March/ April 2012
He’s gotten more done in three
years than any president in decades. Too bad the American public still
thinks he hasn’t accomplished anything.
By Paul Glastris
In mid-January, pollsters for the
Washington Post and ABC News asked a representative sampling of Americans the following question: “
Obama
has been president for about three years. Would you say he has
accomplished a great deal during that time, a good amount, not very
much, or little or nothing?”
When the poll’s results were released on January 18, even the most
seasoned White House staffers, who know the president faces a tough
battle for reelection, must have spit up their coffee: more than half
the respondents—52 percent—said the president has accomplished “not very
much” or “little or nothing.”
It is often said that there are no right or wrong answers in opinion
polling, but in this case, there is an empirically right answer—one
chosen by only 12 percent of the poll’s respondents. The answer is that
Obama has accomplished “a great deal.”
Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his
first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and
turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in
history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of
consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of
national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness
protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid.
Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask,
don’t tell.”
Even over the past year, when he was bogged down in budget fights
with the Tea Party-controlled GOP House, Obama still managed to squeeze
out a few domestic policy victories, including a $1.2 trillion deficit
reduction deal and the most sweeping overhaul of food safety laws in
more than seventy years. More impressively, on the foreign policy front
he ended the war in Iraq, began the drawdown in Afghanistan, helped to
oust Gaddafi in Libya and usher out Mubarak in Egypt, orchestrated new
military and commercial alliances as a hedge against China, and
tightened sanctions against Iran over its nukes.
Oh, and he shifted counterterrorism strategies to target Osama bin Laden and then ordered the risky raid that killed him.
That Obama has done all this while also steering the country out of
what might have been a second Great Depression would seem to have made
him already, just three years into his first term, a serious candidate
for greatness. (See
Obama’s Top 50 Accomplishments.)
And yet a solid majority of Americans nevertheless thinks the
president has not accomplished much. Why? There are plenty of possible
explanations. The most obvious is the economy. People are measuring
Obama’s actions against the actual conditions of their lives and
livelihoods, which, over the past three years, have not gotten
materially better. He failed miserably at his grandiose promise to
change the culture of Washington (see “
Clinton’s Third Term”).
His highest-profile legislative accomplishments were object lessons in
the ugly side of compromise. In negotiations, he came off to Democrats
as naïvely trusting, and to Republicans as obstinately partisan, leaving
the impression that he could have achieved more if only he had been
less conciliatory—or more so, depending on your point of view. And for
such an obviously gifted orator, he has been surprisingly inept at
explaining to average Americans what he’s fighting for or trumpeting
what he’s achieved.
In short, when judging Obama’s record so far, conservatives measure
him against their fears, liberals against their hopes, and the rest of
us against our pocketbooks. But if you measure Obama against other
presidents—arguably
the more relevant yardstick—a couple of things come to light. Speaking
again in terms of sheer tonnage, Obama has gotten more done than any
president since LBJ. But the effects of some of those achievements have
yet to be felt by most Americans, often by design. Here, too, Obama is
in good historical company.
The greatest achievements of some of our most admired presidents were
often unrecognized during their years in office, and in many cases
could only be appreciated with the passing of time. When FDR created
Social Security in 1935, the program offered meager benefits that were
delayed for years, excluded domestic workers and other heavily black
professions (a necessary compromise to win southern votes), and was
widely panned by liberals as a watered-down sellout. Only in subsequent
decades, as benefits were raised and expanded, did Social Security
become the country’s most beloved government program. Roosevelt’s first
proposal for a GI Bill for returning World War II veterans was also
relatively stingy, and while its benefits grew as it moved through
Congress, its aim remained focused on keeping returning veterans from
flooding the labor market. Only later was it apparent that the program
was fueling the growth of America’s first mass middle class. When Harry
Truman took office at the dawn of the Cold War, he chose the policy of
containment over a more aggressive “rollback” of communism, and then he
built the institutions to carry it out. He left office with a 32 percent
public approval rating. Only decades later would it become clear that
he made the right choice.
