A premature obituary

In the summer of 2010, though the specifics may have differed from left to right, the political class in the US had reached a consensus - Obama's presidency was, in a word, doomed.

But if you examined the facts in some depth, the reality is quite different. Two recent pieces provide a more consistent and balanced view of just what Obama has achieved when you get away from the daily hysteria. It is true that the common man is frustrated by the lack of progress in the economy. But they are still looking for solutions more than someone to blame. What has passed under the radar are the very substantial achievements that Obama has had just in the past two years.

He and his team have helped avoid a second Great Depression. The bank bailout, however noxious, worked. The auto industry is now making profits for the first time in five years. Two new Supreme Court Justices are in place after failed attempts at culture war demagoguery. Crime - amazingly - has not jumped with the recession. America is no longer despised abroad the way it was; torture has been ended; relations with Russia have improved immensely; Iran's regime is more diplomatically and economically isolated than in its entire history; even the Greater Israel chorus has been challenged. Despite continued violence and political stalemate in Iraq, he is on track to withdraw combat troops by his stated August 2010 deadline. He scrapped the F-22 fighter, ended Homeland Security pork in states where terrorist threats are minimal, attached strings to US military aid to Pakistan. He pushed the Pentagon to abandon “don’t ask, don’t tell,” expanded AmeriCorps, increased funding for national parks and forests, and “overperformed on education”. And then there’s the piece de resistance, the health care bill, which among other things will extend Medicaid to some 16 million relatively poor people. Health insurance reform will stick despite the recent legal challenges and, with careful oversight, could even begin to curtail runaway healthcare costs. Another recent legislative victory for Obama’s domestic agenda was the enactment of what he has called “the toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression.”

In all of this "he had won ugly—without a single Republican—but won all the same,” writes Jonathen Alter in his book The Promise, “Whatever happened next—however bad it got—Barack Obama was in the company of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson now in terms of domestic achievement, a figure of history for reasons far beyond the color of his skin.”

The Progressives seemed disappointed that he had met all the promises he made during the campaign. Yet even here the facts are quite different. PolitiFact.com, a database of the St. Petersburg Times that won a Pulitzer Prize for its fact-checking of the 2008 campaign, had catalogued 502 promises that Obama made during the campaign. At the one-year mark the totals showed that he had already kept 91 of them and made progress on another 285. The database’s “Obameter” rated 14 promises as “broken” and 87 as “stalled.” With promises ranging from “Remove more brush and vegetation that fuel wildfires” to “Establish a playoff system for college football,” PolitiFact selected 25 as Obama’s most significant. Of those, an impressive 20 were “kept” or “in the works.”

And these were accomplished in spite of obstacles that would fell most mortals—the almost uncountable messes he inherited from Bush-Cheney, a cratered economy, a sclerotic Congress in thrall to lobbyists and special-interest money, and a rabid opposition underwritten by a media empire that owns both America’s most-watched cable news channel and its most highly circulated newspaper.

Of course Barack Obama was too hot not to cool down. He was the one so many were waiting for—not only the first African-American president but also the nation’s long-awaited liberator after eight years of Bush-Cheney, the golden-tongued evangelist who could at long last revive and sell the old liberal faith, the first American president in memory to speak to voters as if they might be thinking adults, the first national politician in years to electrify the young. He was even, of all implausible oddities, a contemporary politician- author who actually wrote his own books. Most people thought, correctly, that the Obama of Hope and Change was too tough an act for Obama, a mere chief executive, to follow.

But the facts here too show that despite the hysteria, his achievements have been substantial. Indeed they far outstrip those of his recent predecessors. And there one contradictory footnote to the many provisional Obama obituaries of early summer 2010. For all the President’s travails, his approval rating, somewhere between 45 and 50 percent depending on the poll, still made him the most popular national politician in the country.

And as Andrew Sullivan cannily observes in this piece on Obama's long game. "I've learned over time", he writes, " to respect the canniness of this president's restraint. His gift is patience and perseverance and allowing his enemies to destroy themselves."