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And fucked it up after Bush left Obama/Biden the greatest recession since the depression. The putin/trump huggers will give putin/trump credit for the Obama/Biden economy of 2014 through early 2020. Now we are in the recession of putin/trump. Putin won the stupid Americans votes
Trump had to handle all the stoopid things odummer did. The last three years has had a great economy because of big "T"! Even with the wuhan covid our economy is still very strong! All this in spite of the say no nothings led by pussollinni in the senate
And fucked it up after Bush left Obama/Biden the greatest recession since the depression. The putin/trump huggers will give putin/trump credit for the Obama/Biden economy of 2014 through early 2020. Now we are in the recession of putin/trump. Putin won the stupid Americans votes
from my epic takedown of Sistine Chapel ..
Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Waco_Kid
Obama's economic failures outweigh successes
Public debt rose, many tax reforms failed under Barack Obama's 8-year term
Just one day after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, famed New York Times writer Paul Krugman wrote, “It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? A first-pass answer is never … So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.”
Nearly two years later, Krugman couldn’t possibly look more foolish, as President Trump has ushered in one of the most stunning and successful economic turnarounds in modern history. Under former President Barack Obama, the economy was stuck in neutral, but Trump has pushed the economic gas pedal firmly to floor by allowing businesses and individuals to control more of their own money and easing government-imposed restrictions that limited growth throughout Obama’s tenure.
More Economic Mistakes Made By The Obama Administration
Last week, we published our first paper. The subject was Obama’s mishandling of the Great Recession and how that mishandling destroyed middle class wealth and middle class black wealth in particular. The paper does not go into all of Obama’s economic failures, but instead focuses narrowly on the decisions made about how to allocate home value losses. A more comprehensive paper about his overall mismanagement would have included things like the too-small stimulus, the unnecessary sequester deal, and the failure to staff the Federal Reserve with aggressive unemployment-fighters.
When Obama came into office, one of the very first things he had to do was pass a fiscal stimulus plan to deal with the effects of the Great Recession. According to reporting from Noam Scheiber, the job of deciding how big the stimulus should be was initially given to Christy Romer, the soon-to-be chief White House economist. Romer calculated that closing the gap caused by the Great Recession would require a stimulus of $1.7-to-$1.8 trillion and presented her figures to Larry Summers, Obama’s top economic advisor.
Summers decided unilaterally that Romer’s figures were impractical. So Romer got working again, producing a second proposal of $1.2 trillion that also included options for $600 billion and $850 billion. Summers again decided to unilaterally kill the $1.2 trillion proposal and eventually president-elect Obama was presented a choice between $600 billion and $850 billion. The $850 billion figure, which was $1 trillion too small, eventually became the basis for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka the stimulus bill). So, despite unified Democratic control of government, the Obama administration put forward a stimulus plan that was never going to come anywhere close to solving the macroeconomic problem of the day.
Just a few years after bungling the stimulus, the Obama administration agreed to a sequester arrangement in 2011 that promised to slash government spending by $1.2 trillion between 2013 and 2023. This agreement was struck at a time when the black unemployment rate was an eye-watering 15.7%. By the time the austerity plan hit in 2013, black unemployment was still north of 12%.
Arguably the effects of a stimulus that was $1 trillion too small and $1.2 trillion of austerity could have been counteracted by extremely aggressive monetary policy. But Obama did not pursue this kind of monetary policy, apparently because of the mistaken belief that monetary policy had already “shot its wad.” Obama allowed vacancies at the Federal Reserve to go unfilled rather than packing the Board with people who would pursue aggressive expansionary policy and appointed a Fed chair in Janet Yellen who similarly failed to ramp up monetary policy once in power.
All of these decisions created enormous and unnecessary economic pain, especially for black families. While failed housing policies wiped out middle class black wealth, the failed fiscal and monetary policies kept black unemployment sky high for years longer than it needed to be.
Those who say Obama did a good job of managing the economy often say things like “Obama had 8 straight years of month-over-month job growth.” This is supposed to be an impressive statistic, but when viewed correctly, it is really an indictment of his economic mismanagement and the excruciatingly slow recovery it delivered. Good economic policy would have resulted in massive job gains over a brief period of time after Obama came into office followed by fairly stagnant job numbers after full employment was reached. Instead, the Obama economy only delivered modest job gains each month, so modest in fact that after 8 years in office, we were still not at full employment.
Insofar as black and Latino unemployment is consistently much higher than white unemployment, the labor market pain caused by these bad economic decisions was disproportionately shouldered by communities of color.
Barack Obama is trying to take credit for the booming economy under President Trump. “When you hear how great the economy is doing right now,” Obama said on the campaign trail for Democratic candidates a few days ago, “let’s just remember when this recovery started.”