Of course, much could happen that might tarnish Obama’s record in the
eyes of history. The economy is still extremely weak, and could stay
that way or relapse into recession; Afghanistan could go south in a big
way; or Obama could simply fail to win reelection, and then watch as his
legacy gets systematically dismantled at a time when most ordinary
Americans still don’t know its worth. This would be the most crushing
blow, because a number of Obama’s biggest accomplishments function, like
FDR’s, with a built-in delay. Some are structured to have modest
effects now but major ones later. Others emerged in a crimped and
compromised form that, if history is a guide, may well be filled out and
strengthened down the road. Still others are quite impressive now but
create potential for even greater change in the future. At this point,
it’s hard to get a sense of these possibilities without lifting the hood
and looking deeply into the actual policies and programs. Hence,
there’s no reason to think that today’s voters would be aware of them,
but every reason to think historians will.
Let’s begin with the policies that have
prompted the most disappointment from the left and anger from the right:
Obama’s big moves on the economy. The most visible aspect of Obama’s
agenda in this arena was the American Recovery Act, better known as the
stimulus. Almost no one has a good word to say about it these days.
Voters have soured on it. Obama made no mention of it in his State of
the Union address. Liberals complain that it was too heavily weighted
with not-very-stimulatory tax cuts meant to lure GOP votes (which it
didn’t), that it should have been even bigger (true, though it was
bigger than the one the Democratic-controlled House proposed), and that a
significantly bigger one could have passed Congress (dubious).
Conservatives claim it didn’t increase jobs or help the economy at all.
But most reputable economists say it did. According to the
Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus added anywhere from 500,000 to
3.3 million jobs and boosted GDP by between 1 and 4.5 percent. Indeed,
within weeks of the stimulus going into effect, unemployment claims
began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began
producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so
for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of 3.7 million
private-sector jobs. On the first key test—whether it helped the economy
when the economy needed it most— the stimulus passed. And if the
current recovery continues to pick up steam, then the stimulus will be
remembered as having helped lead America out of the Great Recession.
But the potential significance of the stimulus may go even beyond
that. First off, thanks to innovative management, the administration has
been able to spend $787 billion with minimal fraud. (By comparison,
FDR’s early New Deal spending was so fraught with waste and abuse that
the term “boondoggle” arose to describe it.) Not only that, but the way
the administration has chosen which projects to fund has itself been
revolutionary. Instead of spending all the money in the usual manner—by
formula, with each state and congressional district getting its “fair
share”—the administration used a sizeable portion of the stimulus to
create a dozen or more giant competitive grant programs. Potential
recipients, be they state and local governments, nonprofits, or
corporations, had to vie for the money by proposing their own
entrepreneurial strategies for meeting federal goals, as well as
procedures to measure the results of their efforts.
The best known of these is Race to the Top, the much praised $4.35
billion Education Department grant program. It is one of the few
policies of this administration praised by left and right—and yet almost
no one mentions that it was part of the stimulus bill. Just to be
eligible to win the competition, cash-strapped states were suddenly
willing to enact reforms they’d hitherto resisted. Dozens upgraded the
quality of their student performance tests, tied teacher pay to those
tests, adopted a common set of strong academic standards, and took caps
off the number of charter schools allowed in their states. Whether these
changes eventually improve student outcomes remains to be seen, but
Race to the Top has arguably brought as much change to state and
district laws and procedures as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind
law. And there are a dozen other similar competitive grant programs
embedded in the stimulus, in areas ranging from digitizing medical
records to expanding freight rail capacity to spurring the creation of
an advanced battery-manufacturing sector.
How will history judge the stimulus? Not so well if the economy stays
weak or sputters out; quite well if it continues to improve. But beyond
that, if some of the bets Obama has placed on education reform or
transportation or energy pan out, and if the competition-based model of
federal spending becomes more common, the “temporary” stimulus will have
left an enduring mark on government and the economy.
