Let's Not Whitewash or Mythologize Obama
Former President Barack Obama speaks at the My Brother's Keeper Alliance
Summit in Oakland, Calif. earlier this year. (Jeff Chiu /
<http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Obama-Utah/a30de0810a0441e3b97fe14cd
cb00e24/13/0> AP)
With former Vice President Joe Biden seemingly ready to join the
presidential race, a Washington Post reporter recently wrote: "Biden and his
allies picture an election that poses a choice between four more years of
Trump disruption and a chance to restore the Obama administration."
Ah, the hope of an Obama restoration!
But is a "return to normalcy" truly enough? After decades in which giant
corporations have amassed huge political and financial control while racial
and economic inequities kept widening-and with climate scientists now
telling us that
<https://www.axios.com/un-report-warns-time-is-running-out-global-warming-ac
tion-00c54c44-2bca-4ffc-be91-b79a9641eed5.html> planetary survival requires
radical reforms?
And what about the real danger that a return to Obama-style, go-slow
"corporate liberalism" would lead to the next right-wing faux-populist
upsurge, this time commanded by someone far smarter and slicker than Trump?
Given what Trump has done to our country and world, it's no wonder that many
Americans long for Obama. He was not a bigot or insult artist. His
administration was not rocked by major scandal, with top aides off to
prison. He was level-headed:"No Drama Obama." He didn't deny science.
President Obama was smart, with a vocabulary clearly
<https://www.newsweek.com/trump-fire-and-fury-smart-genius-obama-774169>
exceeding that of a 4th-grade child. He was hip.
That's what millions of people remember.
I, too, remember all that. But we should also recall the political substance
beyond the pleasant image.
We need to remember the
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/09/24/mystique-free-market-guy-obam
a> vacillation-and worse, the
<https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-cohen/get-ready-for-the-obamago_b_37045
8.html> opportunism and
<https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-cohen/hillary-clinton-banks_b_5584870.h
tml> corporatism. As well as cause and effect: that Obama's tenure paved the
way for the rise of Trump.
Progressive analyst Matt Stoller made that case in a
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/12/democrats-cant-
win-until-they-recognize-how-bad-obamas-financial-policies-were/?utm_term=.b
c4ec32fba78> well-documented Washington Post column on the eve of Trump's
inauguration, headlined "Democrats can't win until they recognize how bad
Obama's financial policies were: He had opportunities to help the working
class, and he passed them up." Stoller wrote of the Obama administration
enabling nine million home foreclosures and anti-consumer corporate mergers,
including dangerous consolidation in health care, partly caused by
Obamacare's "lack of a public option for health coverage." Noting that most
new jobs in the Obama years were temporary or part-time, along with the
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-expectancy-for-white-americans-declines-1
461124861> decline in lifespans among whites, Stoller concluded: "When
Democratic leaders don't protect the people, the people get poorer, they get
angry . . ."
Back in 2008, I was delighted when Obama defeated the Clinton machine,
seemingly for good. (If only!) But I wasn't taken in by his "hope" and
"change" rhetoric.
Obama's first presidential run offered reasons to be skeptical-for example,
how he broke records in pocketing Wall Street donations. Once in office,
<https://therealnews.com/stories/cohen0126pt2> those ties hamstrung his
economic policies.
I remember the opportunism of that campaign: How Obama and his team sought
the endorsements of antiwar celebrities in 2007/2008 by saying, "All of our
advisers opposed the Iraq invasion and all of Hillary's supported it. Why
are you on the fence?" And I remember that, as soon as Hillary was out of
the race, Obama chose one pro-war associate after another, including running
mate Joe Biden, probably the single most important Democrat in
<https://fpif.org/biden_iraq_and_obamas_betrayal/> enabling the Iraq
invasion.
Those hawkish appointees ultimately included Hillary Clinton at the State
Department; they steered Obama to continue-and in some
<https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-dron
e-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush> actions,
<https://www.thenation.com/article/obama-moving-war-terror-africa/> areas
and <https://www.businessinsider.com/obama-aumf-trump-al-shabab-2016-11>
powers, expand-the
<https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0315-bacevich-countering-islami
sm-20160315-story.html> ineffective and
<https://theintercept.com/2018/11/19/civilian-casualties-us-war-on-terror/>
immoral "War on Terror" inherited from Bush, and passed on to Trump.
