• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

Obama's Legacy

Obama's legacy will be intertwined with an historic level of Congressional obstructionism. No Senate has ever blocked more legislation than happened here. From Day One, Obama reached out only to be rebuffed. When the Stimulus started, he breached the protocol of a POTUS inviting Congress to the WH to go to meet Boehner and Republican Senate leaders in The Capitol. That's a huge level of saying he wanted to work with them. Boehner immediately insulted the new POTUS by saying anything other than 100% capitulation to the GOP would mean zero GOP votes and zero GOP participation.

In spite of this, Obama still took out two dozen projects the GOP objected to being included. That didn't help. He made it far smaller than than many economists said it should be as the GOP wanted. Again, nothing but insults. Nearly 1/3 of the plan was tax cuts, including many the GOP had asked for, to no avail.

There will be a lot of "What could have been?" This will likely be how history view the past eight years.

He entered the office with the economy shrinking at over 8% in last two quarters. He entered office with the economy shedding 750,000 jobs per month. Those are nearly unprecedented levels of economic failure. There's no way around this. Add to those factors tens of millions of Americans had lost most of their family's nest eggs in the values of their homes and that the equity markets had been flat for nearly a decade versus an historic average of 7% annual growth in the past 65 years (http://www.simplestockinvesting.com/SP500-historical-real-total-returns.htm ).

Thus the economic turnaround was actually more dramatic than most give it credit for being. Any objective, non-partisan look at the economy will show he did remarkably well considering what he had to work with. Hell, his last budget will have cut the deficits he was handed by almost 2/3.

ACA is a success and failure. The failure is in the messaging. Another major part of any failure was the abject and total obstructionism of the GOP of this plan. Their plan was to do everything they could to make it fail knowing if it succeeded they would lose power. Whether the Republicans/Conservatives/RWers want to admit it or not, before a single word of ACA was written, Obama tried to form The Gang of Eight. This would have two members from each party from each chamber and was going to meet in the WH. He reached out to the GOP to participate. Nothing had been written or decided upon.

No GOP member ever showed up to voice opinions or negotiate. Meetings were postponed in case someone would show up. The GOP has the GOP to blame for anything that happened. This, the stimulus and the roads' bill are primary examples of the GOP want the first black POTUS fail more than they wanted America to succeed.

Nearly 100% of the world, with the exceptions of the Hate Obama First RWers in the US and Netanyahu, thinks the Iran deal is a master stroke. Iran was within months of having 3-6 nukes. Now they are minimum of 15-20 years from having any chance at having even one. They have already given up 98% of the enriched uranium they had. They gave up over 2/3 of their centrifuges. Their only pool for keeping enriched uranium has been filled with cement. There are inspectors all over the country. We have very effectively cut their nuclear balls off and made them eat them in the public square.

Quite frankly if a GOP POTUS had done this, the right would be rallying to put him on Mt. Rushmore.

Syria was a clusterfuck. He could have done better. However, what if we armed one or two factions and those arms fell into ISIL's hands? He didn't explain why there was no good answer here. He should have at least dropped a bombs on Syria's Air Force regarding the red line.

Other than breaking an agreement with a foreign government that we had immorally invaded and occupied, what other choices did we have in Iraq? They wanted us out. We had an agreement that we would leave. It's very possible that both sides would have attacked US troops had we stayed.

He failed to hold bankers and Wall Street responsible for their illegal and immoral actions. There was no excuse for not arresting hundreds of C-level people.

Thanks for the invite, DM.
 
Last edited:
DM kindly asked me to weigh in. I think Townie has it about right. I agree with him on the "good", and I think he gets too little credit for policies that saved the American economy and avoided the disastrous austerity measures that are still dragging down most of the rest of the industrialized world. His support of LGBT rights was historic and certainly gave a tailwind to marriage equality. The lack of progress on income/wealth inequality, Gitmo, and overall hopey changiness will rightly be laid at the feet of an obstructionist Republican party with a strong undercurrent of nihilism and racism.

