OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, JANUARY 19, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
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DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
President Barack Obama pauses during his final presidential news
conference Wednesday in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the
White House.
Obama will be
remembered for his
dignity, diplomacy
O
n Friday, a new president of our country will be sworn
in and take over duties in the Oval Office. As Donald
Trump takes over, you can debate whether Barack
Obama was a great president or not. But above all, Obama has
always acted with dignity and diplomacy and as we send him off
this week into the annals of history, we should take a moment to
appreciate his achievements.
We all know his back story by now: Born in Hawaii to a black
father and white mother. He grew up abroad in Indonesia and
with his grandparents in multicultural Honolulu. He was always
fatherless. He was a troubled teen, made plenty of mistakes
and struggled with his identity. Yet he endured, and then found
strength and ambition. He graduated from the finest schools this
country has to offer. He fell in love. He found his political voice
among the skyscrapers of Chicago, became a state senator and
rocketed up the rungs of political power with unmatched speed.
He became president at a time when the country was mired in
two terrible wars, the economy was in utter free fall, and interna-
tional terrorism was a grow-
ing enemy.
Yet he steered the country Barack
through.
Obama is the
Certainly, his eight years
as the most powerful person personification
in the world was nowhere
of the American
near perfect. His actions
dream and this
often fell short of his soaring
country was
rhetoric.
His speech at Hiroshima
great enough to
was masterful, yet he did
nothing to reduce this coun- let him live it.
try’s cache of nuclear weap-
ons. He allowed Syria to descend into a hellscape, which precip-
itated a worldwide crisis. His decision to overthrow Moammar
Gadhafi in Libya caused unnecessary suffering and death and
made America less safe. His drone policies have resulted in the
death of Americans and the bombings of hospitals and civilians.
Here within our borders, many Americans were left behind in
his chugging economic recovery programs. His health care law
— though an improvement from nothing — was too imperfect
to survive. Like most presidents, the mistakes and regrets are
numerous.
Still, in everything, Obama acted with dignity and diplomacy.
His two terms have come and gone without the whiff of per-
sonal scandal. His family and marriage are an aspiration and a
sense of pride for many Americans. He has somehow held onto
the uncanny ability to joke and cry, talk about sports and music
and his own failings — like a real person among a sea of card-
board-cutout politicians. No president has ever been as cool, in
the most American sense of the word.
He was always opposed, often viciously and sometimes
blindly. Yet Obama kept his head and held his tongue, often to
his own disadvantage. You can count his ineloquent words and
insults leveled at others on one hand.
President Obama has always seemed a bit like a man before
his time. That has never been more clear than now, as he pre-
pares to leave office. Much of his work will be swept away by
the opposition and the country has elected a man to succeed him
who is his polar opposite.
But if Obama’s legislation doesn’t last, his words and actions
will, as will the narrative of his life. He will inspire and be
admired throughout his remaining days and likely long after.
Monuments will likely be built in his honor.
That’s because no American has started with so little and
achieved so much. Barack Obama is the personification of the
American dream and this country was great enough to let him
live it.
The Obama legacy
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
I
f you had set out to assess
President Barack Obama’s
legacy four years ago, when he
won re-election convincingly over
Mitt Romney, the
assessment might
have gone like
this. On foreign
policy, reasonably
high marks:
Osama bin Laden
dead, disengagement from Iraq
without disaster, no major wars or
catastrophic blunders.
In electoral politics, likewise: a
successful re-election that seemed
to betoken a sustained realignment
for the Democrats. On the econ-
omy, lower grades: a depression
averted, but record deficits, stag-
nant growth and stubborn elevated
unemployment. On Obamacare,
his signature achievement, a
grade of incomplete, awaiting its
implementation.
What’s interesting is that four
years later, as the president leaves
the White House, several of those
assessments could be essentially
reversed. His economic steward-
ship looks more impressive than
it did in 2012: The United States
hasn’t escaped the stagnation trap
entirely, but unemployment has
fallen well below the levels that
even Romney promised to deliver.
His foreign policy record, on the
other hand, looks worse: The
Iraq withdrawal paved a path for
the Islamic State, Vladimir Putin
repeatedly seemed to outmaneuver
the Obamanauts, and globally the
Pax Americana is at its wobbliest
since the Cold War.
And in electoral politics,
instead of the great Obama realign-
ment, we have a Democratic Party
reduced to rubble and the stagger-
ing ascent of Donald Trump.
The swift shifts should make us
cautious about assuming that the
landscape of early 2017 can tell
us anything too dispositive about
how the departing president will be
remembered — especially given
how much of Obama’s policy leg-
acy now depends upon the still-un-
knowable intentions and capacities
of President Trump.
But with that proviso, here are a
few guesses as to how that legacy
will ultimately be judged.
First, the core domestic agenda
that Obama actually enacted, from
the stimulus to the health care
law to the auto bailouts and lesser
maneuvers, may be remembered
more favorably than most con-
servatives assume. Its flaws were
manifold (I may have written about
some of them here and there), and
one can spin a happier counter-
factual — for the Democratic Par-
ty’s political fortunes, especially
— involving a more modest health
care bill, a sharper focus on the
middle class and jobs, and some
sort of clear outreach to the cen-
ter right instead of the pushes on
cap and trade and gun control and
immigration.
