Never a stranger to going against the conventional wisdom, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman published a piece in Rolling Stone in which he called Barack Obama “one of the most successful presidents in American history.” To those who aren’t familiar with Krugman’s work, an article titled “In Defense of Obama” might seem like delusional wishful thinking. Rather than being an Obama sycophant, Krugman has spent the better part of the last six years (and even 2008 campaign) as one of the president’s harshest critics. While I would be significantly harsher than Krugman on Obama in the realm of foreign policy, Obama has in fact been a historically successful president rather than the “Rockefeller Republican in blackface” that prominent critic Cornel West labeled him. In terms of what one human individual (as opposed to a fantasy left-wing monarch) could have accomplished despite enormous institutional constraints, Obama hasn’t been bad at all.
In the area of health care policy, Obama has been a resounding success. When criticizing the Affordable Care Act, the left tends to focus on its heavy reliance on rent-seeking insurance companies and an individual mandate to buy privatized health care. These criticisms are valid and highlight the continued dependence of our political economy on markets rather than democratic institutions. That said, Obamacare fundamentally challenges the guiding ideology of the post-Reagan era. Obamacare, philosopher Slavoj Žižek points out, begins a process of shifting the United States away from the ideology of “freedom to choose” towards a new way of thinking based on social solidarity and “effectively delivers a large number of people from the dubious ‘freedom’ to worry about who will cover their illnesses.” Even if the law is cloaked in market mechanisms, Obama’s healthcare reforms represent a real step against the commodification of a social good. The left would be foolish to take that for granted.
Much left-wing criticism of Obama in other areas of domestic policy, from financial reform to tax policy, revolves around the idea, articulated by author Thomas Frank, is that Obama is simply not “progressive enough” or has failed to master the art of “leadership” to bend the opposition to his will. While there is much to dislike in the status quo of political malaise and Gilded Age-level wealth disparities, blaming Obama for most of it is simplistic and unsophisticated. The American political system as constructed by the Framers was one of the most progressive in the world at the founding, but that was by 18th century standards. James Madison explicitly stated in 1787 that one of his goals was to “protect a minority of the opulent against the majority,” so instead of blaming individuals who perennially fail to deliver, disappointed progressives would be far better served by examining the structure of the political system itself. Whether Elizabeth Warren or another progressive folk hero gets elected or not will do nothing to overcome a filibuster that is suffocatingly undemocratic, House districts with an inherently conservative bias and a Supreme Court that has largely unlimited power to strike down laws passed by progressive majorities.
On foreign policy, there’s no doubt Obama has generally ratified more Bush policies than he’s undone. That said, these policies are largely consistent with the post-war norm of extensive executive power in war from Truman’s building up of the national-security state and use of the atomic bomb to Nixon’s criminal bombings in Cambodia to Bill Clinton’s “cruise missile liberalism.” If American foreign policy is to change, it will require the kind of mass mobilization seen with the anti-Vietnam protests or rise of a more multipolar world with international institutions. Short of either of these two developments, any president is inevitably going to be unable to work against a vast network of institutions that have a massive interest in continuing the militaristic status quo. This is not to say that Obama’s policies on drones and the NSA aren’t disturbing; rather that undoing them (and years other precedents) is going to require long-term thinking and hard questions.
There’s no disputing that Obama’s presidency has been disappointing in many respects, at least for me. That said, he has laid the groundwork for future political movements, not messianic presidential candidates, to develop more equitable and democratic policy. Obama succeeded in opening the door of progress a crack; it is up to the rest of us to throw it wide open.
Gray Whisnant is an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.whisnant@cavalierdaily.com.
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