I think the Obama foreign policy will be judged harshly, especially if the middle east continues to deteriorate. He will be seen as a president who either (a) did nothing when he had a chance to improve the middle east (Syria, Egypt, Israel/Palestine), (b) did the wrong things when he chose to act (Libya), and (c) generally got played by the Russians. His Iran deal should be viewed very positively, and if Trump screws it up that's on Trump and the hawks he is hiring. On overall security policy, he doubled down on droning, surveillance, and the PATRIOT act stuff, allowed American civil liberties to continue to erode and the deep state to get deeper, and then handed it all off to a successor who is EXACTLY the kind of guy that civil libertarians have been warning about. I doubt anything is going to happen in the next decade that makes Obama look like a prescient genius on any of this.

One day, if Trump doesn't destroy America, we'll finally see the light and develop a single-payer type health system like the rest of the civilized world. When that time comes, historians will have to decide if ACA was the first step toward health care sanity or an ill-conceived notion that set back health care sanity for years. My bet is on the latter. I was strongly against it when it was passed, and while Republican mass obstructionism certainly has played a major role in its failure, the flaws in ACA were present from the beginning. I think historians will eventually conclude that it would have been a better idea to hold out for single payer than undergo the damage to the body politic caused by the ACA.

I don't really care to opine on where he will be "ranked" among American presidents. Between the obvious national heroes like Lincoln, Washington, and FDR at the top, and obvious idiots or zeroes like Harding, Pierce and Coolidge at the bottom, the middle is hugely subjective, partisan, and greatly dependent on historical circumstance beyond the control of the individual president. Obama's modest achievements, personal honesty, and scandal-free administration will keep him out of the bottom tier, but the ACA and his foreign policy certainly exclude him from the pantheon at the top. Let's just hope he's not remembered as the last president before the nation disintegrated into anarchy led by an orange-haired con man.
 
I personally will always think of Obama as a weak actor. He was, at first at least, too focused on "a new politics" and ending partisan strife in Washington and the entrenched interestes swallowed his agenda. He started his negotiations with the opposition from the middle ground assuming reason and comraderie would prevail. But his opponents usually staked out far right opposition and as a result his attempts at reform were weak and watered down. The ACÁ is a perfect example. What a lofty progressive idea to ensure that everyone has health care, but the end result was mostly a boon for the insurance industry and we are all having to pay more...I personally think that resulted in part because Obama took single payer off the table before they even started negotiating. These same kumbaya efforts pervaded his foreign policy and I think foreign leaders took advantage of that (though the Syria situation is the only real disaster). That is how I will remember Obama, a well intentioned man with good ideas but poor negotiating strategy and implementation.
 
birdman said:
I personally will always think of Obama as a weak actor. He was, at first at least, too focused on "a new politics" and ending partisan strife in Washington and the entrenched interestes swallowed his agenda. He started his negotiations with the opposition from the middle ground assuming reason and comraderie would prevail. But his opponents usually staked out far right opposition and as a result his attempts at reform were weak and watered down. The ACÁ is a perfect example. What a lofty progressive idea to ensure that everyone has health care, but the end result was mostly a boon for the insurance industry and we are all having to pay more...I personally think that resulted in part because Obama took single payer off the table before they even started negotiating. These same kumbaya efforts pervaded his foreign policy and I think foreign leaders took advantage of that (though the Syria situation is the only real disaster). That is how I will remember Obama, a well intentioned man with good ideas but poor negotiating strategy and implementation.
Click to expand...

This is a good post.
 
Deacon923 said:
DM kindly asked me to weigh in. I think Townie has it about right. I agree with him on the "good", and I think he gets too little credit for policies that saved the American economy and avoided the disastrous austerity measures that are still dragging down most of the rest of the industrialized world. His support of LGBT rights was historic and certainly gave a tailwind to marriage equality. The lack of progress on income/wealth inequality, Gitmo, and overall hopey changiness will rightly be laid at the feet of an obstructionist Republican party with a strong undercurrent of nihilism and racism.

