Judging Obama's Progressive, Flawed, Conflicting Legacy

Years from now, Americans will know how they're supposed to feel about Barack Obama. Time has a way of flattening the dimensions of a presidency, of creating a conventional narrative: Jimmy Carter was a weak-willed failure, Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, Abraham Lincoln and FDR saved America at times of crisis. Arguments over Obama's legacy might be academic, but they'll also be important—will his administration represent a high-water mark for sensible, center-left government that liberals yearn to return to, or a symbol for what doesn't work?

It goes without saying that conservatives hate Obama for expanding the regulatory state, allegedly being insufficiently rah-rah in his patriotism, and forcing bakers to create wedding cakes for gay couples. But for those on the left, Obama is a more complex subject—a president who left behind a trail of compromises, half measures, and outright failures that are difficult to excuse.

When he first ran for president in 2008, Obama emerged as the progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton. He was opposed to the Iraq War—which Clinton voted for—back in 2002, when that was actually a bold stance. As a candidate, his healthcare plan called for allowing anyone to buy insurance straight from the government, a.k.a. the "public option." He talked about aggressively fighting climate change, and pledged to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. And of course just the idea of a black man being elected president was a progressive dream—not a signal that racism was over, just an important sign that America was perhaps edging toward equality.

No one expects a politician to deliver on every promise he or she made in the heat of a campaign. And Obama, who for most of his terms faced a Republican Congress that had no interest in compromising on major issues, achieved results that liberals can hold up as examples of real progress. The Affordable Care Act altered the landscape of healthcare in this country, saving tens of thousands of lives along the way. The economy came most of the way back from a deep recession. In Obama's second term, he got around that obstructionist Congress by using executive orders and rule changes to advance some parts of his agenda. That meant undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children and undocumented parents of citizens were protected from deportation. The Justice Department has been investigating cases of police abuse and misconduct across the country. The administration mandated that employers give more salaried employees overtime. The first bill he signed allowed women to sue employers if they were being paid less than a man would be; during his last weeks in office he granted clemency to many prison inmates, most notably Chelsea Manning.

Donald Trump and the Republicans will surely roll back some or all of those measures, but that doesn't mean Obama's efforts didn't matter. It also seems unfair to blame Obama for congressional inaction on climate change, gun control, or criminal justice reform, all of which he pushed for. If you're keeping score at home, you should also give Obama points for his speeches, which are sure to inspire future generations, and the undeniable symbolism of having a black family in the White House.

With Trump taking office, there's an impulse for liberals to look back at Obama through rose-tinted glasses and celebrate those achievements while shrugging off anything they don't like as the fault of those nasty Republicans. That lets Obama off too easy.

The Obama administration continued the bailing out of banks and big business in the wake of the financial crisis. But almost no bankers were ever prosecuted for their role in the collapse of the economy; meanwhile, a program meant to help homeowners whose lives were wrecked by the crisis was poorly supervised and ineffective. Those efforts to close Guantanamo were defeated not just by hardline Republicans but by the White House's own lack of support. Before Obama defended some undocumented immigrants from deportation, he deported millions of others, to the outrage of advocacy groups. Though Obama claimed credit for working to "reform our laws governing surveillance to protect privacy and civil liberties" during his farewell address, he was perfectly content with the surveillance state before the Snowden revelations forced him to publicly change his tune. His administration continued the long trend of expanding executive branch power, a topic that concerns both the left and libertarians. In 2008, he may have been the anti–Iraq War candidate, but he was not been philosophically aligned with the broader antiwar movement as president, as his expansion of killer drone operations indicates. His administration also supported brutal Saudi Arabian military operations in Yemen—when Obama canceled an arms deal to the Saudis last month, it struck many as not nearly sufficient.

The list of liberal and leftist critiques of Obama goes on; I'm sure I'm missing some. But in brief, the problem is that many hoped he would be a president who ushered in an era of actual change but instead sided far too often with Wall Street and other established, monied interests that have traditionally dominated American politics—even as he kept telling liberals what they wanted to hear. The story of the public option is an example of this: After campaigning for the popular insurance reform, as president Obama declined to fight for it when it came time to negotiate the specifics of the Affordable Care Act. Seven years later, in an op-ed for the Journal of the American Medical Association, the president said he supported a public option.

For liberals wrestling with all this, a great deal depends on how they measure a president. Obama fell short, repeatedly, of the ideals he espoused. He was not a populist nor even a radical, even if the right painted him—relentlessly—as one. But it's also difficult to imagine a realistic alternative who would have lived up to those ideals. Partially that's because, well, they're ideals. But it's also because the Democratic Party that Obama came out of was relatively centrist.

On the other side of the aisle, the conservative movement, and the Tea Party in particular, has pushed the Republican Party toward ideological purity. That kind of groundswell of uncompromising fury hasn't consumed the Democrats. At least not yet—Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign maybe gives us an example of what a left-wing Tea Party would look like, in all its divisiveness and fervor. But during the Obama years, Sanders didn't have too many allies in Congress, whereas Tea Party senators like Ted Cruz had plenty of juice. This asymmetry pushed DC in a particular direction—Democrats, by and large, didn't have to worry about being burned in effigy for compromise votes, while Republicans constantly feared being outflanked to the right by primary challengers. Obama's liberal critics may have been eloquent and earnest, but they failed to force his hand when it came to most key issues.

Now that the Democrats are out of power, maybe the party will move leftward—Congressman Keith Ellison, a Progressive Caucus co-chair, might win the top spot at the Democratic National Committee. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have leadership positions in the Senate now. AndSanders supporters, fired up by his surprising primary run, could volunteer for more progressive campaigns or even run for office themselves.

It's by such inching, almost invisible steps that a country shifts. Obama didn't run or govern in a vacuum; whoever the next Democratic president is, they will be constrained and supported by the politics of the party around them. If it seems naive to call Obama a hero and unfair to brand him a failure, maybe the best way to look at him is to quote his own final speech: "We're not where we need to be. All of us have more work to do."

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