Another major (and much-reviled) aspect of Obama’s economic legacy is
how his team handled the meltdown of the financial sector. This is
another achievement he made no mention of in his State of the Union
address—and no wonder, because it’s complex, still unfolding, and
involves the rescue of bankers. But it’s worth slowing down here to
remember the crisis as Obama inherited it. As you will recall, the
actual bank “bailout” took place in the fall of 2008, when the Bush
administration created the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. By
injecting more than $300 billion into hundreds of banks, and especially
the nation’s biggest, TARP bought the economy some breathing room and
gave the incoming administration some resources— another $350 billion in
unspent TARP funds—to work with. But with consumers increasingly unable
to make their mortgage and credit card payments—the economy was
shedding upward of 800,000 jobs the month Obama was inaugurated—losses
at the big banks were mounting faster than Washington could force-feed
dollars into them, and no one really knew what they were carrying on
their balance sheets. Any number of institutions looked like they could
collapse, and that extra $350 billion was not enough to stabilize the
system and pay for other crucial emergency programs, like mitigating
foreclosures.
The advice the administration was getting from economists like Joseph
Stiglitz, who had seen the crisis coming years before, was to use the
moment to completely reshape the financial sector: nationalize the
biggest, most troubled banks; toss out their management; break them up
into smaller banks; have the government strip out and sell off the
“toxic” assets on their books; downsize executive salaries and bonuses;
and, in general, shrink the size of Wall Street, the better to limit its
baleful influence on the rest of the economy.
Obama’s top economic advisers thought such a dramatic overhaul was
both unnecessary and reckless to consider in the midst of an economic
crisis; firemen don’t rethink sprinkler regulations while an apartment
building is ablaze, after all. Instead, Timothy Geithner’s Treasury
Department crafted a much more targeted intervention, aimed at
stabilizing the financial markets and getting the economy back on track
at the lowest possible cost to government. Rather than have the
taxpayers assume the risky and expensive burden of taking over the
banks—an expense that Congress, having already approved TARP and the
stimulus, was in no mood to authorize—Geithner’s plan was to convince
investors to come in and recapitalize them. His plan had three main
parts. First, the Treasury, working with the Fed and other agencies, ran
“stress tests” of the banks to determine the fragility of their books
and how much more capital they’d need to be able to survive and lend in
an even more dire economic scenario than was expected at the time.
Second, it gave banks six months to raise that amount of capital from
private investors, and said that, if they failed, Treasury would use
taxpayer dollars to buy ownership shares of the banks at a preset price,
effectively establishing a floor for private investors. Third, it
created a fund, with both public and private dollars, to buy the toxic
assets on the banks’ books, thereby giving some assurance that there
would be a market for those assets.
The politics of the plan were dreadful. It looked like more mollycoddling of Wall Street. But, as Joshua Green noted in the
Atlantic,
it had the desired effect. Private money, $140 billion of it, flooded
into the nineteen biggest banks; the lending markets unfroze; and, with
the help of low interest rates from the Fed, the banks paid back the
TARP funds, with interest. In 2008, the International Monetary Fund
studied past financial crises in forty-two countries and found that
their governments spent, on average, 13.3 percent of GDP to resolve
them. By that measure, it would have cost the U.S. government $1.9
trillion. The Obama plan got the banks back on their feet at essentially
zero cost to the government, and in historically near-record time. Let
that sink in.
In addition to resolving the immediate crisis, the administration
tried to insure against a repeat of it by issuing a plan to expand
federal regulation of the financial markets, a plan that ultimately
became the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, otherwise
known as Dodd-Frank. The new law, which passed with almost no GOP votes,
has been scathingly criticized since it first appeared in the House— by
conservatives for being a big-government power grab and by liberals and
various academic experts for being too weak.
But as Michael Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute explains, the new
law parallels and expands upon the great achievements of New Deal
financial regulation. Much as the Securities Act of 1933 and the
Securities Exchange Act of 1934 mandated transparency in the securities
markets and created the SEC to punish fraud, Dodd-Frank creates a new
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to do the same for
everything from mortgages to credit cards. The Securities Exchange Act
forced stock trading onto exchanges and mandated that traders have
sufficient collateral. Similarly, Dodd-Frank pushes financial
derivatives into clearinghouses and exchanges. The 1933 Glass-Steagall
Act forced the separation of commercial banks from the more speculative
activities of investment banks. The new so-called Volcker Rule in
Dodd-Frank limits the ability of banks to trade securities for the
firm’s own profit. Glass-Steagall also created the FDIC to monitor
commercial banks and take them over if they get into financial trouble.