But at the same time the U.S.
economy did recover, slowly but
more robustly than in much of
the developed world, and again
and again the dooms predicted by
Obama’s Republican adversar-
ies failed to materialize. The stock
market rebounded and then surged,
there was no hyperinflation in
response to the Obama deficits and
the various monetary easings (quite
the reverse), and the much-proph-
esied debt crisis, in which the
United States was supposed to go
the way of Greece, never actually
arrived.
Meanwhile Obamacare, while
a mess in certain ways, is mess-
ier on a smaller scale than its crit-
ics (myself included) feared:
Health cost inflation isn’t spiral-
ing and employers aren’t dump-
ing people on to the exchanges in
huge numbers; there are many los-
ers but the insurance expansion is
large enough to matter. And that
expansion, and with it the promise
of near universal health insurance,
will be extremely difficult (morally
as well as politically) for Repub-
licans to unwind. The system may
look different after the GOP is done
with it, but I suspect its coverage
guarantee will basically survive.
And if so it may well be Obama
who gets the long-term credit, not
an opposition party that too often
answered his flawed proposals with
boilerplate and cynicism.
As is often
the case
with political
lives, in his
beginning was
his end.
My guess is that less retro-
spective credit will be extended to
Obama’s foreign policy, however.
Hawks and doves will bicker about
whether he intervened too much or
too little, but the reality is that he
was simply halfhearted and ineffec-
tive in far too many cases, pursuing
pre-existing ambitions (Iran, cli-
mate change, a settlement-obsessed
approach to Israel-Palestine) when
the crises of the day required more
resolute attention.
He was just hawkish enough to
intervene in Libya, to poor effects,
and irresolutely dovish in Syria,
where the United States ended up
as just one more party dripping fuel
on this era’s Spanish Civil War.
He drew unwise red lines and then
emboldened adversaries by aban-
doning them, kind-of-sort-of tried
to keep U.S. troops in Iraq but
didn’t make it a priority, and then
had his secretary of state chasing
an always-implausible Israel-Pal-
estine deal while the Islamic State
was on the rise and Putin was seiz-
ing opportunities.
Nothing in all this was as disas-
trous as the previous administra-
tion’s Iraq invasion, and his “don’t
do stupid (stuff)” motto was not
as wimpy as its critics charged.
(Trump essentially made the same
promise en route to winning the
supposedly more hawkish party’s
primary.) But a lot of small fail-
ures, no less than one major one,
can leave the world less safe —
and there were enough failures that
Obama very clearly did.
Not that this will prevent him
from being a liberal icon, years or
generations hence. If John F. Ken-
nedy’s blundering imperilment of
world peace was buried under hagi-
ography, there will be a similar for-
getting spread over Obama’s for-
eign-policy setbacks. As the first
black president, the politician who
passed health care reform and the
man who personally embodied
upper-class liberalism’s cosmopol-
itan self-image, he will almost cer-
tainly regain, in what is sure to be
an active post-presidency, some of
the cult that surrounded him during
his ascent.
This will be true regardless
of whether Trump’s reign pushes
America decisively toward a grim
post-liberal war of Bannonites
against Bernie Bros or ends in
some kind of glorious cosmopo-
liberal restoration. If the former,
Obama will be remembered by lib-
erals as the last good king, the man
who for eight years did battle with
the dark heart of white America.
If the latter, he will be hailed as
the man who saw the liberal future
clearly even amid a temporary
backlash.
But it is precisely this once-and-
future cult that’s crucial to under-
standing Obama’s greatest failure,
and the part he played in delivering
us to Trumpism. Sometimes unin-
tentionally but too often by politi-
cal design, he took the presidency’s
already overlarge role in Ameri-
can life and magnified it further
— raising, through his own trans-
formational-bordering-on-mes-
sianic political style and reluc-
tant-but-substantial embrace of
the imperial presidency, both per-
fervid fears and unsupportable
expectations.
The fears helped give us both
the zeal of the Tea Party and the
alienation of the Trumpistas. The
expectations gave us a late-Obama
left prone to fits of despair when-
ever they were losing and cul-
tural authoritarianism wherever
they could claim the upper hand
(the bureaucracy, the universi-
ties, the media). They also fed into
a persistent sense that liberalism
should no longer even engage with
its deplorable dead-ender dust-
bin-of-history adversaries.
All of these tendencies came
together to give us Donald Trump.
I would blame a lot of people —
Republican leaders and conserva-
tive media personalities and the
liberal cultural establishment and
Hillary Clinton’s campaign team
and Angela Merkel and more —
for Trump’s rise more than I would
blame Obama. But I still suspect
that the Trumpening might have
been prevented had Obama prom-
ised less grandly, eschewed impe-
rial temptations when stymied in
his ambitions, and dressed his tech-
nocratic liberalism in less arc-of-
history nonsense.
But then again such an Obama,
a man of more modest promises
and somewhat more Bill Clintonian
flexibility, might not have been
elected in the first place.
As is often the case with politi-
cal lives, in his beginning was his
end.