By this logic, the Kingston Trio laid the groundwork for the Beatles.
But the contrast in economic performance between the two presidents is undeniable. Obama’s multitrillion-dollar spend-and-borrow policies produced 2 percent growth. In his final year, Obama handed off to Trump an economy that was limping at 1.6 percent.
After only 18 months in office, Trump has elevated growth to 3 percent on an annual rate and the latest projections are that the growth rate for the second and third quarter (which ends Sept. 30) will be over 4 percent. One might say all it took to get the economy really crackling was getting Obama out of office.
Obama is right that this has been a long recovery — beginning in June 2009. But the real economic boom started almost the day after the election in 2016 with the surge in small business, investor and consumer confidence.
No one on the left, least of all Obama, thought this was remotely possible.
Two years ago, Obama famously ridiculed Trump’s campaign promise of faster growth and a comeback in manufacturing jobs by saying this could only happen if Trump was waving “a magic wand.” Obama’s first chief economist, Larry Summers, proclaimed to the world that 2 percent was the best we could hope for. Other liberal economists were so disdainful of Trump’s tax cuts, deregulation and energy development that they predicted Trump would crash the world economy and the stock market.
It’s a little early to be declaring Trump’s policies a “miracle,” as Trump has boasted. All we can say is whatever he’s doing, it’s working.
And that Obama’s economic experiment of Keynesian economics on steroids was a profound disappointment. It began with the $830 billion stimulus plan, and then cash-for-clunkers, bailouts, ObamaCare, tax hikes on the rich, minimum-wage hikes and a wave of financial and economic regulations. All told, the national debt nearly doubled in eight years.
Meanwhile, the Obama recovery was remarkably flimsy. In 2015, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress found that compared to the eight previous post-recession events, “the Obama recovery was the weakest on record.”
The recovery was so shallow that had Obama merely achieved a normal pace of recovery, personal income in 2014 would have been $3,200 higher. If the economy had matched the Reagan trajectory, GDP in 2016 would have been almost $3 trillion larger (equivalent to the combined GDP of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania).
Even as measured by the left’s favorite metric, “economic fairness,” the policies failed. The index of income inequality rose nearly every year under Obama.
While Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington, DC, Wall Street and the energy states did spectacularly well (thanks to shale oil and gas), in the Rust Belt regions of the country — from upstate New York to Ohio and Wisconsin, West Virginia and Kentucky — family incomes remained flat at best. On the campaign trail, I often asked folks in small towns across the Midwest about the Obama recovery, and their response was: What recovery?
Trump didn’t just run against Hillary Clinton and her closet overflowing with scandals, but the meager Obama economy as well. He ran against the runaway costs of ObamaCare. He ran against the regulatory assault, the tax hikes, unpopular trade deals and climate-change fanaticism. He ran against hopelessness, against opioid addiction, the $10 trillion rise in the national debt and income stagnation.
One time during the campaign, Larry Kudlow, Steve Miller and I held an impromptu discussion with Trump about economic strategy. Miller summarized the game plan to Trump succinctly: “Donald, just look at all the things that Obama has done on the economy over the past eight years, and then do just the opposite.”
Trump has done pretty much just that — which explains why the Trump boom is an everyday reminder of the Obamanomics failure.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former senior economic adviser to the Trump campaign. His new book, “Trumponomics,” will be published next month.
Sorry Obama, But It's Trump's Economic Boom, Not Yours
For eight years, President Obama presided over the worst economic recovery in modern times. For six years, he blamed Republicans in Congress for thwarting his spending agenda and hampering growth. In his last two years in office, he claimed that 2% growth was the best we could hope for. And in his last year in office, while the economy was again stalling out, Obama claimed that Trump's tax cuts and deregulation would only make things worse.
But now that we're in the midst of a booming economy — which kicked in after Trump reversed almost all Obama's economic policies — we're supposed to believe that it's Obama who deserves all the credit.
Yep. That's precisely what Obama and his Amen Chorus in the press want us to believe.
In his speech in Illinois last Friday, Obama complained that Republicans were taking credit for his work.
"When you hear how great the economy's doing right now, let's just remember when this recovery started," he said. "I mean, I'm glad it's continued, but … suddenly Republicans are saying it's a miracle."
This week, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett wisely set the record straight. At a briefing on Monday, he noted that just about every important economic indicator showed the economy was stalling out in Obama's last year.
