. Bush was flailing in his presidency, rudderless and without a clear agenda or focus until the planes crashing into the world Trade Center interrupting his reading of The Pet Goat at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School and traumatized the nation and the world.
Looking back on our evolution as a nation, we raise to greatness such presidents as Lincoln (emancipation and preserving our nation via the “act of northern aggression”) and Roosevelt (bringing us out the great depression and sheparding us through WWII), and simply dismiss many others.
Of course Barack Obama will forever be identified as the first African-American president. A mind blowing feat, brought on, in part, by his intelligence, suave, articulate manner and good looks, and in no small measure as a counter to President George W. Bush who was so greatly disliked that by the end of his second term his approval rating was below twenty percent.
And I cannot pass up another opportunity to bash Bush II and his administration of neo- cons who frittered away the six trillion dollar surplus they inherited, and then spent us into an eleven trillion dollar debt. This was a staggering reversal of fortune. Through arrogance, hubris and a long simmering neo-con belief that Bush I did not finish the job in Iraq, initiated two wars and enacted two massively expensive unfunded programs.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama is the subject of blatant racism, vilified by many simply because of the color of his skin. The very thought of a “nigger” in the White House is both an anathema and a rallying point to a significant minority of bigoted Americans. This under-current of prejudice, rarely stated openly, has deeply colored our zeitgeist.
It is complete and utter folly to believe that the America of today is a post-racial society. If you believe that racism is not an issue in twenty-first century American you are not black. A post-racist society was a pipe dream in 2008, even though Obama implicitly campaigned on it. Events such as the George Zimmerman trial and numerous societal studies, such as the recent and startling study by child psychologist Dr. Melanie Killen have found inherent racial bias, even among “nice kids”, in good schools, with parents who are not openly or overtly racist.
What was most illuminating in the wake of the Killen study was the profound shock on the part of the parents of the children who expressed subtlety racist sentiments. When shown their child’s explanation of drawings depicting a happening in a school corridor, they looked startled, like deer caught in the headlights. This shock was followed by puzzlement as to how their children could have developed such beliefs.
Further, it bears repeating that a political as well as a social opposition has beset Mr. Obama. It is, in essence, complete opposition to anything he or the Democrats propose. This opposition has been reduced to satire recently when it was suggested that the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, would refuse to pass a kidney stone if his doctor was a Democrat.
No vigorous debate, no counter proposals or any sense of give and take – in other words no compromise of any degree or kind. The GOP has actually found traction in blanket opposition to any of the Democrats legislative proposals and initiatives, even if they were essentially the same legislation previously proposed, or even enacted, by the GOP at the state level.
For example, in the recent past there was strong conservative support for an individual mandate to buy health insurance. This was the Heritage Foundation’s preferred approach to health care reform in the early 1990s. Yet the GOP thoroughly repudiated this position when it emerged as a centerpiece of Obama’s health care reform. And there are very strong parallels between Obama Care and the health care plan enacted in Massachusetts when George Romney was the governor. It was amusing to see Romeny twist himself into a rhetorical pretzel trying to deny this.
This intransigence has been compounded and reinforced by two forces; first, a rise in popularism that took the form of the Tea Party. A seemingly organic and spontaneous movement fueled by the anger generated in the wake of the bail-outs and stimulus. Their followers, called by some teahadists, are dogged ideologues that are so intransigent that they are actually willing to destroy their own party and shut down the government rather than compromise on fiscal isues.
The second force has been the fact that this unwavering, absolute opposition has proven to be an effective tactic (possibly the only effective tactic available to the GOP that does not involve working in concert with the Democrats and thus compromising) to a party that was devastated in consecutive presidential elections.
This tactic of NO! was articulated and pushed relentlessly by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, and it is credited with bringing the GOP back from the brink of, if not extinction than irrelevancy.
The Republican Party, in doing a post mortem of the 2012 presidential election, realized that they received scant support from a raft of different demographic groups; African-Americans, Hispanics, women and the under thirty voters. A recent survey commissioned by the Young Republicans points up this glaring fact and party statesmen, such as former presidential candidate Bob Dole, have called for a complete restructuring and reset of their platform.
