By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, August 02, 2019
What ever happened to Barack Obama?
For a while there, no modern figure was supposed to be as
consequential. It’s difficult to describe the hype in the early days of the
Obama era. Time, Newsweek, and countless deep thinkers cast him
as a 21st-century Lincoln or FDR. Some literally saw a messianic figure — “The
One,” in Oprah Winfrey’s words. Self-help guru Deepak Chopra said Obama
represented a “quantum leap in American consciousness.”
George Lucas speculated that he might even be a Jedi.
It was a global phenomenon. In a move that embarrassed
Obama himself, the Nobel Committee gave him a Peace Prize on spec — i.e., in
anticipation of what they were sure he would do. A leading Danish newspaper
editorialized: “Obama is, of course, greater than Jesus.”
Obama himself set his sights lower; he wanted to be the
Democrats’ Ronald Reagan. And for a time, it seemed to many that he’d
succeeded. As late as April of 2017, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria said, “Obama aspired
to be a transformational president, like Reagan. At this point, it’s fair to
say that he has succeeded.”
But this proved to be a mirage. As National Review’s
Ramesh Ponnuru observed in 2017, Obama left office almost as popular as Reagan,
but when Reagan departed for California, he left his party stronger than when
he found it, holding more elected offices at the federal and state level. And
the public felt better about the direction of the country as well. By the time
Obama left office, nearly 1,000 Democrats had lost their jobs, and the GOP was
better positioned than at any time since the 1920s.
Some analysts plausibly argue that these statistics are
unfairly inflated because they’re pegged to the large coattails Obama had in
2008. Even so, it demonstrates that Obama failed by his own standard insofar as
transformational presidents expand and entrench their parties the way FDR and
Reagan did.
In fairness, Reagan and FDR had an advantage that Obama
did not: They were succeeded by allies. Since so much of what presidents do can
be reversed by the next president, particularly when done by executive order —
as Obama did for most of his presidency — it takes a new, friendly replacement
to solidify a presidential legacy. Donald Trump reversed many of Obama’s
policies with a stroke of a pen (just as a Democratic successor would do to
Trump’s).
Still, it was hard to appreciate the extent of Obama’s
incredible shrinking presidency until the recent Democratic presidential
debates. Much of the post-debate punditry has focused on the fight between the
handful of moderates, led by Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, and the far
more numerous left-wingers, who attacked numerous Obama policies from the left,
most notably his signature Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, but also his
immigration and economic policies.
Attacks on the Reagan legacy on the right are lamentably
increasing among some intellectuals on the right, but we’ve never seen anything
remotely like this in a GOP presidential debate. Attacking Reagan is still
risky for a Republican politician, and he left office over three decades ago.
The Democrats’ migration to the left is not merely a
story of ideological or intellectual transformation, though it is that; it’s
also the direct consequence of Obama’s presidency. However we’re supposed to
measure the total number of Democratic losses under Obama, the important part
isn’t the quantity of the loss, but the quality.
The ranks of moderate and conservative Democrats were
disproportionately hollowed out under Obama, while Democrats in deep-blue
liberal areas were emboldened to move even further left. (Trump has had a
similar effect on the right, decimating the moderate wing of the GOP while
intensifying the partisanship of conservatives in safe red areas.)
The big-name Democrats who survived Obama are more
concerned by primary challenges to their left than by general-election threats
from their right. As a result, they have a hard time talking to audiences that
don’t already agree with them on the big questions.
Those ultra-liberal politicians — Warren, Sanders, et al.
— now drive the party to such a degree that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is seen
as a moderating force on the Democrats. The moderates in the debates are like
refugees of a wing of a party that has shrunk to a feather. Only Biden stands
as a formidable figure, because of his time at Obama’s side.
And now even that is turning into a liability, at least
on the debate stage.
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