Hassett explained that small business optimism had been on the decline before the November 2016 election. The percentage of businesses saying it's a good time to expand was, too. Business investment was stagnant. All those turned upward starting in 2017. Applications for new businesses are now well above the trend over Obama's entire second term, Hassett noted. And blue-collar jobs are growing faster than any time since the Reagan administration. Turnaround on GDP Growth
There's more. The rate of GDP growth was decelerating in Obama's last year. It went from 2.3% in Q2, to 1.9% in Q3 to 1.8% in Q4 of 2016. Under Trump, GDP growth has averaged 2.9%. It was 4.2% last quarter and might be higher in the current one.
The stock market also was stuck in neutral the year before the November 2016 elections. The Dow is up by some 45% since then.
Real median family income didn't budge from August 2015 to November 2016, according to Sentier Research. It's up more than 4% since Trump came into office. Wages are on the upswing.
In Obama's last year, unemployment rate remained basically unchanged — it was 4.9% in Jan 2016, and 4.8% when Trump took office in Jan. 2017. Now it's down to 3.9%
We could go on.
Meanwhile, the same reporters now patting Obama on the back for today's strong economy were reporting in late 2016 about how — as The New York Times put it — "the underlying reality of low growth will haunt whoever wins the White House." Scientific Consensus
Still not convinced Trump deserves credit for the current booming economy? Consider that a survey of 68 business, financial and academic economists by The Wall Street Journal at the start of this year found that most believed Trump's policies would boost the economy, while the same group had said Obama's policies were a drag on long-term growth. Ninety percent said Trump's tax cuts would accelerate growth.
It is what the left would, in another context, call a "scientific consensus."
Yet to listen to liberal activists and the ideological press and you'd think that Trump was crazy for claiming credit for today's growth. "The economic expansion we're enjoying today was set in motion under Obama," insists Slate's Jordan Weissmann.
Doesn't this make people like Obama and Weissmann "economy deniers?"
It becomes clearer every day that Barack Obama, a historic president, presided over a somewhat less than historic presidency. With only one major legislative achievement (Obamacare)—and a fragile one at that—the legacy of Obama’s presidency mainly rests on its tremendous symbolic importance and the fate of a patchwork of executive actions.
How much of that was due to fate and how much was due to Obama’s own shortcomings as a politician is up for debate and is a question that emerges from Princeton historian Julian Zelizer’s new edited volume, The Presidency of Barack Obama.
With contributions from seventeen historians, the book bills itself as “a first historical assessment” of the Obama presidency. The overwhelming consensus, Zelizer writes, is that Obama “turned out to be a very effective policymaker but not a tremendously successful party builder.” This “defining paradox of Obama’s presidency” comes up again and again: the historians, by and large, approve of Obama’s policies (although some find them too timid) while they lament his politics.
The politics were pretty disastrous. As Zelizer summarizes, “During his presidency, even as he enjoyed reelection and strong approval ratings toward the end of this term, the Democratic Party suffered greatly. . . . Democrats lost more than one thousand seats in state legislatures, governors’ mansions, and Congress during his time in office.” Zelizer could have gone further. According to Ballotpedia, more Democratic state legislative seats were lost under Obama than under any president in modern history.
Yet even with such political fallout, the overall tone of the book is surprisingly wistful. Or perhaps it is unsurprising when you notice that it was written shortly after the 2016 election. The contributors, like the nation, were shell-shocked by the results, and the book, which has a few strong chapters, suffers from the sting of Donald Trump’s victory—after which it became difficult to say anything negative about a normal president.
As such, the book frequently makes excuses for Obama. As Zelizer says in the very first chapter, “The President could take Speaker of the House John Boehner out to play as much golf and drink as much bourbon as their hearts desired, but it wouldn’t make one iota of difference.” Some of the contributors likewise treat Obama’s political problems as if Obama had nothing to do with them, and in so doing they tend to absolve Obama himself from any responsibility for them.
This sort of benefit-of-the-doubt thinking, however, does not produce very insightful history. True, playing golf and drinking bourbon would not alone have changed the composition of the Republican caucus, but it would have given the president a better idea of what he was up against. Moreover, it caricatures what really happened: Obama was not just distant from the Republicans in Congress—he was distant from the Democrats as well. His reluctance to engage members of Congress cut across the aisle, with many Democrats just as furious as Republicans. This would only occasionally break out into the press, but it was well known on the Hill.
So while it is true that Obama faced an extremely oppositional Republican Party, historians must not ignore the fact that Obama was a distant politician. In the end, he was more concerned with policy and reluctant to engage in the political battles that make for successful and sustainable policy.
This flaw is evident in one of the book’s best essays. In “Neither a Depression nor a New Deal,” Eric Rauchway describes the Obama presidency’s “original sin, ” its response to the Great Recession.