I think the Obama foreign policy will be judged harshly, especially if the middle east continues to deteriorate. He will be seen as a president who either (a) did nothing when he had a chance to improve the middle east (Syria, Egypt, Israel/Palestine), (b) did the wrong things when he chose to act (Libya), and (c) generally got played by the Russians. His Iran deal should be viewed very positively, and if Trump screws it up that's on Trump and the hawks he is hiring. On overall security policy, he doubled down on droning, surveillance, and the PATRIOT act stuff, allowed American civil liberties to continue to erode and the deep state to get deeper, and then handed it all off to a successor who is EXACTLY the kind of guy that civil libertarians have been warning about. I doubt anything is going to happen in the next decade that makes Obama look like a prescient genius on any of this.

One day, if Trump doesn't destroy America, we'll finally see the light and develop a single-payer type health system like the rest of the civilized world. When that time comes, historians will have to decide if ACA was the first step toward health care sanity or an ill-conceived notion that set back health care sanity for years. My bet is on the latter. I was strongly against it when it was passed, and while Republican mass obstructionism certainly has played a major role in its failure, the flaws in ACA were present from the beginning. I think historians will eventually conclude that it would have been a better idea to hold out for single payer than undergo the damage to the body politic caused by the ACA.

I don't really care to opine on where he will be "ranked" among American presidents. Between the obvious national heroes like Lincoln, Washington, and FDR at the top, and obvious idiots or zeroes like Harding, Pierce and Coolidge at the bottom, the middle is hugely subjective, partisan, and greatly dependent on historical circumstance beyond the control of the individual president. Obama's modest achievements, personal honesty, and scandal-free administration will keep him out of the bottom tier, but the ACA and his foreign policy certainly exclude him from the pantheon at the top. Let's just hope he's not remembered as the last president before the nation disintegrated into anarchy led by an orange-haired con man.
Click to expand...

If that does come to fruition, then I think he will be (rightly) viewed as the President whose division of the country led directly to said orange-haired con man's rise to power. Obama's legacy is going to be Trump, for better or worse.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
If that does come to fruition, then I think he will be (rightly) viewed as the President whose division of the country led directly to said orange-haired con man's rise to power. Obama's legacy is going to be Trump, for better or worse.
Click to expand...

Saving us from Bush only to have us fall into Trump.
 
The "division" of the country was not caused by Obama. It was initiated, created and driven by the right. It was their strategy to attack everything he tried to do and make him an "other". They attacked his wife for wanting American children to be healthy. It took three years for a roads bill to be passed even with over 50% of Senate GOP voting for it.
 
birdman said:
I personally will always think of Obama as a weak actor. He was, at first at least, too focused on "a new politics" and ending partisan strife in Washington and the entrenched interestes swallowed his agenda. He started his negotiations with the opposition from the middle ground assuming reason and comraderie would prevail. But his opponents usually staked out far right opposition and as a result his attempts at reform were weak and watered down. The ACÁ is a perfect example. What a lofty progressive idea to ensure that everyone has health care, but the end result was mostly a boon for the insurance industry and we are all having to pay more...I personally think that resulted in part because Obama took single payer off the table before they even started negotiating. These same kumbaya efforts pervaded his foreign policy and I think foreign leaders took advantage of that (though the Syria situation is the only real disaster). That is how I will remember Obama, a well intentioned man with good ideas but poor negotiating strategy and implementation.
Click to expand...

Good post overall, but it remains to be seen if any Democrat leader can successfully negotiate with Republican legislators in this era of government.
 
If there's still an America in 100 years, schoolchildren will get Obama's birthday off from school. There will be a monument in DC with statue Barack looking pensive. There will be graduate schools bearing his name. So yes, he'll be remembered well. His top 1/3 case is buoyed by his era comparisons of Dubya and fucking Trump. Dignity and grace might be traits that all Presidents should possess, but it's becoming rarer and rarer. An entire generation of voters now only remembers Clinton/Bush/Obama/Trump. (Good Christ.) Points to Barack for keeping it together in a time of great partisanship and discontent.

