Barack Obama

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John Rapley
Contributor
THE ELECTION of Barack
Obama to the presidency of
the United States nearly
seven years ago produced one of
those ‘where were you when’
moments that will live forever in
our memories. At the moment the
exit polls announced he’d won in
2008, the normal loquacious televi-
sion pundits went silent, too
choked with emotion to comment
on the fact that what many thought
impossible had just happened. Old
friends who hadn’t spoken for
years called to celebrate, and I
recall working the phone lines for
hours as the news programmes
asked for feedback.
As the Obama presidency
enters its final quarter and
Mr Obama prepares to
make his Jamaican
stopover, that day may
seem a distant memory.
As Sarah Palin memo-
rably said (not some-
thing she did often),
the ‘hope-changey
stuff’ didn’t work out
quite the way we all
hoped. Perhaps
Obama’s flaw was that
he was too good a speaker,
raising hopes he could
never meet. Almost at
once, the disappointment set
in. His promise to restore
civility to Washington and
end partisan sniping seems
now like a bad joke in a US
capital where the dividing lines are
starker than ever.
But in fairness to Mr Obama, he
probably can’t be held responsible
for his failure to deliver a new era
of bipartisan politics. The fault
lines in American politics have
been deepening for years, and
structural factors are entrenching
them. The electoral system permits
states to gerrymander their elec-
toral districts in such a way that
conservative regions are becoming
more conservative, and liberal ones
more liberal. So while a large slab
of the American electorate remains
politically centrist, it sadly finds
fewer outlets for expression.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY RETREATING
As for his expressed desire to be a
transformational president, Mr
Obama built a remarkable campaign
machine that excited the grass roots
and brought millions of young
voters out for the first time. And
while he managed to retain that base
in 2012 amid some disillusionment
with his first term, he has done
much less to build his party. Partly
as a consequence, outside of presi-
dential politics the Democratic Party
is retreating before a Republican
advance across much of the country.
His record on the economy is
equally mixed. His administration’s
signal achievement was to stave off
what had the potential to be a cata-
strophic economic collapse in the
wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
But he did so with an economic
team led in no small part by the
architects of that same crisis –
people like Larry Summers, who
had led the deregulation wave of
the Clinton years which rewarded
reckless behaviour by banks.
History will probably record this
as the Obama administration’s
greatest missed opportunity. When
Mr Obama entered the Oval Office
for the first time in 2009, the
American banking system was on
its knees. He faced a golden oppor-
tunity to break it up, reorganise it,
and make it better serve the needs
of both the economy and the society.
Instead, he turned it over to a Wall
Street cabal which quickly put it
back on its feet with its business
model largely intact. The result is
that too-big-to-fail banks are still
too big, banks still engage in
unproductive speculation, techno-
logical innovation is not as fast as it
could be, and income inequality is
getting ever worse.
When it comes to assessing his
domestic policy, though, history may
look more kindly on the Obama
presidency. In shepherding through
the most ambitious expansion in
public health care the US has seen in
recent memory, he helped to complete
a vision of a more-caring America
initially articulated by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt nearly a century
ago. Unfortunately, ‘Obamacare’ was
marred by ham-fisted implementa-
tion, for which the White House
seemed to provide shockingly poor
oversight. This has not helped Mr
Obama’s signature achievement to
win much favour in large parts of the
American population. Republicans
are still determined to reverse it. But
should Obamacare take hold and
lend itself to future reform and devel-
opment, it may one day be remem-
bered as a watershed moment in
American history.
Mr Obama also stuck to his
If America were a
malt shop, the
Obama presidency
might be remembered
for producing either an
experimental sundae
which didn’t quite
come off or a bold
new flavour that
took a while to
catch on – it’s
perhaps too
early to say
which it
will be.
President
Barack
Obama hugs
Vice-President
Joe Biden in this
Associated Press
file photo.
• • gleanerjamaica • jamaicagleaner • FEATURE THE GLEANER, THURSDAY, APRIL 9, 2015 E2
In shepherding through the most ambitious expansion in public health care the US has seen in recent memory, he helped
to complete a vision of a more-caring America initially articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt nearly a century ago. OBAMA
ON THE
ROCK
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ASSESSING THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY:
GREAT VISION, BUT ...
PLEASE SEE VISION, E7
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