The Obama Legacy Project The U.S. is more divided in more ways than it’s been since the 1960s.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-obama-legacy-project-1452643869
As he begins his final year in office, President Obama’s legacy project is already in high gear. This includes Tuesday night’s State of the Union, which is best understood as the start of a campaign to persuade Americans that the last seven years have been better than they believe. He needs to start early because this reality makeover won’t be easy.
Start with the economy, which Mr. Obama’s Boswells are attempting to reframe as a “boom.” Mr. Obama certainly inherited a deep recession, but recessions always end and deep ones usually rebound faster and higher. The test of economic policy is the pace and quality of the recovery, and this one has been the slowest since World War II.
The jobless rate has fallen to 5%, but in May 2007 under George W. Bush it was 4.4%. Today’s rate has been able to fall as low as it has in part because so many working-age Americans have left the workforce; the labor participation rate of 62.6% hasn’t been this low since 1977. Real incomes for most households have only recently begun to rise above what they were at the end of the recession in June 2009.
If you don’t believe us, listen to the Democratic presidential candidates. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and that other guy are all bemoaning the economic plight of the middle class and offering new government ministrations. Perhaps they know they’d sound silly if they talked about an Obama boom. Meanwhile, serious Keynesian economists use a 10-dollar euphemism for the Obama recovery: “secular stagnation.”
The President’s defenders blame slow growth on Republican opposition, yet he has achieved most of what he sought on the economy. He passed his “stimulus” and raised taxes. He transformed one-sixth of the economy with ObamaCare and the financial system via Dodd-Frank. He nationalized student loans, has regulated the Internet, and is redoing electricity markets to crush coal. All of this and more have combined to inhibit growth.
His last year isn’t likely to change this arc, short of a recession. He said Tuesday he wants Congress to pass the Pacific trade bill, but Republicans are wary and Mrs. Clinton opposes it. Corporate tax reform would also be possible but Mr. Obama won’t cut rates enough to make it worthwhile. ObamaCare’s private insurance markets are a mess, but fixing them will be up to the next President of either party.
Mr. Obama also claimed foreign-policy success, but with little connection to reality anywhere in the world. His failure to intervene left Syria to become what former CIA Director David Petraeus calls “a geopolitical Chernobyl,” spreading chaos throughout the Middle East. It nurtured Islamic State, which has swamped Europe with refugees and is inspiring jihadists in the U.S. Killing Osama bin Laden was not an even trade for the rise of ISIS.
The most serious long-term threat has been the rise of authoritarian powers on Mr. Obama’s watch. Vladimir Putin in Europe, China in the Western Pacific and Iran in the Middle East want to push America out so they can become regional hegemons, and they have all made substantial progress.
The best you can say about the Iran nuclear deal is that it will take years to play out, and it will be vindicated if Iran’s theocratic regime falls before the accord sunsets. If not, the deal will have enabled, with money and legitimacy, Iran’s ambitions to dominate the Middle East. Mr. Obama didn’t mention that Iran Tuesday seized two small U.S. Navy boats and 10 American crew members in the Persian Gulf.
***
The President finished his speech with a pitch for optimism and civility, which is a return to the sunny sentiments that launched his national career. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” Mr. Obama famously said at the 2004 Democratic convention.
But as he wraps up his Presidency, the United States is more divided in more ways than at any time since the 1960s. Democrats have moved further left, while Republicans have moved right. Mr. Obama is not solely to blame for this, but much of it is the product of how he has governed.
More than any recent President, he has turned the bully pulpit into a battering ram to smash his opponents. He denounced the Supreme Court in the 2010 State of the Union. He all but called Paul Ryan’s 2011 budget un-American. He played the race card to win re-election in 2012. He doesn’t argue with Republicans; he demeans them. In that sense he has made American politics safe for Donald Trump on the right and Black Lives Matter on the left.
Look no further than the debate over immigration. We supported reform long before Mr. Obama did, but he has succeeded in making it nearly impossible to achieve. His lawless legalization decree has made the issue toxic for Republicans and will probably be overturned in court. The rising terror threat has also made immigration a security issue as much as an economic one. This too has given Mr. Trump potent ammunition.
***
The political result is that, more than nearly all two-term Presidents, Mr. Obama’s legacy depends on the election of a Democratic successor. A Republican President could erase his executive orders in an instant, while a GOP Congress and White House would dismantle ObamaCare and much of his regulatory apparatus. His 2016 legacy project is really intended as a Democratic mobilization call to elect Mrs. Clinton. Above all he needs Republicans to blow themselves up.
Comments are closed.
