The Obama Legacy

“We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 1967

Obama has made his last State of the Union speech, and of course he reports that the union is strong. When was the last time an American president claimed otherwise? Obama might have told the truth and admitted that the union is troubled, unequal, and full of discontented, frightened citizens, but that would make him a leader rather than a politician dedicated to preserving the status quo.

And one key to preserving the status quo is to repeat myths, half-truths, and of course, outright, bald-faced lies. Thus, the state of our union is strong and the wars we wage are just; our enemies are evil, hell-bent on our destruction; the economy is humming along (even if all the gains go to the wealthy); Americans are the chosen people, the last best hope for the world, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good political speech (although I passed on this one) and without doubt Obama is a gifted orator. After all, his rhetorical gift is what brought him to  widespread attention in 2004, and his ability on the stump was one reason he captured the presidency only four years later. The problem with Obama is that his actions and policies rarely measure up to his rhetoric.

Obama began abandoning the voters who got him to the White House the minute his first Inaugural address was over. People forget that Obama surrounded himself with Clinton-era retreads, and awful, deceitful people like Timothy Geithner, or corporate workhorses like Eric Holder. This was a clear signal, very early on, about whose interests Obama was looking after.

The rich and powerful never had anything to fear from the Obama Administration.

I voted for the man, only the one time, and within a year was totally disillusioned. Like millions of others, I had been duped by the rhetoric.

How will history measure Obama’s presidency? That depends of course on who tells the tale. For instance, Obama is given credit by many mainstream types for being the president who got Osama bin Laden. Some accounts are so rah-rah they make it seem that it was Obama himself who stormed bin Laden’s compound and shot the arch terrorist dead. Let’s get real for a minute. The US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, quickly overran the Taliban and supposedly had bin Laden cornered in the Tora Bora mountains, only to see him escape into the hinterlands and vanish -- for ten years! -- despite being the most wanted man in the world, target #1 of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, NSC and Naval Intelligence. And here’s the kicker: for much of those 10 years, bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to our staunch ally in the War on Terror, Pakistan. Why did this heroic execution take so long?

And how about Obama’s doublespeak when it comes to government transparency? He claimed that his administration would be the most open and transparent in history -- until information leaked and then Obama showed his true colors, unleashing the full force and power of the government against whistleblowers and journalists like Jeffrey Sterling and James Risen.

History will, or should, record that Obama was for a time Executioner in Chief, deciding who would die by remote-controlled drone strike in the badlands of Yemen, Afghanistan or Pakistan, without formal charges ever being filed, without trial or any kind of due process. Perhaps some of the selected targets were terrorists, but many were not, and in either case, innocents were murdered. If any nation on this planet (except Israel, of course, which can pretty much murder whoever it wants without consequence) arrogated to itself the right to murder people beyond its own borders, the United States would bellow to the heavens about international law and sovereign territory. In other words, we would have a shit fit.

Obama frittered away his congressional majorities in his first term. He had a window of time to act boldly, but he choose to act cautiously; he allowed his political opponents to seize control of the national agenda. And then he lost his majorities and with them any hope of getting much done against a dysfunctional Congress. Granted, Obama got the Affordable Care Act done, but if this doesn’t lead to a single-payer system like Medicare for all -- the only sensible, equitable, humane system --  Obama’s victory is hollow.

Since the nation is celebrating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, it may be instructive to examine Obama’s accomplishments through the lens of the three evils MLK enumerated not long before he was gunned down: militarism, poverty, and racism. The War on Terror is now in its 15th year. Along with Iraq, Libya and Syria are in ruins. Obama has prosecuted the war with fervor, backpedaled on his promise to end the American occupation of Afghanistan (we’re still there) and as of this writing, failed to close our offshore penitentiary at Guantanamo. I will say that Obama deserves credit for negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran. While it seems hypocritical to me that Israel is allowed to stockpile nuclear weapons, and Iran is sanctioned for its peaceful nuclear program, it was right to engage Iran rather than isolate Iran.

Income inequality has not lessened under Obama, not that it could since he has essentially followed the same economic policies as his predecessor. The gap between wealthy and poor,  haves and have nots, continues to widen, with more and more wealth -- and power -- concentrating in fewer hands. The middle class is on life support. Although the government reports that millions of jobs have been created during Obama’s term, we should ask for details about those jobs. Are they permanent or temporary, full time or part time, do they provide fringe benefits, and what do they pay -- a living wage or a precarious one? 

Obama claimed early in his presidency that we had entered a post-racial era. Wrong. Racism is alive and well in America, and even Obama himself has been the target of racial animus and disrespect. The numbers of young African-American males shot and killed by white policemen on the streets of this country are striking. Black lives remain cheap and disposable; more often than not, despite evidence and testimony, white police officers walk away from fatal shootings, scot free.

From now until he leaves the White House for a financially lucrative post-residency, Obama and his people will devote themselves to burnishing his image. There will be a library and a foundation, books and speeches. The reality of Obama’s time in office will never measure up to the PR, and by MLK’s standards, his legacy is mixed indeed.