It's Obama's presidency, but Bush's
world
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By Matt Bai |
Yahoo News |
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Believe it or not, it was 10 years ago this
month that Barack Obama, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate,
introduced himself to America with a speech that shook the Fleet
Center in Boston. The main theme of that Democratic convention
was the litany of George W. Bush's failures — an unpopular and
unending war in Iraq, a faltering image abroad, a stagnating
middle class. Obama gave eloquent voice to those frustrations,
arguing that all of them could be addressed if only we reunited
the electorate.
Probably Obama himself would not have guessed then that he would
ascend to the White House just four years later. But he
certainly wouldn't have imagined that a full decade on, nearing
the halfway point in his second term, he would find himself
dragged down by precisely the same set of issues that vexed his
predecessor.
After a month that saw Iraq unravel and job growth continue to
plod along, while the stock market soared, the central paradox
of the Obama years, as historians will undoubtedly view it, has
never been clearer. It's Obama's presidency, but he's still
governing in Bush's world.
Obama's critics will no doubt hear in this an excuse for his
stymied agenda and limp approval ratings, but that's not the
point. The fact is that it's always hard to assign credit or
blame for conditions in the country to any president at any one
time; the lines demarcating one presidency from the next are
like arbitrary and porous borders, freely traversed by
longer-term trends that don't neatly conform to the timelines of
our elections.
Did the fault in Vietnam lie with John F. Kennedy (who committed
troops in the first place), or with Lyndon B. Johnson (who
escalated the war), or with Richard Nixon (who failed to end
it)? Did we owe the '90s economic expansion to Bill Clinton, or
did the recovery take root under George H.W. Bush?
The political reality is that a president has to own whatever
happens on his watch, for better or worse, and without any
whining. Polls show the voters now blame Obama more than George
W. Bush for the painfully slow economic recovery, and after
enduring five and a half years of constantly shifting rhetoric
and strategy and White House staff, you really can't blame them.
But it's hard to think of any second-term president in the past
century, at least, who's been so completely consumed by issues
he inherited. With the notable exception of the health care law,
which will stand as his signature initiative, Obama's agenda has
been dominated by crises that predated his tenure and have
eluded his grasp.
The most obvious of these at the moment is the situation in
Iraq, which Obama had vowed to put behind us once and for all,
and which is now devolving into a morass of tribal and sectarian
warfare — an outcome that should have seemed inevitable to
anyone who ever visited the country or bothered to read a
history book. There's also the mess in Afghanistan and the
cresting tide of Islamist militancy in Syria and throughout the
region, all of which came in a package deal with Bush's global
war on Terror.
Then you have to consider security conundrums closer to home,
like domestic spying (which Obama had excoriated as a candidate)
and the quasi-legal prison at Guantanamo Bay (which he had vowed
to shutter). Turns out that it takes an awful lot of resolve for
any president to turn off the giant sucking machine of high-tech
intelligence once the government has turned it on. And what do
you know: There's no good place to send the prisoners at Gitmo,
after all — unless you want to unload them for an American
prisoner of war, like the Marlins at the trading deadline. Obama
hasn't yet solved either problem.
The defining issue of Obama's presidency remains an economic
recovery that continues to leave behind most Americans while
enriching a relative few, for which the president mostly blames
Congress, almost six years after the Wall Street meltdown that
helped propel him to the White House. The mounting debt
Democrats derided as irresponsible in the Bush years has only
intensified under Obama, with no greater clarity on how to get
it under control.
And let's not forget the toxic, paralyzing political atmosphere
Bush bequeathed his successor. Obama's central promise as a
candidate was to unstick us from all of that (hope and change,
etc.), but his presidency has been swallowed by it, instead. Now
he's resorted to exactly the same type of governing by executive
fiat for which Democrats assailed Bush.
The question great thinkers will long debate, of course, is
exactly why Obama has remained so imprisoned by his
predecessor's choices. Will history treat Obama as a victim of
dire circumstance? Or was he too little prepared for what his
first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, once described to me as the
"shit sandwich" he inherited?
You'd have a hard time arguing that Obama didn't underestimate
or mishandle a lot of the challenges that have shaped his
presidency. His economic policies may well have averted the
worst-case scenario, which seemed very real and very scary in
2009, but it's also clear that the administration managed to do
very little to change the long-term trajectories in housing and
education, where rising costs are changing what it means to be
middle class.
It was nice to talk about rebuilding America's tarnished image
in the world, and when Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2009 for no other reason than having succeeded Bush, it
seemed imminently achievable. But whatever moral standing Obama
had to work with was probably squandered by his own inconstancy
in foreign crises and revelations that he has expanded America's
spying apparatus around the world, rather than reining it in.
But the larger miscalculation here, and Obama's advisers were
hardly alone in making it, was to see the destabilization of the
Bush years as just another political cycle, the result of policy
choices that could be readily reversed by some other set of
policy choices. The mistake was in seeing the period before
Obama as a moment that would pass, rather than as the onset of
an entirely new era of governance, beyond any one president's
control.
Bush didn't create the uncorking of religious and nationalist
extremism, or the rise of borderless capital and the decline of
American industry, or the retirement of the boomers, or the
steadily rising temperatures in the Arctic. It's true he didn't
seem very well-equipped to deal with any of them, and his policy
solutions — democratization by force, bottomless tax cuts, the
deregulation of industry — mostly made things worse. But we were
going to have to reckon with these challenges no matter what,
and no set of simple, short-term solutions exist.
Just as the end of World War II ushered in both the Cold War and
the industrial boom that would define American politics for the
better part of 50 years, so too did the terrorist attacks of
2001 and the subsequent economic crisis mark the arrival of what
you might call the era of globalization — an era of often
agonizing transformation that will span several presidencies and
demand some very fundamental reforms before it's through.
Ultimately, history will likely record both Bush and Obama as
presidents grappling in different ways with the same array of
overarching change, at the dawn of a long period of
readjustment. We may yet find some national consensus about how
to confront it. In the meantime, we might as well settle in. |
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