Dodd-Frank gives the FDIC “resolution authority” over the “too big to
fail” financial behemoths so that they too can be monitored and taken
over if necessary.
At each stage as Dodd-Frank has moved through the legislative
process, from House to Senate and now to the agency level for
implementation, liberals have sounded the alarm that the insufficiently
stringent law was liable to get progressively weaker as industry
lobbyists jam it full of caveats and exemptions. Yet while the law does
now include its fair share of loopholes (especially in the Volcker
Rule), what’s surprising is that the measure has in general gotten
tougher, not weaker, over time—often at the behest of lawmakers who
wanted stronger measures than did Geithner. The Senate adopted the
Collins amendment—a set of rules drafted by Sheila Bair’s FDIC that
imposes tough capital requirements on banks, bank holding companies, and
systemically risky nonbank financial institutions like hedge funds,
limiting their ability to make the kind of highly leveraged and risky
trades between each other that contributed mightily to the financial
crisis. Thanks in part to the prodding of Gary Gensler, the
Obama-appointed chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the
language on regulating derivatives got much stronger in the Senate
version of the bill, and since then the CFTC has written a reasonably
strong and comprehensive set of rules and regulations to implement the
law.
Washington narratives tend to get set early and resist new anomalous
facts. So it is with the financial crisis. The initial take was that
Dodd-Frank is weak tea and Obama caved to Wall Street. This view has
persisted despite accumulating evidence to the contrary.
Confidence Men”,
Ron Suskind’s scathing critique of the administration’s handling of the
financial crisis, opens with Obama in a Rose Garden address making
clear that he would not be nominating Elizabeth Warren to head the CFPB.
The anecdote is meant to encapsulate the administration’s general
political spinelessness. Today, the CFPB is headed by the widely admired
Richard Cordray, placed there in a nervy recess appointment by Obama,
and Elizabeth Warren is leading the polls in her race to win back Ted
Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat from the Republicans—hardly a bad
outcome for the cause of financial justice.
True, the largest banks are now bigger than they were before the
crises thanks to emergency mergers engineered by the Bush
administration. But as Obama’s former economic adviser Austan Goolsbee
told journalist Michael Hirsh, “The most dangerous failures—Bear
Stearns, Lehman—were not even close to the biggest. You could have
broken the largest financial institutions into, literally, five pieces
and each of them would still have been bigger than Bear Stearns. The
main danger to the economy was interconnection, not raw size.” With the
capital requirements of the Collins amendment, the Volcker Rule, and the
forcing of derivatives into clearinghouses, Dodd-Frank goes a long way
toward dealing with the “interconnection” problem. The law’s “resolution
authority” also gives regulators the ability to spot overly risky
behavior by big banks early and to shut them down if they get into
trouble. And the behemoths now have higher capital requirements than do
smaller banks, another hedge against risk and an incentive for business
to move from the former to the latter.
True, the bank executives on whose watch the crisis happened got
lavish bonuses on their way out the door, and the bonuses continued to
flow even as the sector was getting bailed out by Uncle Sam—a
dispiriting and infuriating phenomenon to many Americans, liberal and
conservative. Yet it’s also true that bank shareholders were forced to
take a “haircut,” since the new private investment that flowed into
banks thanks to Geithner’s recapitalization plan greatly diluted the
value of their stock. That has provided at least some market discipline
to counteract the “moral hazard” dilemma of government bailouts sending
the signal that there is no penalty for recklessness. More importantly,
by reducing banks’ ability to leverage capital and make risky trades
with other people’s money, Dodd-Frank threatens the honeypot of the huge
profits that have been the source of all that outsized compensation.
And as a fallback, the law gives government the power to rewrite bank
executive compensation packages if those packages are seen as
incentivizing overly risky behavior—a power regulators have already
begun to exercise. Finally, after years of pussyfooting around, the
administration, prodded by aggressive state attorneys general, has
finally launched a major push to investigate and prosecute possible
criminal misconduct in the financial collapse.
