For anyone who remembers the bipartisan sense of national uplift that attended Barack Obama’s inauguration eight years ago, it’s easy enough to list the ways in which his presidency has been a disappointment: Political divisions seemingly deeper than ever. Racial tensions more exacerbated than eased. Prisoners still held at Guantanamo Bay. A national-security state grown ever more secretive.
So it’s well to remember his achievements, too: An administration free of a single major scandal. An economy recovered from the worst crisis since the Great Depression (albeit one with stubbornly low growth and incomes). Health insurance for millions more Americans (despite real problems with rising premiums and access to care). Major strides to combat climate change (though some measures will not bear fruit for years).
Almost all these agenda items will be at risk in Donald Trump’s presidency, along with the balance of the Supreme Court, relations with N.A.T.O., and who-knows-what else. So it’s worth asking, even prematurely, what Obama’s lasting legacy is likely to be. Will his presidency have been transformative, as he hoped it would be when he ran in 2008?
In at least one profound way, Trump’s election amounts to a repudiation of Obama and a vindication of the truism, often cited by the president’s longtime strategist, David Axelrod, that in open-seat elections Americans tend to pick presidents as unlike the ones who preceded them as possible. Hence the choice of the cool, cerebral Obama after eight years of George W. Bush’s shoot-from-the-hip style. By that measure, Trump—hot-headed, bombastic, impulsive, crude—is Obama’s polar opposite. Indeed, it’s a nice question to what degree Obama’s very resolute civility, his almost Vulcan presence—not to mention his status as the nation’s first black president—fueled Trump’s rise (and not just because Obama taunted The Donald so brutally, and effectively, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011).
Obama failed spectacularly in his pledge to end the partisan divide and dysfunction in Washington—a failure, it must be acknowledged, that congressional Republicans worked overtime to guarantee from his first day in office. But he also failed, as he has implicitly conceded, to persuade millions of disaffected ordinary Americans that he had their backs, and felt their pain, much less had any idea how to salve it. Fairly or not, his health care plan came to be seen as punishing the working class in order to serve the poor.
Obama could speak of America’s racial realities with soaring clarity and unifying dignity, as he did in his eulogy for victims of the Charleston church massacre. But whether criticizing the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police for acting “stupidly” by arresting professor Henry Louis Gates at his own front door, or acknowledging that if he’d had a son, he’d look like the Florida shooting victim Trayvon Martin, Obama alienated some white Americans by seeming to take sides, even if he was just expressing the painful truth as he knew it.
Taken together, Obama’s misfires—whether on policy or politics—can fairly be said to have provided fertile soil in which first the Tea Party, and then the Trump movement, grew. One suspects that a Bill Clinton, at the peak of his powers, might have found a way to deflect the forces of Trumpism to his own advantage, as he did with Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution two decades ago. Then again, maybe not.
But the truth is that Obama is leaving office with job approval ratings about as high as any he’s had for most of his term, and if those ratings hover only in the mid-to-upper 50s, that’s no mean feat in a country that, by every available index, remains as narrowly divided as in any era since the run-up to the Civil War. Hatred of the president is visceral in many quarters, but hope still abides. No small number of voters who picked Trump in November voted twice for Obama himself. In our hyper-partisan politics, 50 may well be the new 70.
Hillary Clinton struggled in vain all year to articulate a single big organizing idea. Her failure makes Obama’s willingness to swing for the fences on an issue like health care (against the advice of some of his own top aides) appear all the bolder. Of political necessity, he rammed the Affordable Care Act through Congress on the narrowest of partisan majorities (and one can debate the wisdom of that course). At a minimum, it meant that the law never had the kind of broad, bipartisan backing that has accompanied most major changes in the social contract, from Social Security to civil rights, and it cost Obama control of the House of Representatives. Congress has not been able to revisit the measure to rectify its inevitable flaws (even quite technical ones), because Republicans would seize on any such opening to try to kill it. And, until now, the public focus has been on Obamacare’s shortcomings and high costs, not on its benefits.
But the knots into which Trump and congressional Republicans are already tying themselves as they strive to “repeal and replace” the law serve as proof that its most popular provisions are here to stay. Fifty years from now, when some form of Obamacare’s ban on denial of coverage for pre-existing medical conditions, or lifetime limits on care, remain firmly entrenched in law, the perspective will be clearer. Few now under age 60 may have any emotional feeling about Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, but the legacy of the civil-rights bills he worked so hard to pass is evident in Obama’s presidency itself. As Obama told cheering supporters in his farewell speech last week, democracy has always been hard. “For every two steps forward,” he acknowledged, “it often feels we take one step back.”
Indeed, some of those steps forward can be hard to see—scores of regulations, presidential directives, protections for national monuments and so on—and they will be just as hard for any but the most skilled inside operators to systematically roll back. Trump has so far evinced no appetite for managerial detail, and it is far from clear that he’ll have anyone around him with the brutal knowledge of the federal bureaucracy possessed by, let’s say, a Dick Cheney
It is not too much to say that Obama did for decency in the presidency what only the best of his predecessors have ever done: He and his wife and daughters set an example for good behavior that even many of his political adversaries were forced to concede. He is leaving office seemingly confident that the country that elected him against the historical odds can’t really go wrong, for long.
Together with Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, Obama is one of just three Democratic presidents to win a majority of the popular vote at least twice. That he was not able to translate his personal success into comparable institutional victories for his party in Congress and the statehouses, where Democrats suffered net losses in his tenure, is a cross to be borne. It is also a burden that could dampen his legacy long after Trump has served one or even two terms, simply because Republican-dominated state legislatures have drawn district lines so lopsidedly in their favor.
Starting on Friday, Obama belongs to the ages, as was famously said of his fellow Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln. But unlike Lincoln, who was cut down at age 56, Obama is very much alive at 55, with actuarial odds of having one of the longest presidential retirements ever (even, one assumes, with some points off for his years as a smoker). He has let it be known that a principal political aim of his post-presidency will be reforming the shameful system of incumbent protection that has made the nation’s congressional districts into ever redder and bluer slices of easily defensible turf, instead of competitive battlegrounds. That’s a big job, worthy of a big man, a man who, after all, rocketed to prominence with a speech in which he dismissed the very notion of a red America and a blue America, and insisted, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
If that promise seems a little less plausible—maybe even a good deal less—than it did when he took the oath of office eight years ago, that’s a short term setback he seems willing to risk. From the moment he first set out on his improbable odyssey, Barack Obama has always played the long game.