Rauchway recounts how Christina Romer, the first chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, came up with a number ($1.8 trillion), “based on arithmetic and data,” that she thought would be necessary to jumpstart the economy again. Given the sense of emergency at the time and the Democratic control of both houses of Congress, Obama could have used his rather large amount of political capital to authorize and then fight for a larger stimulus package, one which focused intensely on job creation and retention. But the star economist on his team, Lawrence Summers, disagreed with Romer and argued that the economy could be stabilized using a much smaller stimulus. Obama chose to go with Summers’s plan; the results of that decision would reverberate throughout his presidency.
First of all, while Summers’s plan worked, the recovery was very slow. Second, instead of focusing relentlessly on jobs, as Romer, most of Congress, and most of the nation wanted, the administration quickly pivoted to its next policy agenda item: health care. As Rauchway writes, “Obama’s decision to deemphasize stimulus in favor of pressing for health insurance reform was a gamble of immense, if unknowable, magnitude and consequence.”
By 2010 Obama’s fate was sealed. In the midterm elections, Republicans ran on the slow recovery, the perception that the stimulus package favored Wall Street, not Main Street, and the Democrats’ tone-deaf obsession with the health care bill. They easily took control of the House, picking up sixty-three seats—the biggest midterm election gains for the out party since 1938. And from then on, the Obama presidency struggled under a radicalized Republican Party. As Paul Starr writes in the collection, “Obama repeatedly chose substance over politics, which hardly seems like a fault in a president—except that the failure to get credit later limited what he was able to do.”
And so for its remaining six years, the Obama presidency had to confront a Republican Party that was hell-bent on opposing everything he did. But was such opposition set in stone?
At its height, the House Republican Tea Party Caucus consisted of only 60 members out of 242 Republican members of Congress. That left 182 Republicans to be wooed by a new and charismatic Democratic president—far fewer than what was needed to break gridlock. But a president who would not court members of his own party was not likely to try or to be successful at courting members of the other party, either.
In the summer of 2010, for example, Obama tried to pass a comprehensive cap-and-trade bill to combat climate change. It failed miserably, and after that, climate change legislation “fell off the political radar,” according to Meg Jacobs. It was replaced by an aggressive strategy of executive actions, from the Clean Power Plan to the Paris climate accords. And yet, as Jacobs concludes, “With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, many of Obama’s advances became vulnerable to rollback by the new GOP president who believes climate change is a ‘hoax.’”
Indeed, as Zelizer’s volume makes clear, the problem with executive action is that it is so easily undone. The majority of the book is spent cataloging Obama’s many well-intentioned executive actions that are in the process of being reversed by his successor.
Obama, for instance, presided over a Justice Department that made meaningful gestures toward reducing incarceration and demanding accountability for police violence. But these moves can be undone by the current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, leaving Peniel E. Joseph to characterize this part of the Obama legacy as “an opportunity found and frustratingly lost for advocates of criminal justice reform.” Writing about Obama’s urban policy, Thomas J. Sugrue calls Obama’s actions “miniscule” and “too cautious” and notes that, “In Obama’s last two years in office, American cities began to burn again.”
Obama’s most significant executive action came as the result of his failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform. As Sarah R. Coleman notes, “In the summer of 2012, under pressure from party activists to show some effort on immigration reform before the November election and unable to rise above the partisanship that dominated Washington as he had hoped, President Obama turned to his executive powers and announced the creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.” But again we see the weakness of executive action. As Coleman concludes, “President Obama ends his two terms with few successes and a mixed legacy on immigration and refugee policy.”
Of course there were successes in the Obama administration that appear to be sustainable. The fact that the Affordable Care Act escaped congressional repeal by the skin of its teeth is one bright spot in an otherwise dreary picture, even though the Trump administration continues to undermine it at every step. And as Timothy Stewart-Winter points out, Obama will likely be remembered as the “Gay Rights President,” in honor of the astonishing progress toward LGBTQ rights made during his years in office.
But as this first accounting of the Obama presidency shows, a president’s policy legacy is indistinguishable from his political legacy. Meaningful, sustained progress on policy requires some continuity in the political base. Rather than remake the Democratic Party from top to bottom, Obama opted to focus his political hopes on the continued success of his campaign, Obama for America. Writing in this volume, Michael Kazin notes, “Organizing for America (OFA), the group Democrats created just before the inauguration to harness the momentum of the Obama campaign to their legislative program, failed to keep the party’s young, multicultural base mobilized against the Republican onslaught that followed.”
The Presidency of Barack Obama is a good example of how hard it is to write history quickly. In twenty or so years, we may well discover that Obama’s distance from politics was intentional and designed to preserve an image of the president as “above politics.” As we know from Fred Greensteins’s book on President Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Hidden Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (1982), Eisenhower intentionally obscured his acute political sense. But his “above it all” approach to the presidency did not change what was the liberal, New Deal trajectory of the country any more than Obama changed the conservative, anti-government zeitgeist.
