By John Daniel Davidson
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
President Obama was not supposed to go out like this.
Since the improbable election of Donald Trump, he has been trying to salvage
his legacy. After all, what could be a greater repudiation of a progressive
Democrat’s presidency than Americans choosing Trump as your successor?
Obama didn’t expect this. He even admitted at one point
during the campaign that if Hillary Clinton didn’t win, he would “consider it a
personal insult—an insult to my legacy.” So lately he’s been scrambling, not
just to ram through last-minute regulations and executive orders but to
convince the country that his presidency has been a success. In his farewell
address on Tuesday night, Obama once again laid out his now-familiar litany of
achievements: a rescued economy, Obamacare, the international climate change
pact, the Iran nuclear deal, rising wages, and so on.
In Obama’s mind, his tenure has been nothing short of
unbelievable. “If I had told you eight years ago that America would reverse a
great recession, reboot our auto industry, and unleash the longest stretch of
job creation in our history, if I had told you that we would open up a new
chapter with the Cuban people, shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program without
firing a shot, and take out the mastermind of 9/11, if I had told you that we
would win marriage equality, and secure the right to health insurance for
another 20 million of our fellow citizens—you might have said our sights were
set a little too high.” But, he added, “That’s what we did.” In Obama’s world,
“America is a better, stronger place than it was when we started.”
That’s not how most Americans feel, though. Voters
rejected continuity with Obama’s policies in favor of uncertain change, placing
power in the hands not just of a political novice, but a man of questionable
judgment and temper. That’s how much Americans disagree that Obama’s time in
the White House has been a success. It is a sobering indictment, even if Obama
appeared to be unaware of it Tuesday night.
Obama’s Style of
Governance Grew From Hubris
This indictment is made worse by how high the
expectations were for Obama’s presidency when he took office in 2009. His
supporters were optimistic, even ebullient, despite the worst economic
recession since the 1930s and Obama’s inexperience. Obama was likewise
optimistic. In his inaugural address, he spoke in lofty tones of choosing “hope
over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.” He proclaimed “an end
to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out
dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
Obama would be a “post-partisan” president, his
administration would herald a new era of transparency and honest dealing in
government, and together we would transcend our differences. It was a new era,
he said, and “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long
no longer apply.”
So much for all that. Obama’s presidency proved instead
to be a time of intense rancor and discord, worsening racial enmity, eroding
trust in government, and a national public life marked by petty grievances,
false promises, and endless recriminations. He leaves behind a polarized
America, a Middle East in flames, an unstable international order, and a
Republican-controlled Congress and incoming president who have staked their
reputations on dismantling every signature achievement of his presidency.
The “pen-and-phone” strategy he announced in 2014,
rejecting bipartisan compromise with Congress, was predicated on a Democratic
successor who would preserve his executive decrees and regulations. Instead of
building support for major initiatives, Obama governed under the assumption
that Democrats had achieved a permanent majority.
Indeed, his entire approach to governance belied a
conceit that the major questions of policy had been settled. From health care
to climate change to financial regulation, the question was not whether the
federal government should take action, but what the details should look like.
As Obama said Tuesday night, “We can argue about how best to achieve these
goals, but we can’t be complacent about the goals themselves.”
Obama was uninterested in debate, still less in
persuasion. If you didn’t agree, you were on the wrong side of history. In
this, Obama helped shape the dominant ethos of the Democratic Party, which was
also the basis of Clinton’s campaign: we are on the winning side. The
“deplorables” who support Trump, who aren’t on board with the progressive
agenda, are “irredeemable.” Why bother reaching out to them? Why compromise,
when victory is certain?
Thus the shock of Trump’s victory. In his speech Tuesday
night, Obama could not even conjure the grace to wish Trump success—something
even Jimmy Carter managed to do. Carter pledged to support Ronald Reagan “to
the very limits of conscience and conviction,” and wished him “success and
Godspeed.” Obama could not do this, because success for Trump will mean
dismantling everything Obama tried to build.
Obama’s Lasting
Legacy Will Be War
If Obama’s domestic legacy is evanescent, his enduring
legacy will be in foreign policy. In 2008, Obama promised to “restore our moral
standing” in the world, by which he meant that America would retreat from the
international stage to “focus on nation-building here at home.”
In practice, that meant abandoning the Middle East and
allowing ISIS to rise from the ashes of Iraq. Obama was elected on nothing so
much as a desire among Americans to be done with that part of the world, and
Obama had an idea how to do it: elevate Iran as a regional hegemon to replace
America.
That’s why he pursued the Iran nuclear deal. The price he
was willing to pay is that the regime in Tehran could have nuclear weapons
within the next decade, if not sooner. The mullahs know this, and it has
emboldened them. (Just this week, Iranian naval vessels made a simulated attack
run at a U.S. destroyer, which opened fire in response.)
The story is much the same all over the world: American
retreat is emboldening our adversaries. Russian aggression has grown to the
point that Moscow launched an “active measures” campaign to disrupt our
presidential election, even as it pursues revanchist aims in Eastern Europe and
an irregular military conflict in Ukraine that has left more than 10,000 dead.
Nearly a half-million have perished in Syria’s civil war, thanks in large part
to Obama’s refusal to intervene. Iraq, left to its own devices when Obama
pulled out American troops in 2011, has proven unable to defeat ISIS. An
irredentist Chia is installing military bases on man-made islands in the South
China Sea, forcing a strategic realignment along the Asia Pacific.
All of which to say, on the eve of Obama’s departure from
office the world is more unstable, and a major conflict more likely, than at
any time since the Cold War. This was not inevitable; it was the result of
conscious choices by Obama and his inner circle. In assessing his likely place
in American history, it calls to mind James Buchanan, perhaps our worst
president ever. In one of his last public addresses before leaving office,
Buchanan laid out the reasons for his inaction following the secession of South
Carolina. On January 8, 1861, he gave a speech about the “threats to the peace
and existence of the Union”—a bit of a euphemism, since South Carolina had
seceded weeks earlier, and the Union had in fact already ceased to exist.
Buchanan’s approach to national security in this moment
of ultimate crisis was much the same as Obama’s approach to foreign policy: he
determined to do nothing, hoping for a “peaceful solution of the questions at
issue between the North and South.” Buchanan refused even to send
reinforcements to Fort Sumter, “lest it might unjustly be regarded as a menace
of military coercion, and thus furnish, if not a provocation, at least a
pretext for an outbreak on the part of South Carolina. No necessity for these
reinforcements seemed to exist.”
The next day, Mississippi seceded. The day after that,
Florida. Before the month was out, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana would
secede, followed by Texas on February 1. Confederate forces attacked Fort
Sumter on April 12, and war was joined between North and South.
If Obama has a legacy that will endure, it will be a
major war. Not a civil war of the kind Buchanan helped provoke, but a global
conflict made possible by America’s retreat from the world—a retreat that Obama
pursued for the sake of a domestic agenda that belongs to the wind.
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