Five different, often competing legacies of President Obama
1. Wall Street's President:
Very early on in his presidency, Barack Obama made it very clear who it was he would be fighting for from the White House. Despite promising to reign in Wall Street and regulate the banks, Obama appointed big shot bankers, trickle-down-endorsing CEOs, corrupt tax-cheats and recession-creating ultra-conservative billionaires to his economic advisory team. Instead of fighting for the middle class, the president passed up an opportunity to raise taxes on the wealthy when he had a democratic majority in congress. Rating agencies, lobbyists and executives, all at least somewhat regulated in Europe, continue to operate as they please in the United States. The Unemployment rate, as well as the percentage of Americans who have given up looking for work remains far higher now than when the president took office over three years ago. With both parties in bed with the super-wealthy, Obama has, for political reasons desperately refused to accept who he has become- a Wall Street president.
2. A leader in the economic turnaround
23 consecutive months of private sector job growth don’t lie. When President Obama took office in early 2009, the private sector was losing an unprecedented 900,000 jobs a month. Just four months later, it was losing 350,000 a month. Six months after that, we were back to gaining jobs. The president has made it clear that he will not rest until all those who lost jobs during the recession regain employment, but his policies of stimulating private sector job growth and rescuing major global industries have saved the economy as we know it. He passed the tightest regulations Wall Street has ever seen and refuses to let America return to the policies that created
3. A man of compromise:
Clinton commanded the narrative of his presidency. Obama has been weak, even pitiful as a leader- choosing compromise over principal. His largest legislative accomplishment remains an unpopular health care reform bill designed to please the insurance companies with an unconstitutional mandate. Obama backed down on what most Americans wanted- a public option, compromising with lobbyists and conservatives in congress. On immigration, Obama's policies have been far to the right of Bush's, pandering to Republicans with a strict quota of 400,000 deportations a year. On education, Obama has abandoned teachers unions and instead pushed for what many consider to be No Child Left Behind on steroids. Incentive -based, test-based and performance-based education is priority, with funding being cut to suffering inner-city schools. Environmental policy is perhaps the greatest example of the Obama administration's inability to stand up for values long upheld by liberals. Pandering to oil companies instead of his base, Obama has flushed major environmental protections down the toilet and committed that the U.S will continue to rely on foreign oil, particularly from Brazil. Time and time again, the president has turned his back on the American people and sold out his base. Most recently, he became the first president in American history to overturn a decision by the FDA. The decision was to allow the all-too-commonly-pregnant under-18 demographic of American girls to have access to birth control. Again, Obama pandered- this time to radical evangelicals and Catholics- instead of his base. And arguably most disturbingly, Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act on New Years. As critics have charged, the bill in-effect repeals the constitution; giving the military power to skip due process and right-to-a-lawyer and detain any American citizen they deem a threat, for as long as they want. If that’s not president Obama shamelessly bowing to the ultra-conservative patriot-act loving, pro-authoritarianism Republicans, I don’t know what is.
4. A war president
When president Obama was running for president in 2008, he pledged to get the United States military out of Afghanistan by 2011. Now military generals and the president himself are claiming American troops may be in Afghanistan as late as 2015 or 2016. As president, Obama has deployed 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and his military budget has exceeded George Bush’s. Under Bush, 575 troops were killed in Afghanistan. As AntiWar.com states “the death toll in less than three years under President Obama more than doubled the number of US soldiers slain during President Bush’s seven plus years in the nation.” Under Obama, nearly 1,400 American troops have lost their lives in Afghanistan. While no nation or empire has ever succeeded in Afghanistan and the battle with the Taliban shows no end in sight, the administration continues to insist that the war is going well and taxpayer dollars are being used wisely. Yet, according to the congress-created Commission on Wartime Contracting, approximately 60 Billion Dollars of taxpayer dollars has been wasted in the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with nearly half of the waste coming in the last 3 years. According to their findings, this waste includes, but is not limited to “corruption” and “lax oversight of contractors”. Moreover, the majority of Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan. Yet, we are still there, fighting a war that continues to tarnish our image in the world, kill innocent civilians and rack up our debt. President Obama defends our role of killing off as many Taliban leaders as we can while we let Al Queda roam free in Pakistan, where we killed Osama Bin Laden.
5. A corrupt man
While the image of the Obama administration as one riddled with corrupt cronies is largely an over-hyped and overly propagated creation of right-wingers, there is no denying that President Obama’s role in the Solyndra scandal has left a large stain on his trustworthiness. President Obama's authorization of a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra Corporation in 2009 as part of a program to spur alternative energy growth was designed to boost his image as a pro-green-energy president. Instead, it backfired in every way imaginable. The company filed for bankruptcy and shut down entirely, laying off thousands. And as it turns out, the Obama administration knew that’s where it was headed. Solyndra was manufacturing solar panels, spending about 6 dollars on every panel but selling them for only three. Therefore, government staffers warned it was headed for bankruptcy dozens of times. It was as clear as day, but the money was given away anyway. Critics have argued that because Solyndra was one of the top donors to Obama’s campaign for president, they were rewarded with the $535 million after being elected. What is clear is that Solyndra was upheld by Obama as the centerpiece to his platform of creating green jobs. He toured their facilities and met with their CEO. He claimed it was the perfect symbol of job creation during a speech at Solyndra headquarters. Joe Biden claimed that the jobs created as a result of the loan would be “permanent jobs”. As Jon Stewart put it after the scandal broke out, “That custom-tailed Obama scandal you ordered is finally here.” Of course, Mitt Romney and the Republicans will use the Solyndra scandal as much as they can during the 2012 campaign. A company gives money to the president’s campaign. That company is given taxpayer money in return and lays off all its employees anyway. They have tried milking the Timothy Geithner tax scandal. They have tried milking the Tony Rezko and Steve Ayres scandals. They have even tried to link the president to the Blagojevich scandal. But they days of desperation are over. There could be no better poster-child for corruption in the Obama administration than Solyndra. Say what you want about what Barack Obama isn’t. He isn’t Muslim. He isn’t someone born outside America. He isn’t a socialist or communist. But you really can’t say he isn’t corrupt. At least not anymore.
The legacy of President Obama can only be speculated on, as I do in this article. If he is a one-term president, however, I imagine most of these legacies will carry. If he is a two-term president, than I’ll be pleased to provide commentary four years from now on what the legacies of his 8-year presidency.
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