In the Afterglow of a Comet: The Legacy of the Obama Administration

On the night of June 3, 2008, then-Senator Barack Hussein Obama took the stage in St. Paul Minnesota. The last of the 2008 Democratic primaries had just concluded, leaving Senator Obama as the first non-white, major party nominee in U.S history. Barack Obama was a singularly inspiring figure, a political natural with a remarkable personal narrative. His soaring oratory was the siren song of his campaign, drawing millions of voters to the polls.

The soon-to-be president was at his lofty best that evening. His speech overflowed with the rhetoric of hope, change, and progress, and concluded with one of his most ambitious promises:

If we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.

Such bold rhetoric made for an excellent soundbite, but it, along with his other statements, set high expectations for his future administration. Candidate Obama pledged to be a transformational president, and it is by that standard that many modern Americans have judged him. As we approach the end of Obama’s administration, his success will be measured by his potential — his potential to be one of America’s ten greatest presidents.

Some, especially those who rooted against him from the beginning, have already begun writing schadenfreude-filled obituaries for his presidency. They chronicle the Obama years as a period of American decline, declaring the president impotent in the face of a crumbling world-order. Pointing to the chaos in the Middle East, the rise of ISIS, and the sluggish American economy, these detractors describe a president out of his depth, too weak to exploit America’s natural global dominance, too stupid to revive the economy here at home. Obama’s political opponents will push this version of history for years to come, hoping that by shouting loudly enough, their voices will be the only ones remembered by posterity. Maybe they will succeed, but their narrative is unquestionably wrong.

The truth is that Barack Obama has been the best president of the post-war era. He came into office in the midst of our nation’s worst economic collapsein nearly 80 years, with the country ensnared in two foreign wars to boot. Fixing that situation would have been difficult enough under normal circumstances, but the president also had to contend with perhaps the most intransigent opposition party in the history of American politics. Facing those odds, it is nothing short of miraculous that Obama will leave the White House with the nation’s economy largely restored and its commitments overseas greatly reduced. His success deserves acknowledgement.

The Economy

The president’s largest economic contributions came in the early years of his presidency, and are seldom discussed today. As a result, we largely forget that his decisive action in the early months of the Great Recession helped prevent the country from sliding into depression. The most prominent of these actions was the $787 billion economic stimulus package he implemented within his first month in office. The package was approved despite near unanimous opposition from Republican senators. In the ensuing years, Republicans have tried to claim that the stimulus was not responsible for the subsequent economic recovery, but most professional economists feel differently. A University of Chicago survey of these individuals founds that 80 percent of the top economists believe that the legislation reduced unemployment, with only 4 percent disagreeing. The unemployment rate itself supports this conclusion; President Obama has presided over the largest drop in unemployment of any president since FDR.

The problem with this reasoning is that there is a measure of unemployment that counts the underemployed and discouraged job-seekers. It is called the U6 unemployment rate, and it has been calculated monthly since the early 1990s. President Obama fairs well by that metric too, as the below graph shows.

However, there is reason to believe that the Obama administration contributed to the recovery, rather than simply overseeing it. Consider the following: in the first year of Obama’s presidency, he inherited an economy that was growing at a rate of -2.9 percent annually. This represented the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression and the year immediately following the end of World War II. The end of WWII was an abnormality, of course, because the U.S was ramping down its incredible military production. The real comparable situation was the Great Depression, which encompassed four consecutive years of negative growth. By contrast, President Obama was able to limit the Great Recession to two years of negative growth, and maintain growth at about 2 percent in every year since.

By no means has the president been a perfect economic manager. Average household income has only barely ticked upward during his tenure, and 2 percent growth is relatively tepid by historical standards. Nevertheless, President Obama has been probably the best jobs president since the second world war, an achievement made all the more remarkable by the historically low inflation that has been the norm during his tenure (see below). Without a doubt, his economic record is one he can be proud of.

Health Care

However, what Barack Obama will most likely be remembered for is his eponymous health care legislation. The Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act (“Obamacare”) was probably the most significant piece of domestic legislation passed since the early 1970s. Reviled by the political right, it was passed in 2010 without a single Republican vote in either house of Congress. Obamacare expanded coverage in two major ways: first, by expanding Medicaid to cover individuals with household incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty line; and second, by creating state and federal insurance exchanges with subsidized coverage for low-income individuals.