In the end there are only two ways a president can forge a legacy in U.S. politics: accomplish things with bipartisan support, or nurture his political party so that people are elected who will carry on and protect his accomplishments. Obama’s legacy is in trouble because he did neither. For him, the first path was difficult—and some would say impossible. He faced a Republican Party controlled by extremists determined to undermine him at all costs. “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency,” he said in his last State of the Union address, “that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.”
That left him a second path: build a Democratic Party strong enough to carry on his accomplishments. Though he did not do so at the time, Obama’s current pledge to nurture a new generation of leaders(through his foundation) and his support for former Attorney General Eric Holder’s campaign to fight gerrymandering are signs that he has come to the realization that his legacy depends on politics after all. It is a late realization but, given that the fifty-six year old has many years of influence before him, perhaps his post-presidency will help build the political support for the kinds of policies he advocated as president.
Is this an example of a perfectly acceptable response?
Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Waco_Kid
Trump’s reversal of failed Obama policies has created a booming economy
How can you tell whether the economy is truly surging under President Trump? Just listen as the Democrats try to take at least some credit for the current economic boom.
For example, President Obama pleads with us to “remember who started” this economic boom. Former Obama administration economist Austin Goolsby attempts to credit both presidents, claiming that Obama handed Trump “some of the best economic conditions for a new president in a half century.”
Let’s be clear: The economy is booming because President Trump reversed President Obama’s economic policies – not because Trump furthered the Obama policies.
Trump rescued America from the economic oblivion under Obama
Even in the midst of the economic boom America is enjoying under the stewardship of Donald Trump, Democratic candidates are suggesting we return to the failed policies of Barack Obama. Since President Trump took office two years ago, the national economic engine has been roaring, generating widespread prosperity across every corner of the country.
Our unemployment rate stands at 3.8 percent, a remarkable figure most presidents never achieve during their time in office. The unemployment rate during the first 26 months of the Trump administration averaged 4.1 percent, the lowest rate of any administration since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking the statistic in 1948. The labor market continues growing stronger every month, consistently beating the expectations of all the skeptical establishment economists who continue to forecast an impending recession. The country added a solid 196,000 jobs last month, which comfortably exceeded the predicted increase of 170,000 jobs.
During the first 26 months of the Obama administration, on the other hand, the unemployment rate spiked all the way to 10 percent, and then stayed stubbornly above 9 percent. While those discouraging numbers were in large part a product of the Great Recession, job creation had remained unfortunately sluggish throughout the remainder of his time in office. The official unemployment rate also masked the severity of economic misery under President Obama because a modest increase in part time jobs took attention away from the loss of full time employment opportunities. The result was widespread underemployment, which forced many working families to simply make do with lower incomes.
Under President Trump, full time jobs have rapidly replaced part time jobs, providing workers with the sort of financial stability they need to provide for their families and make long term plans such as saving or college or buying a home. This is no modest achievement, nor is the economic growth over the past two years. In 2016, the final year under President Obama, real gross domestic product grew by just 1.6 percent, which was also the average growth rate during all of his eight years in office. Under President Trump, growth increased to 2.2 percent in 2017, jumped again to 2.9 percent in 2018, and rose to an incredible 3.2 percent earlier this year.
By adopting policies that put our nation first, such as cutting taxes to make businesses more competitive and allow workers to keep more of their paychecks, eliminating wasteful regulations, and protecting our workers from unfair foreign competition by renegotiating outdated trade deals, President Trump has been the polar opposite of his predecessor. President Obama heavily regulated the financial industry in an attempt to reduce economic risk, but this strategy of punishing bankers only ended up dragging down growth. He also championed poorly negotiated trade deals that put our workers at a disadvantage, such as the Trans Pacific Partnership that President Trump wisely scrapped after taking office.
The results of these wildly different approaches speak for themselves. After enduring a moribund “recovery” for eight years under President Obama, the economy shifted into high gear after President Trump took office, and domestic growth has only continued to accelerate ever since. With the 2020 election rapidly turning into a referendum on socialism, it is important to remember that the free market policies of President Trump are what rescued us from the economic calamity brought on by the big government liberalism that the Democrats are still pushing to this day.
Madison Gesiotto is an attorney and a commentator who serves with the advisory board of the Donald Trump campaign. She was an inauguration spokesperson and former Miss Ohio. She is on Twitter @MadisonGesiotto.
Is this an example of a perfectly acceptable response?
In his 2016 State of the Union address, President Obama summarized his achievements. That same night, the White House issued a press release touting Mr. Obama’s accomplishments.
Now that he will be leaving, how well did these initiatives listed in the press release actually work out?