How, then, will historians judge Obama’s handling of the financial
crisis? That’s hard to say definitively because so much depends on
follow through—specifically, on whether Obama has a
chance to
follow through by winning a second term. (If he isn’t reelected, the
Republicans have vowed to gut Dodd-Frank.) Will the rules that
regulators are now writing to implement Dodd-Frank be tough and smart
enough? Will they be enforced? Will federal prosecutors bring some
bankers to justice? Can the toxic assets still on banks’ books be
disposed of without causing another banking collapse?
We can’t yet know the answers to these questions, but there are
strong signs that Wall Street knows the jig is up. In anticipation of
Dodd-Frank’s provisions going into effect, many of the biggest banks
have already shut down their proprietary trading operations. Banks’
profits, which soared during the initial stages of the bailout, have
plummeted in recent months even as other corporate sectors have been
doing quite well. Compensation packages are down, too. If, five, ten, or
twenty years from now, risky behavior by financial institutions once
again leads to a crisis, Obama will be judged harshly for having failed
to push for stiffer reforms at the moment when Wall Street’s political
power was weakest. But if we get through the next decade or two without
another financial meltdown, and Wall Street’s unhealthy influence over
the economy abates, then Obama will be credited with not only having
gotten us out of the financial crisis in the short run but also having
crafted an effective new set of rules to reduce the chances of it
happening again.
A similar “we shall see” factor looms
over what is arguably Obama’s crowning achievement: the Affordable Care
Act. In passing a bill that provides near-universal health care to the
American people, Obama succeeded where five previous presidents over the
course of a century had failed. He did so against the advice of some of
his closest aides and the fervent, united opposition of Republicans.
The law manages not only to extend coverage to 32 million uninsured
Americans but also to cut the deficit and put in place dozens of new
policies and programs aimed at reducing health care costs, the single
greatest driver of America’s long-term fiscal problems.
Yet the measure’s major effects are yet to be felt, and its ultimate
fate is highly uncertain. Most of the law’s benefits, including
subsidies for the uninsured, do not kick in until 2014. Little wonder,
then, that voters have a hard time getting excited about the ACA. And
the bill’s various experimental policy measures to control health care
costs are just that— experiments that might or might not work. Moreover,
the law might not survive a legal challenge that the Supreme Court is
currently considering, and will almost certainly be killed or gutted if
the Republicans are victorious in November.
You can understand, then, why Obama was afraid to make more than a
glancing mention of the ACA in the State of the Union. But the
lukewarm-to-hostile attitudes people have about the law now are likely
to fade if he manages to get reelected. With four more years to oversee
the implementation of the law and protect it against whatever the courts
and congressional Republicans hurl at it, Obama can ensure that it will
be politically and programmatically secure. The benefits will have
started flowing, and businesses and the medical industry will have begun
to adapt to it. Over time it will likely become as much a permanent
fixture of American life as Social Security.
Even those achievements that Obama is willing to brag about—ones that
have created benefits that are already apparent—may ultimately be seen
as grander in scope than we now appreciate, depending on how the future
plays out. Take, for instance, his policies toward the auto industry.
When he came into office, Detroit was in free fall. Without additional
government help (the Bush administration had provided $13.4 billion in
bridge loans), Chrysler and possibly GM could have been liquidated,
putting at risk the entire network of domestic auto suppliers on which
Ford and other carmakers depend. The Obama administration injected an
additional $62 billion into GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes
and agreements for massive restructuring— eliminating brands, closing
dealerships, renegotiating pay and benefit agreements, and, in
Chrysler’s case, facilitating a merger with Fiat.
The federal takeover was deeply unpopular with the public and
condemned by conservatives as socialism. But it is hard to argue with
the results. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added
upward of 100,000 jobs. The Big Three are all profitable again, and last
year they each gained market share, the first time that’s happened in
two decades. Most of the $80 billion in bailout funds have been paid
back; Washington is likely to lose only about $16 billion, less if the
price of its GM stock rises. Even on its face, the policy has been one
of the most successful short-term government economic interventions in
decades.