This reset was immediately rejected by the Tea Party, the members of their caucus in congress and kowtowed to by House Speaker and majority leader. Boehner and Canter respectively, have made a conscious choice between standing up to the far right or, holding their collective noses and retaining their leadership positions.
In point of fact this insistence on ideological purity has worked to the Democrats advantage. Most notably in 2012 when the Republicans had a real chance to take back the Senate but were undone when five kooky and/or radical candidates won in the primaries over more mainstream Re-publicans. Mainstream conservatives then joined with Democrats in the general elections and universally rejected these extreme candidates.
The polarization in congress has been has been steadily hardened by gerrymandering, the practice of drawing up election district boundaries to ensure one party dominance. In the thirty states with a Republican governor and legislature, the “safe” districts that were created are estimated to number around seventy percent of all congressional seats. One wag said that Texas is trying to stuff all of their 3.8 million Hispanic voters into just two congressional districts. This means that own-party primary fights are more feared than general elections and thus candidates can be bullied into adhering to the party line.
In early 2009 I argued that Barack Obama would go down in history as one of our greatest presidents. I was wrong.
One has to wonder, what if Hillary had become president in 2008. Alternative history is always an interesting exercise; what if the South had won the Civil War, what if the Incas had kicked the crap out of Cortes, or what would our world be like today if Hitler had prevailed?
But would our world be that very different if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency? I believe we still would have had the Tea Party uprising with all the rage and ferment it produced. We still would have had the same level of obstructionism in congress. We still would have had to deal with the financial crisis and the subsequent recession and jobless recovery that followed.
Well what would have been different? The initial flush of electoral success rarely, if ever, translates into a legislative transformation. Health care? Well the Clinton’s tried it, albeit badly. Thus I feel that Hillary would have been a bit gun shy and left this issue alone. Financial reform? Absolutely, and it would have looked very much like that which emerged from Obama’s first term with Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Would Hillary have pushed a bit harder for Elizabeth Warren to head up the CFPB, probably but to what consequence? No, this would not have been a game changer.
Foreign policy? Mrs. Clinton was a terrific Secretary of State (a courageous pick and better at it than we could ever have anticipated) but would she have done anything of substance differently than Obama? So that leaves social initiatives, refusal to defend DOMA, repeal of Don’t Ask – Don’t Tell - pretty much the same I figure.
And I am gonna go out on a limb here and say that it would have been pretty much a draw between the racism that swirls around Obama and the distain that many of the same people would have held for Hillary Clinton for being a woman.
Which brings us back to Mr. Obama’s legacy and the “things” I alluded to earlier.
I distinctly remember election night, November 4, 2012. The polls were strongly in Obama’s favor but much of the GOP punditry and talking heads were absolutely sure that Mitt Romeny was going to pull out a win.
Around eight-fifteen pm on the pacific coast we heard that several major news bureaus were calling the election for Obama. Twenty minutes later when we pulled in to the parking lot at the Obama headquarters in our county the revelers were spilling out into the street and the party was on.
How euphoric we were, the promises made, expectations run amuck. It was a redo of the 2008 election victory with the crowd in the stadium in Chicago, literally in tears, as Barack Obama and his family made its way out onto the stage in a beautifully orchestrated moment. No less a person than Oprah Winfrey, picked out of the crowd by the savvy director, quietly crying and looking up at the stage in beatific wonder.
But before Obama even took the oath of office for the first time the euphoric bubble burst, upending the plans for a new, post-racial world. The magnitude of the financial crisis that emerged was so staggering that its scope could not be easily conceived of at the time.
And then Obama did a very brave, some would say naïve, political thing. He decided to prove that he could chew gum and walk at the same time by proposing an overhaul of health care while simultaneously dealing with the financial crisis. He counted on taking advantage of the two-year window while the Democrats controlled both houses of congress. Or was he simply so naïve that he under estimated the scope of the financial crisis and how all consuming it would become?
