I confess that I have not read President Obama’s recent memoir, A Promised Land, nor am I likely to, because I have convinced myself that the political pressures on American politicians make it impossible, or at least exceedingly unlikely, for them to ever write anything that resembles an honest book. I would say that this is particularly true for a young ex-president like Obama, who will certainly have an active political future ahead of him for several decades to come. For example, from what I’ve read, Obama never, in his new book, got around to saying what he “really” thought of Joe Biden, and somehow this doesn’t surprise me. “SIOWG” (Standard Issue Old White Guy) is probably not what you would want to be on record as saying about the newest occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW.
However, I have read a nice review of A Promised Land, ”Could Obama Have Been Great” by John F. Harris—“nice”, even though John includes an extensive and, to my mind, entirely unnecessary wind-up regarding presidential memoirs, which somehow necessitates quoting from such masters of the genre as Ulysses S. Grant. But once John has shown us how learned he is, things do go better.
Unsurprisingly, Obama saw himself as the man who would “bring us together” not realizing, I suspect, how often his predecessors saw themselves as uniquely qualified to fulfill that same role. As Harris tells it, and as I had already guessed, Obama saw himself as the second “man from Illinois”, the second Lincoln. Says Harris
There’s no doubt the kind of presidency he [Obama] wanted. In his rise to power, Obama and his surrogates frequently invoked Lincoln language and imagery and encouraged the belief that one Illinois politician was a kind of historical descendant of the other. The suggestion was that the president who freed African Americans from bondage was linked in some mystical way with the first African American to rise to the presidency.
Unfortunately, Obama and his supporters failed to notice, in their search for historical precedent, that Lincoln had been the most divisive president in American history—in a class by himself, really, since no one before or since has triggered an armed rebellion merely by obtaining a plurality of the popular vote.
Obama was not in Lincoln’s class, of course. Unlike Lincoln, he was elected by a substantial majority, with a massive congressional majority as well. Yet he largely managed to turn that gold into dross, “transforming” not the country, as he hoped, but the Republican Party, from a largely unconscious tool of racism to a conscious one. What happened?
Despite his self image of uniqueness, self-congratulatory as it may be, there is a remarkable similarity between Obama and his two Democratic predecessors in the “modern” presidency,1 Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. All three men thought of themselves as dispassionate, non-partisan problem-solvers. Democrat? Republican? Those are just labels! What I want are solutions! If you’ve got one, I’ll take it! I don’t care who you are!
Unfortunately, none of three ever noticed that they always defined “problems” as “big problems”, which would necessarily involve a massive government program (and a massive government bureaucracy) to solve. Nor did they notice that the “problems” identified affected either the financial needs of the poor (public jobs under Carter, universal health care for both Clinton and Obama) or the emotional needs of the upper-middle class (the “environment” for all three), to be financed largely at the expense of the middle class, which Democrats routinely praise (“the great American middle class”) and then routinely neglect once in office.
By the end of his second term, President Obama had handled the Great Recession better than the leader of any other nation, and he would have accomplished quite a bit more if the Republican Party hadn’t sought to destroy him from the minute he took his first oath of office, just as they did Bill Clinton. And it is a bit ridiculous—a bit more than ridiculous, in fact—to fault a president for failing to anticipate and respond to an unpreceded catastrophe on the scale of the Great Recession sans flaw. Yet Obama did make a few unforced errors that made things worse.
First of all, he tied himself far too tightly to Wall Street. I believe that in his early meetings with the billionaires, he lost his head, believing their promises that if he took care of them (largely by choosing, and faithfully supporting, Wall Street butt boy Tim Geithner as secretary of the treasury), they would take care of him, by leaning on the Republican Party to pass universal health care, which they signally failed to do.
According to Harris,
He [Obama] writes that he had expected that passage of the Affordable Care Act, “an item that most affected people’s day-to-day lives,” would be his best shot at “building momentum for the rest of my legislative agenda.”
This shows, I think, the level of self-illusion that has prevailed among my fellow liberal Democrats, for decades: that universal health care, because it is “universal”, is a sure-fire vote-getter. That self-illusion, to my mind, is part and parcel of a larger self-illusion that Democrats have about the history of their party.