But Obama’s restructuring of Detroit goes even deeper. A big part of
the reason U.S. automakers were in such bad shape on the eve of the
recession was a spike in gas prices that had left them with lots full of
SUVs and light trucks they couldn’t sell. Unlike their foreign-owned
competitors, who could shift from, say, Tundras to Corollas and weather
the storm, Detroit simply didn’t know how to make money producing small
cars, though they were belatedly trying to learn. So, as a condition of
the bailout, Obama’s White House secured commitments from GM and
Chrysler to put even more emphasis on building more fuel-efficient cars
in the United States. Meanwhile, with money from the stimulus, the
administration invested in companies that manufacture advanced batteries
of the kind needed to make electric cars. And, while the automakers
were feeling beholden, the administration convinced them to agree to a
doubling of auto fuel efficiency requirements over the next thirteen
years.
The overall strategy (which the administration doesn’t like to talk
about because it sounds too much like industrial policy) is to create
the conditions whereby American car manufacturers can profitably build
and sell small, fuel-efficient cars in the United States. The hope is
that this will obviate the need for additional bailouts if and when gas
prices rise again, and position Detroit to export the kinds of cars most
of the world wants. Will the strategy work? We shall see.
Or consider higher education. Obama has pushed through two major
reforms in this area. First, working with Democrats in Congress, he
ended the wasteful, decades-old practice of subsidizing banks to provide
college loans. Starting in the summer of 2010, all students began
getting their loans directly from the federal government. The move saves
the Treasury $67 billion over ten years, $36 billion of which will go
to expanding Pell Grants, the most significant form of aid to lower- and
lower-middle-income students. Second, the administration has issued
so-called “gainful employment” rules for career-focused colleges,
especially for-profits. Those schools whose students don’t earn enough
to pay off their loans—because they never graduate, or don’t learn
marketable skills—will be cut off from the federal student loan program,
effectively putting them out of business.
While these are big moves, they might also turn out to be first
steps. As the think tank Education Sector has written, by kicking the
banks out of the student loan program, Obama has effectively eliminated
the biggest lobbying force standing in the way of an über-reform of
student aid: turning the confusing plethora of loan programs into one
simple federal loan payable as a percentage of a person’s income over a
working lifetime. Such a single “income-contingent” loan would make it
possible for virtually every American to afford a post-secondary
education without risk of going bankrupt. And with the gainful
employment rules, the federal government will have the ability to track
what kind of income students from different colleges earn after they
graduate. If such data were made available for every college, parents
and students would have vital information they don’t have now on the
comparative value of their education choices, which in turn might
provide market pressure on schools to keep tuition down and quality up.
Obama has signaled that he’d very much like the authority to provide
such information. Whether he can get it is an open question.
If it’s too early to know what history
will think of Barack Obama, it is possible to ask today’s historians
what they think. Two polls have been conducted since Obama took office
that ask experts to rate America’s presidents based on measures of
character, leadership, and accomplishments. A 2010 Siena Research
Institute survey of 238 presidential scholars ranked Obama the
fifteenth-best president overall. Last year, the United States
Presidency Centre at the University of London surveyed forty-seven UK
specialists on American history and politics. That survey placed Obama
at number eight, just below Harry Truman.
I had conversations recently with six presidential scholars. Three of
them—Robert Dallek, Matthew Dallek, and Alan Lichtman—said that, based
on what Obama has gotten done in his first term, he has a good shot at
ranking in or just below the top ten presidents of history, but with the
proviso that he almost certainly needs to get reelected to secure that
position. The other three—Alan Brinkley, David Greenberg, and Allen
Guelzo—took a more jaundiced view. While conceding that Obama has put a
lot of points on the board in terms of legislation, they felt that the
highly compromised nature of that legislation, among other things,
reflects qualities of leadership—a lack of experience, acumen, and
forcefulness—that will keep him from ranking with the great presidents,
and will more likely place him somewhere in the middle of the pack,
presuming he even gets reelected.
These last three scholars’ views mesh with the broader feeling among
Obama’s critics, especially on the liberal side, that Obama is fatally
overcautious. What’s notable about such critiques is that they
essentially rest on arguments that are counterfactual—that a savvier,
more experienced, more energetic president could have gotten more done.