The GOP, still reeling from their electoral defeat, began to regroup and formulate the tactic of NO!
Legislative inexperience coupled with a built-in predilection on the part of Mr. Obama that just about anything could be resolved with a coming together and reasoning. I remember that in January 2009, shortly after his first inauguration, he invited the Republican legislative leadership to the White House for a Super Bowl party. Boehner and company were literally speechless, finally commenting that this was a totally unexpected gesture to an opposition party - and they then proceeded to piss on his shoe.
The two-year window when the Democrats controlled both the administrative and legislative branches of government became a time of progressive legislative activity. However, true to form, in the effort to pass the Affordable Care Act with some vestige of compromise and bi-partisan approval the President let the debate go on way too long. Just as he has let the agency rule making related to such legislation as the Dodd-Frank Act linger for over three years. Currently only forty percent of the rules have been written.
The stimulus bill, which preceded the Affordable Care Act, was being put together in early 2009 while the populous anger of the nascent Tea Party was building into a resounding roar.
Opposition was fierce in spite of the Democrats agreeing to about twenty-eight percent of the stimulus in the form of tax cuts. The result was a stimulus bill that undoubtedly saved us from another depression but was insufficient to produce a rapid recovery.
The temperament of seeking accommodation with the opposition, long after it became apparent that no such hope existed, dogged Obama for the balance of his first term in of-fice. Time after time he provided concessions far greater than he had to, angering many progressives who had so fervently believed in him. The extension of the Bush tax cut for the wealthy so angered me personally, that I publicly declared that I would not vote for him again. Well I got over it with a bit of the lesser of two evils rational.
The Republican Party is currently in the process of an autopsy, as Maureen Dowd labeled it, following the party’s near death experience in 2012. There is little debate among the Repubs that they took a whopping in 2012. The primary question seems to be whether the death is ruled a suicide or from natural causes. The mainstream, more moderate Repubs reject a natural demise as the COD (cause of death, sorry but I watch too many police procedurals) and lean towards suicide. The far-right rejects such an explanation with some even saying that the real reason they took such a beating at the polls is that they were not sufficiently ideologically pure. The resulting kafuffle is akin to the gladiator games in ancient Rome and it has been endless fun watching the GOP eat its young.
Before President Obama’s brilliant impromptu press conference on race, “He [Trayvon Martin] could have been me thirty-five years ago”, he was on track to be more of a transitional than a transformational president. Prior to this point he displayed many instances of timidity and absolutely no glimmer of transformational, much less transcendent, behavior.
Recently he has refused to play the macho games of Vladimir Putin of Russia, gone on the stump for Obamacare, said, in no uncertain terms, that he will not be blackmailed on the upcoming increase to the debt limit, and has given clear indication that he thinks that the collection of meta data on emails and telephone calls has gone as bit too far, and lacks transparency.
Jobs growth is slow but steady, the national debt is in major decline, the federal government is much smaller than when he first took office, the trade imbalance is steadily improving and there are still over three years left in his last term. I, for one, pray that greater things are to come.
My thoughts on President Obama
Roy Davis
In response to your essay “The Obama Legacy”:
I’m sure you are aware that my view of Obama is different than yours. I have never thought of him as a progressive. In fact, in my view, it is not even accurate to describe him as liberal. If you look at his overall record, his positions on issues, he is really a right-leaning centrist Democrat. Some, including Chris Hayes, have described him as liberal and left-leaning because of his health care law success, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military, and his repeal of the onerous global gag rule.
However, he gave the leadership of his Affordable Care Act legislation to Max Baucus of Montana, one of the more right-leaning Democrats. Though one would have to accept that the bill is a positive development, it does not contain any public option because Obama refused to fight for it. Most would characterize the bill as pretty mild. Considering the Republican opposition, one can argue that it was a major achievement, or one can complain that Obama did not ask for enough. Of course, the latter issue regarding Obama’s negotiating skills is one of the central weaknesses of his administration in all spheres.