Way back in the day, there was an inside joke among liberal reformers, “a program that only helps the poor is a poor program,” the joke being that, since “the poor” only constitute a small percentage of the overall population, there aren’t enough votes involved to make such programs politically feasible. Instead, “we” need programs that help everyone, like those great New Deal programs of the past, which guaranteed huge Democratic majorities. Current media darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, has advocated both universal income and Medicare for all, as modern examples of programs reflecting the true New Deal spirit.
Sadly, most Democrats are unwilling to recognize that the original New Deal measures were, in fact, excellent examples of [wait for it] systemic racism, what one witty ex-Republican called “white socialism”—socialism for those who’d “earned it”. All those great “universal” New Deal programs were not universal—they carefully excluding occupations dominated by blacks, like farmworkers, servants, waiters and waitresses, etc. It was the industrial factory jobs—particularly the unionized industrial factory jobs—that were covered by Social Security, wage and hour restrictions, unemployment insurance, and the like.2 It wasn’t until the post-WWII era that these programs were slowly expanded to cover “everyone”. And, of course, the more universal these programs have become, the more “controversial” they have become as well.
I’ve discussed the phenomenon of “white socialism” several times3 and discussed the general, bad habit of the Democratic Party of favoring programs that aid the poor and the upper middle class at the expense of the middle class perhaps most extensively here. Sadly, Obama never listened to me. Instead, he pushed “blindly” ahead, taxing those who had medical insurance in one form or another— the majority of the population—in order to provide medical insurance to those who lacked it—a definite minority of the population—and thinking that this would “build” support for similar reforms, all of which would be equally unpopular, for the very same reasons—taxing the middle class for benefits that would go to people other than themselves.
Because Obama saw his reforms as nothing more than “common sense”, he could only conclude that no “honest person” could disagree with him, that all opposition was a matter of blatant self-interest. At the same time he had to contend with the vicious and entirely unprincipled opposition of the Republican Party, which his billionaire “friends” did nothing to temper, despite all their promises. Instead, they simply took the money and ran, as they always do.
In foreign affairs, Obama was a painful disappointment to me, continuing George Bush’s interventionist “crusade” with barely diminished force, filling his administration with self-righteous Wilsonians like Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton, who were convinced that nothing promotes the coming of the New Millennium like a whiff of grapeshot. His support for the overthrow of Kaddafi in Libya was a particular disaster, costing the Democrats the presidency in 2016, though Hillary Clinton surely would have endured even more furious Republican opposition in Congress had she won. Our “allies” in Europe, principally the United Kingdom and France, served us very ill for pressing for this action, but Obama was a fool to listen to them in the first place.
Obama had a painful record as well when it came to civil liberties. He was under enormous pressure to continue “tough”, that is to say, illegal and unconstitutional, treatment of “terrorists”, which, to my mind, makes his failures here more excusable. But he had a painfully lazy attitude towards due process, thinking it more important to “punish” those we “know” are guilty of sexual harassment, via both criminal and civil processes, even if we can’t prove it, than to protect the rights of the accused. As someone supposedly devoted to “science”, he allowed his administration to adversely affect the rights of millions of college students on the basis of endlessly repeated false statistics that equated vulgar remarks with physical assault.
Despite my generally negative comments on President Obama here—I only voted for him once—I believe his record is superior to most modern presidents. He handled the Great Recession far better than the legendary Franklin handled the Great Depression, for which he had no real answer, and had to rely on World War II both to end the Depression and burnish his reputation.4 Lucky Franklin! Harry Truman certainly accomplished far more in the field of foreign policy, but failed to handle the Korean War.5 John F. Kennedy started far more than he finished, and he made a great many mistakes along the way. LBJ gave us Vietnam. Clinton did quite well during “good times” but had to throw it all away for the cheap thrill of a banal affair. Obama managed the one most important thing—the economy—extremely well, the Republicans stabbing him in the back every step of the way, but elsewhere his record was far too often disappointing. Taking things all in all, it’s hard to give him more than a B-.
Afterwords
Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post has an excellent column (that I still disagree with), “Obama’s raw recollections on race in ‘A Promised Land’”, discussing Obama’s comments in his autobiography regarding one of the earliest mini-controversies of his presidency, occasioned when Harvard Professor Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct after police were summoned to his home in Cambridge when a suspicious neighbor thought that Gates was breaking into it. The mainstream media, like the Post, lit up with outraged stories, unsurprisingly placing the police entirely in the wrong. Obama was asked about the incident in a press conference several days later, and this is how he responded:
Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.