Two days after Obama's 2008 election, I remember how even my small sliver of
hope evaporated when he selected Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff-a
stridently pro-corporate, pro-war Democrat despised by progressives since he
worked in the Clinton White House and helped lead legislative campaigns that
pushed through the NAFTA trade pact, the 1994 crime bill, and welfare
"reform."
Like Emanuel, Obama's next two chiefs of staff
<https://dailycaller.com/2012/01/10/obamas-third-chief-of-staff-like-first-t
wo-got-rich-on-wall-street/> also came out of big finance: William Daley
from JPMorgan Chase and Jacob Lew from Citigroup.
It's well-documented that Obama loaded his
<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/henhouse-meet-fox-wall-street-
washington-obama/> team of economic advisers with Wall Streeters. So it's no
accident that Wall Street was bailed out rather than underwater homeowners
during
<https://money.cnn.com/2010/01/14/real_estate/record_foreclosure_year/> the
biggest foreclosure wave in US history. The inside story of Obama's
semi-regular capitulation to economic elites is told in
<https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/books/review/confidence-men-by-ron-suski
nd-book-review.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all> Ron Suskind's book "Confidence Men:
Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President." Largely with GOP
support-and over the objections of most Democrats in Congress-Obama
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/business/international/trans-pacific-par
tnership-obama.html> kept pushing the corporate-friendly Trans-Pacific
Partnership trade deal until his last months in office.
Obama appointed
<https://www.organicconsumers.org/essays/obama-supports-food-incs-world-domi
nation-and-all-we-get-white-house-garden> Monsanto executives and allies to
key food and agriculture jobs. While he acknowledged the science of climate
change and talked of the need for action, Obama's tenure coincided with a
boom in U.S. oil
<https://money.cnn.com/2016/07/21/investing/trump-energy-plan-obama-oil-boom
/index.html> production and
<https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/america-has-built-the
-equivalent-of-10-keystone-pipelines-since-2010-and-no-one-said-anything>
lethal infrastructure, and his administration
<https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/america-has-built-the
-equivalent-of-10-keystone-pipelines-since-2010-and-no-one-said-anything>
fervently promoted fracking worldwide.
His health care reform, which originated with the conservative
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/10/20/how-a-conservative-th
ink-tank-invented-the-individual-mandate/#53822b836187> Heritage Foundation,
expanded health coverage largely by enriching private insurance firms and
Big Pharma, whose
<https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-the-administrations-deal-with-the
-pharmaceutical-lobby-0223> lobbyists were allowed to
<https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/13/internal-memo-confirms-bi_n_25828
5.html> obstruct cost controls. Obamacare did expand Medicaid and
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/29/upshot/obamacare-who-was-hel
ped-most.html> increase coverage in poor and rural communities and to young
people, but it still left millions uninsured.
In one lengthy, link-filled sentence, journalist Nathan J. Robinson
<https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/03/the-obama-boys> summarized the
progressive critique of Obama:
He deported
<https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/08/trump-deportations-behind-obama-l
evels-241420> staggering numbers of immigrants, let Wall Street criminals
<https://theintercept.com/2016/07/12/eric-holders-longtime-excuse-for-not-pr
osecuting-banks-just-crashed-and-burned/> off the hook, failed to take on
(and now proudly <https://www.apnews.com/5dfbc1aa17701ae219239caad0bfefb2>
boasts of support for) the fossil fuel industry,
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-security/obama-administration-
arms-sales-offers-to-saudi-top-115-billion-report-idUSKCN11D2JQ> sold over
$100 billion in arms to the brutal Saudi government,
<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/killing-of-americans-deepens-
debate-over-proper-use-of-drone-strikes.html> killed American citizens with
drones (and then made <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWKG6ZmgAX4>
sickening jokes about it), killed lots more non-American citizens with
drones (
<https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/01/yemenis-seek-justice-wed
ding-drone-strike-201418135352298935.html> including Yemenis going to a
wedding) and then
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/05/do-not-believe-the-u-s-governments-off
icial-numbers-on-drone-strike-civilian-casualties> misled the public about
it, promised '
<https://www.propublica.org/article/trying-to-get-records-from-most-transpar
ent-administration-ever> the most transparent administration ever' and then
was '
<https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/cjp_report_on_us_press_freedom.php
worse than Nixon' in his paranoia about leakers, pushed a market-friendlyhealth care plan based on