How much of Obama's historical legacy will be because of what he represents v. how much governance he oversaw? Worth debating, but ultimately less consequential to the wide historical overview than some here would have it. A Congress of frothing, lunatic obstructors are part of that legacy, and serves as a full-proof counter to any handwringing about what he accomplished policy-wise versus what he could've/should've accomplished. (Not totally fair, in my opinion, but the approval ratings of Obama v. the approval ratings of Congress tells us already how that battle will be remembered.)

The ACA is a stepping stone. There may be some windy turns and curves during the next couple years of Celebrity Apprentice, but as others have already suggested, it's on the right side of history and will be remembered as the beginning of something much larger and more successful.

Only eight years ago some states still outlawed gay marriage! That's wild.

Killing bin Laden got turned into a joke because of the 2012 election, but it was a gutsy call and did the world a lot of favors the way it played out.

Withdrawing from Iraq to fulfill a campaign promise rather than adjusting to the realities of 2011 was a tragedy. The effects of that decision are only now revealing themselves. Oh, and we're back in the Middle East. Never left Afghanistan. Drones and Guantanamo were one thing under a benevolent emperor-king, gonna be something else altogether under a fascist hack.

How the nuclear deal with Iran looks in 30 years will probably shape Obama's foreign policy legacy more than anything else.

"Keeping it Together" is a far cry from the Hope and Change of '08, but that's what Obama did, and he did it well. Voting for him from Iraq, and watching election night there in complete ecstatic shock, remains one of my fondest memories. He disappointed me a few times over the years, but he never embarrassed us, and I always trusted he had the American nation's best interests in mind and at heart. He was presidential in a century of decidedly unpresidential American leaders.
 
Last edited:
TownieDeac said:
The bad:
While I don't place the blame squarely on Obama's feet for this, I think he leaves office with the country more divided than it has been since the Civil War, and not getting Hillary elected is his single biggest failure in office. He's not to blame for the erosion of discourse--that lies squarely with the safe spacers, whether they be cowardly Dems calling everything "problematic" or cowardly Pubs hiding behind a fear of some amorphous "PC." That, and more simply, the wrecking ball that is Donald Trump. So while the discourse low water mark of the American republic should not be part of Obama's legacy (quite the opposite, he was the most thoughtful and erudite I think we may have ever had, at least going back two generations), the failure to elect Hillary generally is.

Foreign policy is a real problem spot. I hesitate to call someone like Obama naive on any subject, but I think he was a bit naive on Afghanistan. Iraq seems demonstrably better as does Iran. Syria is obviously the biggest disaster of his presidency and now we have a Trump-Putin collective left to handle it, which is objectively terrifying. He continued to erode civil liberties and PATRIOT Act era opaque surveillance state policies, continued the drone wars, and his administration more or less decided of its own volition it was all legal with no real bipartisan oversight. Not closing Gitmo falls on a NIMBY Congress. He got Bin Laden, which, LOL Bushes.

Mixed:
I think ACA is a mixed bag. Its achievements are overshadowed by its flaws, and for that, it will never be a positive part of his legacy. Maybe if the next generation of presidents worked to make it better, it would be, but we all know that won't happen.

Good:
I think commuting sentences, walking back some of the disastrous Clinton-era drug sentencing laws, and generally being open to smarter drug policy will be viewed positively.

He fixed the economy, plain and simple. For that alone he should be considered an above average president. The fact that people even quibble about it taking too long is absurd. As Italy is about to tank again and we see other major countries around the world still feeling the effects of the crisis, America is very strongly poised to recover stronger than ever. Bank bailout had too few strings attached, auto bailout was more or less perfect. Not getting an infrastructure bill passed is squarely on the partisan Congress.

He restored dignity to the office of the President. He gave the office the international PR facelift it needed after the doofus before him, stayed entirely scandal free, and governed as a centrist. For those things alone, he should be judged above average. Like most presidents, he'll be judged harshly along partisan lines.
Click to expand...

People keep saying stuff like this, but the country was way more divided in the Bush presidency. Especially in the '04 election. It was less overtly racist, but not less divided
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
If that does come to fruition, then I think he will be (rightly) viewed as the President whose division of the country led directly to said orange-haired con man's rise to power. Obama's legacy is going to be Trump, for better or worse.
Click to expand...