“Securing the historic Paris climate agreement.”
The accord was never submitted to Congress as a treaty. It will be ignored by President-elect Donald Trump.
“Achieving the Iran nuclear deal.”
That “deal” was another effort to circumvent the treaty-ratifying authority of Congress. It has green-lighted Iranian aggression, and it probably ensured nuclear proliferation. Iran’s violations will cause the new Trump administration to either scrap the accord or send it to Congress for certain rejection.
“Securing the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
Even Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton came out against this failed initiative. It has little support in Congress or among the public. Opposition to the TTP helped fuel the Trump victory.
“Reopening Cuba.”
The recent Miami celebration of the death of Fidel Castro, and Mr. Trump’s victory in Florida, are testimonies to the one-sided deal’s unpopularity. The United States got little in return for the Castro brothers’ propaganda coup.
“Destroying ISIL” and “dismantling al Qaeda.”
We are at last making some progress against some of these “jayvee” teams, as Mr. Obama once described the Islamic State. Neither group has been dismantled or destroyed. Despite the death of Osama bin Laden, the widespread reach of radical Islam into Europe and the United States remains largely unchecked.
“Ending combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
The Afghan war rages on. The precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. peacekeepers in 2011 from a quiet Iraq helped sow chaos in the rest of the Middle East. We are now sending more troops back into Iraq.
“Closing Guantanamo Bay.”
This was an eight-year broken promise. The detention center still houses dangerous terrorists.
“Rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific region.”
The anemic “Asia Pivot” failed. The Philippines is now openly pro-Russian and pro-Chinese. Traditional allies such as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are terrified that the United States is no longer a reliable guarantor of their autonomy.
“Supporting Central American development.”
The once-achievable promise of a free-market, democratic Latin America is moribund. Dictatorships in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua remain impoverished bullies. All have been appeased by the U.S.
“Strengthening cybersecurity.”
Democrats claimed Russian interference in the recent election. If true, it is proof that there is no such thing as “cybersecurity.” The WikiLeaks releases, the hacked Clinton emails and the Edward Snowden disclosures confirm that the Obama administration was the least cybersecure presidency in history.
“Growing the Open Government Partnership.”
The NSA scandal, the hounding of Associated Press journalists, some of the WikiLeaks troves and the corruption at the Internal Revenue Service all reveal that the Obama administration was one of the least transparent presidencies in memory.
“Honoring our nation’s veterans.”
Mr. Obama’s Department of Veterans Affairs was mired in scandal, and some of its nightmarish VA hospitals were awash in disease and unnecessary deaths. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki was forced to resign amid controversy. Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano apologized for issuing an offensive report falsely concluding that returning war vets were liable to join right-wing terrorist groups.
The 2016 presidential campaign was among the nastiest on record. WikiLeaks revealed unprecedented collusion between journalists and the Clinton campaign. Earlier, Mr. Obama had been the first president in U.S. history to refuse public campaign money. He was also the largest fundraiser of private cash and the greatest collector of Wall Street money in the history of presidential campaigns.
“Protecting voting rights.”
Riots followed the recent presidential election. Democrats, without merit, joined failed Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s recount in key swing states they lost. Progressives are berating the constitutionally guaranteed Electoral College. State electors are being subject to intimidation campaigns.
“Strengthening policing.”
Lethal attacks on police are soaring.
“Promoting immigrant and refugee integration and citizenship awareness.”
The southern U.S. border is largely unenforced. Immigration law is deliberately ignored. The president’s refugee policy was unpopular and proved a disaster, as illustrated by the Boston Marathon bombings, the San Bernardino attack, the Orlando nightclub shooting and the recent Ohio State University terrorist violence.
Note what Mr. Obama’s staff omitted: his doubling of the U.S. debt in eight years, the unworkable and soon-to-be-repealed Affordable Care Act, seven years of anemic economic growth, record labor nonparticipation, failed policy resets abroad, and a Middle East in ruins.
Why, then, has the president’s previously sinking popularity suddenly rebounded in 2016?
Mr. Obama disappeared from our collective television screens, replaced by unpopular candidates Clinton and Trump, who slung mud at each other and stole the limelight.
As a result, Mr. Obama discovered that the abstract idea of a lame-duck Mr. Obama was more popular than the cold reality of eight-year President Obama.
He wisely adjusted by rarely being heard from or seen for much of 2016.
So Mr. Obama now departs amid the ruin of the Democratic Party into a lucrative post-presidency: detached and without a legacy.
• Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Why Obama Failed
He was brilliant at many things, but economics is not one of them.