You take the position that Obama is better in all respects than his predecessor. The record does not justify that claim. Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan. He has escalated the use of drones. He has escalated the prosecution of government whistle blowers dramatically. He has killed American citizens overseas. He has increased the use of “state secrets” defense in challenges to civil liberties litigation in courts. He has altered the definition and attacks of so-called terrorists on foreign soil through “signature strikes” which have arbitrarily defined all adult males as legitimate targets and marked them for assassination. One has to wonder how a drone makes that distinction from an altitude of several thousand feet.
He has instigated a “kill list” which permits him to act as judge and jury and kill without recourse. He has seriously increased detainment and deportation of illegal immigrants. He has increased the prosecution of medical marijuana providers in spite of his own statements that he would not do so. He voted for the immunity of the telecoms, and he in-creased the power of the military over the U.S. civilian population with the amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act. Some, including Chris Hedges, claim that those amendments were in effect a repeal of Posse Comitatus. Oh, and he has failed to close Guantanamo. In fact, there was a hunger strike there that brought some attention to the plight of 86 prisoners who have already been totally cleared for release. Have you heard anything from Obama about it since one speech a month ago?
The above acts are not progressive, left-leaning, or even democratic in the minds of many, including me. Not only has he compromised with Republicans over every objection, and there have been way too many, but he has then claimed that the resulting compromises have been beneficial to our future. It’s one thing to compromise, but to then claim it as progress is salt in the wound.
On the fiscal front, since the original stimulus, which has been important and under appreciated, he has been mostly stagnant. He gave up the payroll tax cut to get an increase in capital gains. Net zero? Hard to say. Ending the payroll tax cut meant a loss of income for middle and some lower income Americans. Dodd Frank was a major achievement, but most would again acknowledge that it is a weak reform. The banks are bigger than ever; they have virtually no limitations on derivatives trading, rapid computer trading, or capital requirements. There has been no investigation at all of the rating agencies or of the Libor interest rate manipulation. He has indicated well ahead of impending debt level obstruction by the Republicans that he is willing to consider “chained interest” for Social Security calculations. His financial advisors have uniformly been from the Wall Street crowd and a serious majority from Goldman Sachs. They are all “insiders” with the exception of Elizabeth Warren, and even she did not get the post she deserved.
I will acknowledge that the big elephant in the room is Re-publican opposition. It is historic and deadly. But it has taken Obama five and one-half years to figure it out, and, in my mind, he still has not done so. It was clear from the first six months and the actual statements of the Republicans that they would oppose him on everything. They have been true to their word. He continues to “reach out”, to appeal to a humanity or compassion that simply does not exist in the Republican Party. I knew that years ago. What does it take for this man to learn a lesson? He is supposed to be smart, and I believe that, but there is also a damaging naiveté that is difficult to understand.
On the other hand, it is difficult to characterize his actions with regard to the bold empowerment of the NSA and other intelligence agencies as naïve. He is a constitutional lawyer. Surely he has to be aware of the dangers of his civil liberties policies. Yet, we have this massive collection of data, the government co-opting of private data from the major inter-net giants – nearly all of them – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Apple. It is unprecedented. It is draconian. I can’t remember the exact actions with regard to the US Postal Service, but it too has been somehow brought under the government’s surveillance efforts. This is not democratic. Laura Poitras, who has been instrumental in working with Edward Snowden on the NSA revelations has decided to live in Germany (how ironic!) because she feels that privacy in American is no longer possible. That’s a very serious allegation from a respected journalist who has broken no laws or been accused of no crimes, yet she has been stopped and questioned over 40 times when entering and leaving the U.S.
If one collects the Poitras, Greenwald, Assange, Manning, Binney, Drake, Kiriakou files, the no-fly lists, the surveil-lance revelations, the state secrets defense, the collective government co-opting of the Internet, the massive increase in privatization of surveillance, the huge increase in secret classification of government documents, the militarization of local police through huge government subsidies and budget allocations, they constitute an unprecedented assault of our liberties and civil rights. They constitute a serious movement towards a police state. That, with the Obama admini-stration’s backing and support, is undemocratic and dangerous. That is a major and serious part of his legacy that can-not and should not be ignored.