Obamacare was never implemented precisely as planned; the Supreme Court made the Medicaid expansion optional for individual states, and 19 states have decided not to expand coverage. Nevertheless, the legislation has been immediately successful at reducing the uninsured rate, as the below graph represents:

The observed drop in the uninsured rate is unparalleled in any administration since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency; indeed, none of the past four presidents have managed to achieve any noticeable increase in health coverage.

While this increase in coverage is certainly to be applauded, detractors might argue that the true test of the Obamacare’s effectiveness will be its ability to control healthcare costs. That question may not be answered in the near future; in the three years since the Obamacare was implemented, there has been no clear trend in the growth of healthcare costs (see below).

The costs of healthcare will be closely monitored in the coming years, and Obama’s political opponents will certainly tie the Obamacare to any sharp increases. But this should not diminish the achievement that Obamacare represents. Approximately 11 million more individuals have health care because of the president, which will undoubtedly save countless lives in the years to come.

LGBTQ Rights

In this article, I have tried to discuss those among the President’s accomplishments that can be celebrated by those of all political ideologies. Increased employment, expanded healthcare coverage; these are developments that everyone can celebrate. Unfortunately, rights for LBGTQ individuals have not yet reached that uncontroversial status, and the U.S still has a long way to go before all Americans enjoy equal treatment. Nevertheless, 60 percent of all Americans now supporting marriage equality (including 73 percent of those born after 1980), it is clear that the tide of history is shifting in support of LBGTQ individuals. With this in mind, President Obama deserves some credit for the progress we have made towards equal rights for all during his administration.

Obama’s support for LGBTQ individuals never resulted in anything as dramatic as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Instead, his support for a series of small steps contributed the movement’s larger success. In 2010, he successfully campaigned for the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and in 2012, he became the first sitting president to endorse marriage equality. He also supported gay couples at the Supreme Court in Windsor, Perry, and Obergefell, and issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity among federal contractors. Obama probably cannot claim the status of movement leader, but his advocacy for universal equality has made him a strong civil rights president.

Foreign Policy

It is impossible to review all of the President’s foreign policy decisions in a relatively brief article. However, it is fairly easy to recognize what stands out most among Obama’s foreign policy efforts: his commitment to diplomacy and his reluctance to send American ground troops into military combat. The President helped broker several important international arrangements, and has thus far avoided plunging the nation into a new war.

The latter of these accomplishments might seem unremarkable. After all, how hard is it to not invade another country? As it turns out, the ability to refrain from foreign military excursions is not one that every post-war president has possessed. Of the twelve men that have occupied the White House since FDR, a full third of them launched sustained ground campaigns in other nations, and the rest have certainly contemplated doing the same. If Obama manages to exit the White House without committing ground troops to Syria or Iraq, he will cement his reputation as a president with impressive restraint.

Of course, not everyone believes that restraint is an admirable quality in a president. Indeed, the majority of today’s GOP criticizes Obama for failing to act more aggressively against ISIS, and for stepping back from his infamous “red line” in Syria. As Jeffrey Goldberg details at length in his definitive article on Obama’s foreign policy, much of the Washington intelligentsia believe that the President weakened America’s reputation abroad when he decided against carrying out his threat to bomb the Syrian government should it use chemical weapons. According to these thinkers, Obama’s choice both emboldened our adversaries and contributed to the rise of ISIS in the Middle East. This, thus far, has been the most significant criticism of the Obama Doctrine.

Such criticism, however, puts too much faith in the U.S’s ability to resolve crises. The situation in Syria would not have been fixed by lobbing in a few cruise missiles. As the President rightly noted, what exactly would we have attacked, and how would the situation have been improved? We certainly could not have destroyed Assad’s chemical weapons via an air campaign, since doing so would have risked “sending plumes of poison into the air.” Maybe the administration could have destroyed some of Syria’s military infrastructure, but even if we unseated Assad, there is no guarantee that the violence would have abated. There were, and still are, more groups fighting in Syria than we can keep track of, and the end of the rebels’ war against Assad would merely have signaled the beginning of a war amongst themselves. Moreover, the entirety of Assad’s chemical weapon arsenal would have remained in Syria, potentially to be used by belligerents. Today, as a result of President Obama’s restraint and an agreement negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry, much of that stockpile has been disposed of.