In his autobiography, Obama wrote bitterly about the incident:
For just about every Black man in the country, and every woman who loved a Black man, and every parent of a Black boy, it was not a matter of paranoia or “playing the race card” or disrespecting law enforcement to conclude that whatever else had happened that day in Cambridge, this much was almost certainly true: A wealthy, famous, five-foot-six, 140-pound, fifty-eight-year-old white Harvard professor who walked with a cane because of a childhood leg injury would not have been handcuffed and taken down to the station merely for being rude to a cop who’d forced him to produce some form of identification while standing on his own damn property.
But I thought at the time, and think now, that the president should have stopped at “I don’t know, not having been there”. What he went on to say was mere speculation, something that is emphatically not the job of the president of the United States to do, especially, one might say, in cases involving criminal charges. The president should have known that the media, particularly prestige outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times have a very strong tendency to package these kinds of stories according to their own liberal bias—“this is a great opportunity for us to educate the public on how bigoted they are and how enlightened we are!”
There are all kinds of ways that this could have gone sideways for the president. Suppose Gates had been drunk, hungover, or high? Suppose he had poked the policeman with his cane? “Don’t turn your back on me, you goddamn cracker! I’ll have your badge for this! You don’t know who you’re fucking with!”
Since I don't know Gates at all, I don't know how he would be "likely" to behave, but apparently he did berate the cop in some manner. In any event, the president of the United States should not rush blindly to support people when he doesn't know the facts of the matter. Furthermore, and worst of all, the president was doing doing exactly what he condemns in others: judging a particular individual—the cop who arrested Gates—on the basis of a stereotype. “He was a white cop! A white cop! What more do you need to know? They’re all alike!”
George Bush fatuously proclaimed himself “the Decider”, which is in fact not the president’s job. Because he always thought that what made sense to him was “the truth”, President Obama unwisely saw himself as “the Explainer”, graciously giving us the advantage of his superior wisdom, and not understanding why we didn’t thank him for it.
1. “Modern” if you think, as I do, that “modern” American politics really was defined by the tumultuous “Sixties”—the civil rights revolution, the urban race riots, Vietnam, and the sexual revolution, “capped”, as it were, by Watergate.
2. Even today, Democrats seldom realize, out loud, at least, that their beloved Social Security and Medicare are not “universal” at all: you have to work 10 years to qualify. In addition, your SS benefits are calculated based on your earnings rather than your needs.
3. Additional post-war “white socialism” included the GI bill, which benefited whites far more than blacks, and employer-provided health insurance, available for the most part to unionized workers only, which constituted a double hidden benefit. The benefits were not considered taxable income to the employees, and tax advantages accruing to companies who offered health insurance were only available if the plans prohibited screening, which was, of course, grossly “unfair” to the insurance companies, who were forced to accept “bad risks”, jacking up the premiums overall. Employer-provided health insurance has the added attraction to the middle class of being worth more to higher-income employees. Almost no one realizes that employer-provided health insurance is “welfare”, but it is.
4. Roosevelt did not “solve” the Great Depression in eight years in office, but won what were in effect two world wars, fought in opposite corners of the globe, in less than four. Fighting economic disaster, it seems to me, is “tougher” than a war, because the measures needed to right economic collapse are almost inherently divisive, while war can be a uniquely powerful unifier—for a time.
5. According to what I have read, immediately after World War II the military were content to allow the Soviet Union to control all of Korea, but the State Department insisted on a fifty-fifty split. In 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech describing the “defense perimeter” of the U.S. in Asia in a manner that excluded Korea. The North Korean invasion followed shortly thereafter, and people naturally blamed Acheson. In his memoirs, Acheson said he gave his speech to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for review and they signed off on it. Presuming that that’s true, why did “everyone” in the Truman Administration suddenly realize, after the fact, that South Korea was “vital”? Perhaps because immediately after WWII China was still independent. When the communists took control of all of China in 1949, I suspect that no one “thought through” the implications for the importance of Korea until after the invasion.