He renominated Brennan, previously discredited, as head of the CIA, and he was approved! Hard to believe. Obama clearly has a lot of undemocratic company in the Senate. He defended the NSA as having oversight, regulation, and checks and balances one week. The next week is was re-vealed by the Washington Post that the NSA collections have violated the law on numerous occasions. Then the NSA admitted that it had done so. What a surprise. I don’t know why anybody anywhere relies on these spy agencies to ever tell the truth. They and the bankers lie through their teeth every time they move their lips. If I know that, and you know that, the President should know that. Yet, he hires them, seeks counsel from them, and apparently trusts them. It defies reason. And we know, Caesar is a reasonable man, I mean Obama.
You are absolutely right that Obama is a victim of blatant racism. It is a major reason for all of the obstruction by the Republicans and their extremist Tea Party comrades. It is even more apparent in the various actions taken by the states to restrict voting, food stamps, early childhood education, and Medicare. I would like Obama to protest the Re-publican obstruction far more than he has. He has the “bully pulpit”; he is a famously skilled orator. However, he has not used his pulpit effectively. He has not asked for enough. He compromises too readily and signals his willingness ahead of time. He makes a pretty good speech one week in one place, but he does not follow through. No doubt, he has a lot on his plate, and the volatile situation in the Middle East has only complicated his concerns.
However, his policies are partly to blame. The drones, the prisons, the aggression in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, (and now Syria???) are also his legacy, and those military actions are simply creating a perpetual enemy. Does anyone in his administration admit that? We now even have John Kerry, the hero of the “Winter Soldiers” Vietnam protests in Canada decades ago, seriously consider-ing our involvement in Syria? Really? This too will be part of his legacy. I am not optimistic, as you can tell.
There is also, unfortunately, the total failure to hold Wall Street and the Big Banks accountable or even to diminish their influence or activities. Corporations and banking insti-tutions got government assistance but the supposed efforts to help mortgage holders has mostly failed. Government overseers who were in charge of that process have them-selves admitted that such a rescue of homeowners was never really a serious effort by the government. As a result, the financial crisis, higher unemployment, and an anemic re-covery continue. Obama has not made any real effort to bring in authoritative dissenting voices, such as Krugman, Stiglitz, Reich, Black, Hudson, Kwak, Simon, or Adnati to stimulate a real debate among economists. He has instead relied on his insiders who favor the status quo and the one percent.
Though Dodd Frank has passed, it has not been enacted and will require many more months of work to actually write the rules and regulations. As we all know, Republicans are doing their best to obstruct and prolong that process. Obama seems powerless to alter that process, and it is hard to know if there is anything he can do. However, the bill does not address the size of the banks, and we have already heard of successful efforts to exempt risky derivatives trading from oversight. I am hopeful that Dodd Frank will be a positive addition to his legacy, but it is hard to tell at this point.
He has had a lot of assistance from Congress on stalling the many issues involving the financial crisis, but the Obama/Holder justice department has essentially admitted that such prosecutions carry systemic risk. What does that mean? It means they are too big to fail and too big to jail. It is a total surrender to the financial establishment. Individual traders have been prosecuted by state attorneys general, but Holder has really done nothing about the institutions or their overpaid CEOs. Do you think it’s because Geithner would be tarnished? Would Lawrence Summers be diminished as his advisor? It’s public record that Obama has made a choice to “look ahead” on financial issues, but he is clearly looking back at whistle blowers. This too is part of his legacy.
Almost as a side note, you praise Hillary for her work as Secretary of State. In my opinion, the jury is still out on her performance. It is no doubt very difficult to predict or deal with the turmoil in the Middle East, but I don’t see that we have done much to change or improve things. We waffled early on Mubarak, then, when it was clear that the protestors were on the wining side, we sided with them. We really had no clue that Tunisia was in such a fragile state in the first place.