Lol, come on man.

Unless you are saying the mere fact of his being president led to unprecedented division, then this statement is pure nonsense.
 
just to point out in the meantime as i draft a response to one of ELC's posts, just wanted to say I reached out to as many people who I generally don't agree with as I could find names to click on. thanks to those who've chimed in as well as those who intend to, from all ideological angles. if i didn't send you a PM it's probably cuz i didn't see or couldn't find ur name as i briefly skimmed pit pages.
 
Irish, given the fact that the Iraqi government was demanding that we leave, how could we have left 5000 or 10,000 US troops in country against their wishes? Would there not have been a big backlash?
 
RJKarl said:
The "division" of the country was not caused by Obama. It was initiated, created and driven by the right. It was their strategy to attack everything he tried to do and make him an "other". They attacked his wife for wanting American children to be healthy. It took three years for a roads bill to be passed even with over 50% of Senate GOP voting for it.
Click to expand...

You are correct that it was not caused by Obama. However, it was not initiated, created, and driven by any one individual or element. It is a product of the times we live in where mindsets are reinforced rather than educated, and it is a product that has snowballed since the 90s and the spread of the internet. Blaming one side or the other just perpetuates the idiocy.
 
EatLeadCommie said:
You are correct that it was not caused by Obama. However, it was not initiated, created, and driven by any one individual or element. It is a product of the times we live in where mindsets are reinforced rather than educated, and it is a product that has snowballed since the 90s and the spread of the internet. Blaming one side or the other just perpetuates the idiocy.
Click to expand...

No it doesn't. That's like saying you shouldn't blame the person who calls your wife a whore for doing so. This was both orchestrated and condoned by the right. There is no way around it.
 
RJKarl said:
Irish, given the fact that the Iraqi government was demanding that we leave, how could we have left 5000 or 10,000 US troops in country against their wishes? Would there not have been a big backlash?
Click to expand...

There'd have been some grumbling and some rockets and some car bombs but nothing like it's been since we left. And since when does America actually act in accordance with other countries' wishes and desires, particularly ones we've invaded and occupied? Maliki deserves a lot of the blame, sure, but he gave the Obama administration the cover they wanted.
 
MysteryMen said:
People keep saying stuff like this, but the country was way more divided in the Bush presidency. Especially in the '04 election. It was less overtly racist, but not less divided
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I agree with this, but a lot of it depends on where you're standing. The sad fact of today's world is that if your guy gets 4-8 years, he's going to be abused by the opposition for those 4-8 years, and then you get to do the same thing to their guy for 4-8 years when it's his turn. That's basically politics in a nutshell today-- taking turns with the pinata. The electorate's role anymore doesn't seem to be to contribute ideas or civil discourse, but rather to undermine it and assign the worst motivations ever to the guy we didn't vote for and accuse him of everything short of babyfucking. Of course the electorate is going to put people in Washington who reflect this type of behavior. This is politics for the foreseeable future or until somebody with enough force of personality and willpower to rise above it emerges. The last three Presidents have had to deal with this new form of politics, and all were lacking either one or the other in that regard. Trump, oddly enough, may have both but appears a bit too thin skinned to rise above it. We shall see. It's kind of why I agree with the assessment that he has a high ceiling but also a low floor.
 
That's just silly. Of course he had a major role in the division. Obama is the master of the straw man tactic. He has governed in a very partisan manner. He always catered to his base, who love him, but that has the opposite effect on those who don't agree with his policies.

One example is the Keystone Pipeline--he could have thrown his opponents a bone but he wouldn't stray from his environmentalist supporters. On the BLM situation, he could have spoke truth to power when their leaders were over the top, but he wouldn't do it. Eight years of this takes a toll.
 
simosfrostyone said:
He has governed in a very partisan manner.
Click to expand...

This is unequivocally untrue, yet the fact that this idea persists is a testament to the power of American partisanship.

Personally, I wish Obama had been the strong leftist boogeyman fringe conservatives describe him as. Garland would be on the Supreme Court right now, for one.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top