No presidency in my lifetime was greeted with such enthusiasm and unhinged hope as that of Barack Obama. At the start of his first term, a cult-like following had already developed among the intellectual and media elite. It was the dawn of a new age, marked by exuberant anticipation of justice, fairness, equality, peace, and sea-to-shining-sea happiness, all of it predicted as a certainty once you consider the sheer intelligence, erudition, and good intentions of the great man. Salon sums up the Obama era thusly:
Obama campaigned on hope in 2008 and it helped turn out a large and diverse electorate, excited at the idea that this charming man who could be the hero of a feel-good movie would give us our happy ending. He spent the next years cultivating that image….. through it all, he radiated hope and racked up some impressive victories — passing universal health care legislation, killing Osama bin Laden, getting the federal bureaucracy largely working as it should again — that justified his heroic image.
Hope and change ended in frustration and fear.
Now two months following the greatest political upheaval most of us will ever witness, we are seeing the dawning of a new reality: Obama failed. The supposed successes such as the Affordable Care Act have become a handful of dust, and we are left with a huge amount of executive orders and signed legislation that seem destined for repeal.
Eight years in office, and there’s not much to show for it. Economic growth never did take off. Hope and change ended in frustration and fear. The last month of the Obama years has been spent in a frenzy to do something, anything, important to secure his place in history: releasing prisoners, imposing new regulations, putting on the final spin.
Why He Flopped
What was the source of the failure? It was the same at the beginning that it was at the end. Despite his intelligence, erudition, earnestness, and public-relations genius, and the mastery of all the Hollywood-style theatrics of the presidency, Obama’s central problem was his failure to address the driving concern of all of American life: the economic quality of our own lives.
In other words, despite his hope and charm, his highly credentialed brain trust, his prestige cabinet, and all the enthusiasm of his followers, he did not end persistent economic stagnation. The movie has ended. We leave the theater with an empty popcorn-bag, a watery soda, and once again deal with the real world instead of the fantasy we watched on the screen.
Now, you can chalk this up to many factors but let’s just suppose that Obama and his team truly did have the best intentions going into this. What was the missing piece? He never understood economics and he had very little appreciation for the power of freedom to create wealth and prosperity.
The Greenbergs, not intending to make the same point, describe the problem:
His legacy regrettably includes the more than 1,000 Democrats who lost their elections during his two terms. Republicans now have total control in half of America’s states.
Why such political carnage?
Faced with the economy’s potential collapse as he took office, Mr. Obama devoted his presidency to the economic recovery, starting with restoring the financial sector. But he never made wage stagnation and growing inequality central to his economic mission, even though most Americans struggled financially for the whole of his term.
Which is to say that his failed economics agenda drove the party into the ground.
At the same time, Mr. Obama declined to really spend time and capital explaining his initiatives in an effective way. He believed that positive changes on the ground, especially from economic policies and the Affordable Care Act, would succeed, vindicating his judgment and marginalizing his opponents.
He truly did believe it would work, whereas anyone with basic economics understanding could foresee that the ACA would fail. Anyone familiar with the history of socialism would know failure was baked into the entire command-and-control apparatus.
Absent a president educating the public about his plans, for voters, the economic recovery effort morphed into bailouts — bank bailouts, auto bailouts, insurance bailouts. By his second year in office, he spotlighted the creation of new jobs and urged Democrats to defend our “progress.”
When President Obama began focusing on those “left behind” by the recovery, he called for building “ladders of opportunity.” That communicated that the president believed the country’s main challenges were unrealized opportunity for a newly ascendant, multicultural America, rather than the continuing economic struggle experienced by a majority of Americans.
Which is to say that he took wealth creation for granted, as if it were a machine that would run on its own without necessary fuel. His administration saw its job as the one the media and academic elite cheered on: achieving cosmetic gains for the gauzy causes of social justice, cultural inclusion, and progressive government management. To be sure, there are policy changes that could have been pursued on this front – such as ending the drug war and penal reform – but these were both too little and too late.
Economic Ignorance
He never had a big idea, a mental framework for thinking about economic fundamentals.
The first extended treatment I read of Obama’s economic outlook was from David Leonhardt in August 2008, based on a series of interviews with the candidate for president. As usual, Obama was compelling throughout. Concerning his actual views on economics, however, he became vague, defaulting back to a technocratic center that rejected both free markets and socialism.
Leonhardt caught on quickly and commented: “He can be inspiring when talking about how the country ended up being the envy of the world. But when he comes to the part about what he wants to do next, how he wants to keep America the envy of the world, it can sound a little like a State of the Union laundry list.”
A laundry list of policies is pretty much the whole of Obama’s economic thought. He never had a big idea, a mental framework for thinking about economic fundamentals. All the interviews in this period illustrate how brilliance does not come prepackaged with economic understanding. He simply had none.