We were for Khadafi before we were against him. We have done nothing to support the democratic uprising in Bahrain. We seem to be caught off guard in Syria and may be com-pounding the problem there. Hillary, in fact, has made no progress at all on the resolution of the Israel/Palestinian is-sue. I was appalled by her unfortunately forgotten quote that, “We are all Israelis” when Israel was bombing the crap out of southern Lebanon. Has she made any defense of the various flotillas that have tried in vain to reach Gaza? All she or any American can seem to say about the continued illegal settlement building in the West Bank is that it is “not helpful”. Really? That’s all? That’s appalling. AIPAC rules.
There is more dissent in Israel than there is here. So, would Hillary be any better than Obama as President? I’m not optimistic. She is a much stronger personality, and she does have pretty amazing worldwide experience, but I’m not sure that her political values or connections would lead the U.S. into more peaceful or more prosperous territory. She is a “Clinton”. She will be a welcome target by the right, and the “triangulation”, for which her husband was famous, will be painted on her posters, possibly accurately.
A final very serious concern about the Obama administration is the continued use of National Security Letters, a device condemned by Obama himself in his 2007 campaign as “just plain wrong”. He has used these letters quite extensively to quiet protestors and to harass Internet and print journalists, among them respected NYT reporter James Risen and FOX reporter James Rosen. The Holder Justice Department recently used an NSL to access the records of the email site used by Edward Snowden. The developer and owner of that site elected to shut down rather than comply with the government demands to turn over all records because he considered their request a violation of the Constitution. Though the use of these extreme instruments was initiated in the Bush administration, Obama has continued the process and extended it to Internet service providers. The NYT Executive Editor decried that “the process of news gathering is being criminalized”. These are pretty strong words which are clearly aimed at the Obama administration’s pressure to intimidate journalists and those who assist them.
I mentioned the harassment of Laura Poitras above, but there has also been the recent detention and interrogation of David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald (That was at Heathrow, right? If anyone believes that the U.S. was not involved, I have a bridge to sell them).Then there is the the international effort to silence Wikileaks and Julian Assange through legal manipulation as well as corporate boycotts of his fund raising sites (under government pressure?), and the unbelievable and unprecedented forced landing of the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales under the mistaken belief that Edward Snowden might be on board. The latter is not really an attack on journalists or the press, but it suggests the paranoia as well as the incompetence of the administra-tion’s vast spy apparatus that it found such a “rumor” credible. Their surveillance is either very good and chilling – or it’s not. In either case, it’s scary to the average American as well as all of those targeted, which appears to be worldwide in scope and includes diplomats, ambassadors, and the UN and nearly all forms of electronic communication. And, we have learned recently that it includes ALL phone, email, and Internet activity by ordinary, law abiding Americans not connected to crime, not with “probable cause”, and even with-out any judicial oversight. It’s hard to believe that all of this will not backfire in some spectacular fashion. Obama gives nice speeches, but his actions do not match his words. In most cases, that kind of behavior is called hypocritical. To me, that is the label and the legacy that I see most in this president.
The really unfortunate aspect of Obama’s assault on privacy and civil liberties is the apparent approval by Democrats. Obama has succeeded where Republicans have failed, and he continues to be manipulated by his extremist opponents. It is not a pretty picture.
P.S. Left out of his legacy and of the conversation in general is any serious attempt by the Obama administration, except for occasional speeches about jobs, union/labor mobilization, alterations in subsidies to Big Oil or Big Agriculture, or attempting to fulfill any promises with regard to modifications in so-called “free trade” agreements, the latter of which were part of his election campaign in 2008. His administration has actually gone forward on more such agreements, in secret according to the Hightower Lowdown, rather than fulfilling his campaign rhetoric so long avoided. These are admittedly very complex and difficult issues, but they are the kind of issues that could be part of his “negotiating” demands, along with zillions of Presidential appointments, that could be part of his strategy with Republicans.