The removal of Syria’s chemical weapons is but a single instance of President Obama’s commitment to diplomacy. The results of that commitment have generally been cheered and booed along partisan lines; the opening of Cuba, the Paris climate treaty, and the Iran nuclear agreement have generally satisfied Democrats and frustrated Republicans. Each of these achievements came in the President’s second term in office, and all are too young to evaluate fully. Nevertheless, early signs point to success.

Some on the left have taken a different tack in criticizing the President, arguing that he has been too aggressive internationally. Pointing to Obama’s frequent use of drone strikes, his failure to close the U.S prison at Guantanamo Bay, and the military actions taken in Libya, these detractors have suggested the President has abused his power as commander-in-chief. Some of these critiques may be justified; it is unclear that drone strikes are worth the reaction they cause, and the Libyan intervention met with uneven success. Others, such as those focused on Guantanamo, mistakenly blame the President for what was really a congressional blunder. But fair or unfair, these criticisms are focused on relatively small parts of Obama’s foreign policy. Avoiding a major war, negotiating several large-scale diplomatic agreements, ending (for the most part) our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan; these are the achievements our posterity will make note of.

Barring catastrophe in his final nine months, the President will have a solid, if not sparkling, foreign policy record. He ranks ahead of Bush Jr. and Johnson, both of whom led the U.S into disastrous wars; above Clinton, who, aside from the Oslo Accords, had a relatively undistinguished tenure diplomatically; and in front of Carter, whose best intentions were insufficient to resolve a series of U.S foreign crises. If Obama’s trio of international treaties is successful, he will have a series of significant diplomatic accomplishments to his name. If not, he will still retain a passing foreign policy grade for his avoidance of an interminable war.

Presidentialness

Presidentialness is rightly mocked by pundits. It is hardly a justifiable basis for a vote in a presidential election, especially when today’s candidates differ sharply across a number of issues. However, as a concept, it is still a positive asset for any chief executive. Our idea of presidentialness includes a sense of decorum, calm under pressure, and respect for the office of the president. Individuals who are “presidential” inspire the trust of their constituents and garner respect on the international stage. More than anything, a presidential president confers some sense of legitimacy onto the government she represents.

Irrespective of your view of President Obama’s policies, it is difficult to deny the dignity he brought to the highest office in the land. Conservative pundit David Brooks, a frequent Obama critic, recently conceded “Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.” As Brooks points out, that the President has taken his responsibilities with the utmost seriousness, and has avoided bringing disrepute to the Presidency. For President Obama, there has been no Iran-Contra, no Monica Lewinsky, no Watergate, no sleeping around, no false claims of WMDs. The largest “real” scandal that faced Obama (no, I do not count Benghazi) was Fast and Furious, which was so mild that I doubt you remember what it was. The President’s comportment has been a model for his successors, and an especially important one in the era of Donald Trump. Given the raucous nature of this year’s presidential primaries, I doubt we will see another president with Obama’s grace anytime soon.

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There is much more I could say about the President that would impress Democrats like myself. Beyond the accomplishments listed above, Obama put two excellent Supreme Court Justices on the bench, implemented Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, signed a new START Treaty, repaired our fractured relationships with Europe, and became the first president to truly recognize the existential threat posed by global warming. As a partisan, I think all of these achievements will be valued by future generations.

But winning these ideological battles is not what Obama should be best remembered for. He should be remembered as the President who oversaw stunning decreases in unemployment and the rate of uninsured. He should be remembered as the first President to fully embrace the dignity of LGBTQ Americans. He should be remembered as the President who valued diplomacy over violence, who strove to keep the United States out of foreign military engagements. And not for nothing, he should be remembered as a president with poise and grace, whose dignity befitted the office he held. This is a legacy that every American can celebrate. President Obama will be missed.

Brett Parker, a junior studying political science, is the managing editor of Stanford Political Journal.