Certainly that’s plausible, if unprovable. But it is equally plausible,
as Ezra Klein has argued, that what has constrained Obama is not a lack
of boldness but a lack of political space. With Republicans unified in
opposition and willing to abuse the filibuster such that to pass any
legislation has required sixty Senate votes that Obama has seldom had,
it is unrealistic to think he or anyone could have done a whole lot
better.
Even if his caution has led to achievements that are less sweeping
than they might have been, that same character trait might also explain
why none of Obama’s decisions has, so far, led to a calamitous outcome.
This is no small feat, especially in a time of multiple world-historical
emergencies. Indeed, some of our greatest presidents did not manage to
avoid such self-inflicted disasters. The sainted George Washington, in
an effort to retire Revolutionary War debt, chose to tax whiskey, and
sparked a bloody insurgency, the Whiskey Rebellion. Thomas Jefferson,
hoping to punish European powers for harassing American merchant
vessels, put a stop to all marine trade in and out of American ports,
and succeeded only in causing a national recession. FDR, too,
precipitated a recession when he slashed budgets in 1936; he also
interned the Japanese and tried to pack the courts. Ronald Reagan traded
arms for hostages. Obama may well make similar kinds of grave mistakes
in the future, but so far, as best we can tell, he has not made any.
The view that Barack Obama is overly cautious must also take into
account the many times in his presidency when he took extraordinary
risks. He did so when he turned down Detroit’s first bailout request,
demanding more concessions, including government ownership and the
resignation of GM’s CEO, before saying yes. He did so when, after
passing the stimulus, he made health care reform his number one
legislative priority, against the advice of some of his top political
advisers; and when, after Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts
Senate race, he chose to jam the health care bill through reconciliation
despite cries of outrage from the GOP. And he did so, most famously,
when he chose to send special forces into Pakistan to go after Osama bin
Laden, without certainty that the terrorist leader was even there, with
his senior national security advisers waffling, and with the clear
understanding that if the mission went wrong, as a similar one did under
Jimmy Carter, it could ruin his presidency.
It should be clear by now that I don’t believe that Obama’s record
has been crippled by an excess of caution. Indeed, his last-minute
decision to order extra helicopters into the bin Laden raid illustrates
that daring and caution are compatible virtues, and he has a winning mix
of both. It should also be clear that, on the strength of his record so
far, I think he’s likely to be considered a great or near- great
president.
That’s not to say that his instincts and decisions have always been
right. I cannot, for instance, find a good reason why he should not have
at least threatened to use Fourteenth Amendment powers to unilaterally
raise the debt ceiling to break the hostage standoff with the GOP last
year. Time and again, he has allowed himself to be played too long by
Republicans pretending to be interested in bipartisanship. He could have
used more experience going into the job, and his temperament does not
make him a perfect fit for it. His disdain for the “political games of
Washington” is understandable, sane, and appealing to voters, and part
of why he is good at keeping his focus on the long term. But unless you
can change the rules—which Obama has not been able to do— the game must
be played. And games tend to be mastered by those who love them; think
LBJ and Clinton.
One of the most important tasks a president must master—and Obama
hasn’t—is speaking up for his own record. This has been especially
challenging for him because of the still-widespread economic suffering
across the country and the too-soon-to-tell quality of his biggest
accomplishments. And again, his even temperament hasn’t helped. He has
seemed to want his achievements to speak for themselves. Who wouldn’t?
But the presidency doesn’t work that way. A president has to remind the
public every day of what he’s already done, why he’s done it, and how
those achievements fit into a broader plan that will help them in the
future.
With his State of the Union and some subsequent speeches, he has only
begun this task. And while it’s very late in the day, the election is
still eight months away. The irony is that, while Barack Obama has
achieved a tremendous amount in his first term, the only way to secure
that record of achievement in the eyes of history is to win a second.
And to do that, he first has to convince the American voters that he in
fact has a record of achievement.
(Molly Riley-Pool/Getty Images)
(AP Photo/Saul Loeb)
(Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images) 
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) 
(AP Photo)
(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
5 Top Highlights in Hillary Clinton’s Secretary of State Tenure
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