Obama never figured out where wealth comes from, the contribution of freedom to its creation, the role of property rights in securing prosperity, much less how government controls and mandates hold back growth. Every time these ideas were brought up, he would dismiss them as Reagan-era fictions. Moreover, denouncing trickle-down economics always elicited cheers from all the fashionable people.
Technocratic Takeover
The mainstream of the economics profession has long rendered the problem of generating prosperity as a matter of engineering.He took office in 2009 in the midst of a financial meltdown. He had to deal with a fantastic mess of bailouts and monetary interventions that he could not begin to understand. He continued his predecessor’s policies, agreeing with Bush’s zero-tolerance policy toward an economic downturn, however brief it might have been. He packed his economic team with technocrats and bailout masters and never looked back.
To some extent, this was all understandable. The mainstream of the economics profession has long rendered the problem of generating prosperity as a matter of engineering. Scientific management of macroeconomic aggregates could manipulate outcomes, provided the right experts were in charge and given enough resources and power. Lacking independent convictions on the topic, Obama outsourced his knowledge to these mainstream conventions with all their pomp and conceit. They failed him and the rest of us completely.
Eight years later, in an April 2016 interview in the same venue, Obama seems just as lost on the topic. “I can probably tick off three or four common-sense things we could have done where we’d be growing a percentage or two faster each year,” Obama said. “We could have brought down the unemployment rate lower, faster. We could have been lifting wages even faster than we did. And those things keep me up at night sometimes.”
To this day, he still has no ear for the topic. Precisely how might he have brought down unemployment? How was he going to lift wages? There is no control room in Washington, D.C., that you can enter and turn some dial to lower unemployment and boost wages. If there were, he surely would have done that. The relation between cause and effect in economics continues to elude him.
In another interview in 2016, faced with failure in health care and jobs, his frustration on the topic yielded this bit of honesty. “One of the things that I've consistently tried to remind myself during the course of my presidency is that the economy is not an abstraction. It's not something that you can just redesign and break up and put back together again without consequences."
It's amazing that he would have to "remind" himself that no one can redesign an economy. Still, it's good that he figured out that much. Would that he had followed up further and earlier on the implications of that statement. He would then know that the government cannot create outcomes; it can only hinder them.
Ruling Cannot Create Wealth
Despite his vast knowledge on seemingly everything, and endless amounts of charm to sell himself to the public, he missed the one crucial thing.
In some ways, this highly educated man with impeccable credentials and all the right friends, was a victim of a system of education that suppressed the great truths about economics.
Despite his vast knowledge on seemingly everything, and endless amounts of charm to sell himself to the public, he missed the one crucial thing. He never understood wealth is not a given; it must be created through enterprise and innovation, trade and experimentation, by real people who need the freedom to try, unencumbered by a regulatory and confiscatory state. This doesn’t happen just because there is a nice and popular guy in the White House. It happens because the institutions are right.
That most simple lesson eluded him. Had it not, he might have turned failure to success. Instead of imposing vast new regulations, passing the worst health care reform in American history, saddling industry with endless burdens, he might have gone the other direction.
Obama wisely said at the DNC convention that “we don’t look to be ruled.” “America has never been about what one person says he'll do for us,” he said. “It's always been about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard, slow, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government.”
It was supposed to be an attack on Trump. It might also be an attack on how his own administration handled the economy. Would that he had seen that this is not just true in politics; it’s the core principle of economics too.
And so he leaves office, confused about what went wrong, worried about his legacy, alarmed at the destruction of his party, and fearful about the forces of reaction that his health care reform and persistent economic stagnation have unleashed. There is an element of tragedy here. It is the fate of a man who knew everything except the one thing he needed to know in order to generate genuine and lasting hope and change.
You can have all the highest hopes, best aspirations, vast public support, and all the prestige backing in the world. But if you can't get economics right, nothing else falls into place.
Is this an example of a perfectly acceptable response?
I would respond but the assertion is so stupid, and the poster as well, that it makes it difficult to respond in any meaningful way...like arguing who's stronger, the Hulk or Superman.
TWK - thanks for a learned and complete post/discussion of the absurdities of the marxist DPST's - who believe their socialist mandates will create equality and prosperity - when in reality they will destroy the economy to a smoking ruin- and ignore reality in favor of their ideology.
In four years - how much damage can they do - never underestimate lizzie, bernie, and aoc,
the DPST's are incapable of lerning the fallacy of their beloved marxism - and learning through reality in America will only strengthen their denial and deflection of the true results of their ideology.
If, if he had concentrated on The Economy instead of “ THE HORRIBLE “ health care act, I would have some respect for him, but no, He was a horrible ( FOOL ) President!!!
Trump walked in to the Obama/Biden economy
