The Obama narrative is that he
inherited the worst mess in memory and has been stymied ever
since by a partisan Congress — while everything from new ATM
technology to the Japanese tsunami conspired against him.
But how true are those claims?
Barack Obama entered office with an approval rating of over
70 percent. John McCain’s campaign had been anemic and
almost at times seemed as if it was designed to lose nobly
to the nation’s first African-American presidential nominee.
One-percenter magnates welcomed Obama. If Steve Wynn,
Donald Trump, and Mort Zuckerman now blast Obama, just four
years ago they seemed to have found him a relief from George
W. Bush. Christopher Buckley and the late Christopher
Hitchens openly endorsed him. Republicans like Colin Powell,
Scott McClellan, and Doug Kmiec all went public with their
support. One got the impression from what David Frum, David
Brooks, and Peggy Noonan wrote that with a wink and a nod
they had welcomed his election. Never has a president
entered office with so much goodwill from so many diverse
quarters.
Rarely does a president enter office with a majority in
both the House and the Senate. Not only did Obama do so, but
his soaring ratings put enormous pressure on the Republican
minorities to join the Democratic majorities. Liberals were
talking about a new era of Democratic political dominance.
No prior president had such a supportive media. Sometime in
mid-2008, the
New York Times, the
Washington Post,
the
Los Angeles Times,
Time,
Newsweek,
CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, AP, Reuters, and hundreds of
other mainstream voices had decided that Barack Obama was not
just a liberal Democrat whom they would tilt toward, but a
messianic figure for whom they gladly sacrificed the last
ounce of disinterested coverage.
The financial collapse was four months in the past when
Barack Obama took the oath of office, and its immediate
aftershocks had been addressed with the October 3, 2008,
TARP stabilization protocols. Obama’s chorus simply blamed
the entire panic on George Bush; and the idea that
government guarantees from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae —
which the Democrats had backed — had ensured huge loans for
the unqualified to buy homes at inflated prices was mostly
ignored. The recession was finishing its second year and
would end five months into the Obama administration, in June
2009. The stock market had mostly stopped falling before
Obama took office. In other words, Obama entered office with
all the blame for the bad economy going to his predecessor
and with the end of the deep recession in sight.
The president’s own racial heritage was said to be
emblematic of the new racial healing. Indeed, it was
promised that race itself would become incidental rather
than essential to the nation’s persona. Advisers and Cabinet
officers like Valerie Jarrett, Eric Holder, Hilda Solis, Ken
Salazar, Van Jones, Steven Chu, and Hillary Clinton were
said to “look like America” far more than the old white guys
of the past.
Abroad, the unpopular war in Iraq was quiet after the
successful surge, and agreements were already concluded
about the withdrawal of U.S. forces; in Joe Biden’s words,
the war in Iraq had the potential to be “one of the great
achievements of the administration.” Everyone had forgotten
that Obama himself had urged a unilateral withdrawal as
early as March 2008. Afghanistan was still the “good” war
but the one where, as Representative Steny Hoyer put it, “We
took our eye off the ball”; during the campaign Obama and
other Democrats promised to win it.
Most Americans believed Obama when he made the argument
that our current problems abroad had mostly started with
George Bush and would end when he left. Iran and Syria were
said to be hostile only because they had been gratuitously
alienated by Bush. Ditto Putin’s Russia. Our battles with
the U.N. were said to be over, as multilateralism was
trumpeted as the new cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy — a
loud boast sure to win even more goodwill both from allies
and from neutrals that had been turned off by the twangy
Texan Bush. Just as Obama had wowed thousands at Berlin’s
Victory Column, so he would win over the world, as his first
interview with Al-Arabiya presaged. Obama was shortly to be
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the theory of what he
represented rather than the facts of what he had done.
Many claimed that Obama was the “true conservative,” as he
blasted Bush as unpatriotic for piling up $4 trillion in
debt and promised to cut the annual deficit in half by the
end of his first term. We heard all sorts of
bring-us-together rhetoric: a new bipartisanship, a new
civility, a new transparency, a new campaign ethos, a new
everything — coupled with lots of “no mores”: no more
earmarks, no more revolving doors, no more former lobbyists
in government, no more serial fundraisers on the government
dime.
Obama had the luxury of enjoying the security benefits that
had accrued from George Bush’s controversial protocols like
Guantanamo, renditions, military tribunals, preventive
detention, intercepts, wiretaps, and drone hits, while not
having his own signature upon them. The result was surreal,
as Obama embraced or expanded all of what he had earlier
blasted as unconstitutional or superfluous — to the sudden
quiet of a once-raucous civil-libertarian Left. Somehow
Obama managed to blame Bush for providing him with the vital
measures that he damned even as he utilized them.
Even stranger was a revolution in oil and gas exploration
that seemed to coincide with the Obama inauguration. Obama
had the best of both worlds: He took office when gas was
below $2 a gallon — saving the nation billions of dollars —
and when the novel techniques of fracking and horizontal
drilling had just tripled known U.S. reserves and promised
to offer a godsend of new energy on federal lands.
In other words, the future seemed to be all Barack Obama’s.
Bill Clinton’s second term offered an easy blueprint of what
bipartisan centrism might achieve. Balance the budget and
create jobs, and the nation will forgive anything, from
lying under oath to romancing an intern in the Oval Office.
And what happened?
Barack Obama chose to ram down the nation’s throat a
polarizing, statist agenda, energized by the sort of
hardball politics he had learned in Chicago. Rather than
bring the races, classes, and genders together, he gave us
an us-versus-them crusade against the “1 percenters” and the
job creators who had not “paid their fair share,”
accusations of a Republican “war on women,” and the worst
racial polarization in modern memory. Statesmanship
degenerated into chronic blame-gaming and “Bush did it,” as
he piled up over $5 trillion in new debt. Financial sobriety
was abandoned in favor of creating new entitlement
constituencies, and job creation was deemed far less
important than nationalizing the health-care system.
And so here we are, three weeks before the election, with a
squandered presidency and a president desperately seeking
reelection not by defending his record, but by demonizing
his predecessor, his opponent — and half of the country.
What, then, was Obama’s first term?
Jimmy Carter’s ends justifying Richard Nixon’s means.
