President Obama did not create the candidacy of Donald Trump. “Responsible” Republicans like Ross Douthat have been pushing that banal meme since the Donald first reared his ugly head back in the primaries, a falsehood that received a proper beat down from Slate’s William Saletan at the time. As Bill put it, “Obama is an adult. Therefore, Republicans are nominating a child.” But did policy errors by the Obama Administration make Trump’s victory possible? To my mind, the answer to that one is “yes”.
I lack the requisite viscera (heart, stomach, or generic “guts”) to read all the many “why I voted for Donald” statements available in the press, but of those I have read, the most frequent complaint is that Obama and Hillary helped “the undeserving”—the slackers and the illegals.
Back in the day—1992, to be exact—Bill Clinton ran and won on the cheesy but effective slogan that he would stand up for “those who work hard and play by the rules”, a pledge that he did not honor in his first two years, leading to the Democrats’ brutal loss in 1994. Clinton eventually realized that standing up for gay rights and universal health care was not the way to Middle America’s heart. When he combined with Newt Gingrich to pass welfare reform legislation prior to the 1996 election, he took the welfare monkey off the Democrats’ back, winning re-election. Had he been willing to resist the fine careless rapture of Monica Lewinsky’s blowjobs, he might have even assured the election of his successor, Al Gore.
President Obama did not learn from Bill Clinton’s mistakes, at least, not all of them. Obama, unlike Clinton, took a “hands-off” approach to gay rights in the early days of his administration, despite the fact that homophobia was clearly a declining factor in American life by 2008. But he foolishly insisted on passing the Affordable Care Act, fulfilling the Democratic dream of universal health care, unfortunately doing so on the backs of the middle class.
The Affordable Care Act was modeled, to a fair extent, on “RomneyCare”, the health care program Mitt enacted in Massachusetts. Well, if it worked in Massachusetts, it should work anywhere, right?
Well, no. Massachusetts is a very wealthy, very liberal state, with a fairly small minority population (74% white, 9% black, and 11% Hispanic). Furthermore, Mitt Romney was governor prior to the great recession, back when people still assumed that “everyone” was going to get rich. In 2009, Obama was already facing a severe populist backlash generated by the Wall Street bailout, yet he persisted in pushing through a massive healthcare program that was guaranteed to raise costs on everyone except “the poor”. At the same time, of course, he was aggressively pursuing negotiations with Congress to enshrine Wall Street’s dream of reduced Social Security and Medicare benefits. Anything to make the billionaires happy!
I don’t think Obama was at fault for ignoring the Republicans’ hysterical opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Hysterical minorities should not deserve more respect than responsible ones. But he should have recognized the deep American working/middle class opposition to entitlement programs for the “undeserving”. The fact that this attitude very frequently has racist overtones does not mean that it should or can be ignored without paying a severe—often disastrous—political price.1
Obama compounded his folly with the abysmal rollout of the program, basically tossing his crown jewel in the mud and inadvertently demonstrating that government bureaucracies motivated by the very best intentions can frequently screw up. In fact, the Affordable Care Act proved to be the gift that keeps on giving for the Republicans, because many people covered were hit by sharply increased premiums in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign. Democrats were simply blind to the fact that requiring everyone to have “good”—i.e., comprehensive—coverage meant that millions of people would be facing higher premiums than they wanted to pay. Of course, people “ought” to want comprehensive coverage. But, often, they don’t, and, when they’re young, they often don’t want to pay for any coverage. Most of all, of course, they don’t want to have to pay for someone else’s coverage.
The Obama Administration pursued a fairly tough policy on immigration through the 2014 congressional election, setting a record for deportations. The Democrats were hit with some bad luck just prior to November 2014, with the sudden influx of child immigrants. After the campaign, Democrats decided that being “tough” alienated Hispanics without attracting whites, so they shifted to a “let my people go” stance that was emotionally satisfying but politically unwise. A “tough but fair” policy probably would have been more effective.
The administration also made a massive unforced error with its military assault on Libya, championed, of course, by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who reaped what she sowed, although even the Libyan disaster could not quench her appetite for regime change, because she pushed for the same in Syria. If Hillary Clinton had been as strongly against the invasion of Libya as she was in favor of it, she would probably be president. The fact that the president insisted on wrapping this massive and gratuitous violation of international law, and national common sense, in idealistic folderol lifted from The West Wing—“Stand aside and watch innocent people die? That’s not who we are”—only compounded the folly.
The administration also drifted to the left on gun control following the Sandy Hook murders. Hillary couldn’t quite conceal her longing for a gun-free society, but she should have. She didn’t have to strike a varmint-huntin’ pose à la Mitt Romney, but she could have kept her mouth shut. She and Obama both.2
There’s no denying that the national mood in 2016 has been both ugly (Trump) and irrational (Bernie Sanders). Hillary was fighting against the tide. But if it weren’t for the Affordable Care Act and Libya, she’d very probably be in the White House.
Afterwords
For many number crunchers, the big story of the election is the failure of Hillary Clinton to do as well among working-class whites as Obama did. If working-class whites are racist, why did they vote for a black man but not a white woman? I’d say the implementation of ObamaCare, which proved to be a consistent embarrassment to the Democrats, had not yet occurred by November 2012. Throughout Obama’s second term, there was a growing hostility to both immigration and free trade. Clinton denied the latter but embraced the former, which I think encouraged some working-class voters to think that she was not “on their side”. The Obama Administration’s championing of Wall Street’s interests, and Clinton’s obvious Wall Street connections, hurt as well.However, the conviction that almost all of our economic woes are the result of unfair, and easily prevented, foreign competition, fanned eagerly by both Trump and Bernie Sanders, a conviction that is both widely believed and entirely false, certainly isn’t in any way the “fault” of either Clinton or Obama.3
There was other “bad luck” as well. Obama’s second term saw the emergence of ISIS, violent unrest associated with police killings of unarmed blacks, execution-style killings of police officers by blacks, terrorist killings in San Bernardino and Orlando in the U.S., and multiple terrorist attacks in France, all of which Trump crudely parleyed into a picture of “chaos” from which only he could save us.
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And, in fact, it often makes for good policy. Prior to the reform of federal welfare programs, 80% of the cost went to 20% of the recipients. Most welfare recipients stayed on the program or a year or less, but 20% did not. These people simply wanted to game the system, and they did, something that liberals simply were unwilling to believe. All people are good! But some are not. ↩︎
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Justice Scalia’s nose-thumbing decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, later expanded to apply to state governments as well, is “arguably” Nino’s own private Dred Scott Decision, but gun control simply doesn’t work. Liberals should recognize that fact and stifle their notion that all gun owners are “sick”. ↩︎
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To the extent that Clinton lost votes because her husband signed NAFTA, one can only agree with JFK that “life is not fair." ↩︎
