He also called it universal health care when it wasn’t. And lied about supporting the individual mandate. History generally doesn’t remember such details, but those who lived through his Presidency do.
But because ACA isn’t UHC, it’s not really going to be remembered well even if it stands. Most of it is an expansion of Medicaid, which wasn’t his program, it was LBJ’s, and the exchanges and subsidies only affect a very small percentage of people. I’d argue that SCHIP was more impactful, and no one remembers Bill Clinton for SCHIP.
Minimal to no progress on major domestic problems, poor foreign policy results, no significant disasters (affecting Americans) on his watch, one of the more ethically-behaving Administrations on record.
We’ll especially miss the lack of significant scandals.
No significant scandals? This is crazy, the IRS was found to be targeting political opponents, the VA was found to be falsifying data and letting vets die, the ATF smuggled weapons to mexican drug cartels, his Secretary of State was illegally running a private server to get around federal transparency laws (something which Obama knew about and lied about), and his Secretary of State was selling access to herself to foreign interests.
Yes, but he didn’t know about any of it, which makes it a management failure. Actually, it’s a management failure even if he did know about it. There’s no evidence that he directed any of the scandalous behavior. I really, really dislike the guy, but ethically his administration is the cleanest in my lifetime.
And don’t forget the biggest management failure of all, the VA.
The IRS “scandal” ended with the FBI saying that that the IRS was a mismanaged bureaucracy trying to enforce rules that even the IRS personnel did not really understand, but that there was no evidence of targeting or enemy-hunting.
The VA has been a mismanaged bureaucracy for decades (the first director of its predecessor the Veterans Bureau, Charles Forbes, went to prison in the 1920s for defrauding the government), but nobody has yet found good evidence of “letting vets die.” The FBI, the VA’s inspector general, and Congress have all combed through medical records and autopsy reports, but the most they’ve been able to prove is that some veterans who already had very serious health problems died while waiting for additional appointments. Whether faster appointments even could have prevented the deaths is hotly debated, not settled.
The Obama and Bush administrations both ran operations trying to catch smugglers conveying guns to Mexican gangs; the ATF under both administrations lost track of guns, but has not been accused (credibly) of any kind of deliberate efforts to aid smuggling. Operation Fast and Furious and its predecessors were poorly conceived and badly run; that is again a management failure, but not really a scandal.
Secretary Clinton’s private server was stupid, but probably not illegal, and absolutely nobody has come up with real evidence that she sold access to foreign interests.
In other words, your entire list of “scandals” is misrepresented or flat-out wrong.
Obama’s legacy will be the birth of the Trump movement, the neutering of the liberal movement, and the conservative take over of the Supreme Court for decades.
The failure of the ACA will stop healthcare reform for another generation. UHC? Forget it.
During his time the Democratic majority in Congress evaporated. He let Wall Street off the hook. Economic resentment built during the sluggish recovery, most of which went to the 1%. Obama prosecuted more whistle blowers than any other president. Continued and expanded the NSA spying programs. Whether you’re on the left or right you’re probably not happy with the way he handled the Middle East. Relations with Russia and China are not good.
From most reports I’ve read, Obama is not interested in the sort of glad handing behind the scenes wine and dine politics necessary to secure legislative victories. Yes, the GOP vowed to obstruct at all costs. Obama didn’t use his oratory skills or the bully pulpit to put pressure on them. Nationally, he had no coat tails. Other Democrats ran away from him. There was no movement behind him after he secured office. You can blame the man, the party, the liberal electorate, millennials – there’s always enough blame to go around.
His presidency has also seen the deterioration of race relations, though I wouldn’t blame him. He did insert himself in controversies before facts were known, such as the Trayvon Martin case, but I think this had a marginal effect at best. The white reaction was coming regardless.
There are some positive things. Cuba. The Iran deal. Increased gay rights. Releasing thousands of non-violent drug offenders. Many good executive orders. Some of these may be undone by Republicans sooner or later, others maybe not.
The IRS admitted to illegally releasing donor names from the National Organization for Marriage and paid the $50,000. The IRS’s own inspector general found “The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention.”
An internal audit of the VA found that 120,000 veterans were left waiting or never got care.
According to Federal Records laws all work emails produced by federal employees are federal property. A private email server designed to skirt these laws is very much illegal.
The idea that unless people are arrested and go to prison there is no scandal is crazy. It is Obama’s job to manage the executive administration of the federal government. I don’t expect there to be no wrongdoing in such a vast bureaucracy but when wrongdoing occurs it is up to the people at the top to root it our and punish it so it doesn’t happen anymore. Obama not only did not punish those responsible for the awful things that happened, his department of justice helped cover them up.
I get the feeling some people would deny Watergate was a scandal since Nixon did not personally break in.
He’s a fine president. If you find a dearth of accomplishments, you have to accept that the GOP has been obstructing in an unprecedented manner for his entire term.
He has taught us that there is no penalty for mindless obstruction. The GOP hurt millions of people, and caused untold human suffering in the furtherance of slowing the recovery, so they could paint Obama as a feckless leader.
They left him with dozens of unfilled court vacancies, and one on the SCOTUS. Which they will now fill. They win, and they win because they were shitty callous people Obamacare exists as it is because there were zero GOP votes, and it had to serve the whims of the very most conservative Dem senator.
Our system needs an overhaul, because things like this used to be unthinkable because of collegiality. And civil behavior is dead. At least on the right. I imagine that the Dems will take the torch and obstruct Trump to their capability, unless they erase the filibuster.
now that the election is over, the Republicans might actually acknowledge reality… I know that sounds crazy, but they no longer need to label everything Obama did as ‘terrible’ now that they’ve won. ALL of that was for pure partisan reasons. They couldn’t give him a single ‘win’ or they feared the Dems would use it against them.
Major examples:
Obamacare. aka Romney-care. A big hand-out to the big-business Insurance companies. They won’t have anything to replace it with. If their base will let them, they might just drop the issue.
The Iran deal. Again, NOT a terrible deal, but actually a good one. Now they don’t have to badmouth it anymore, and - unless the warhawks like John “Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain have a say - they will also probably drop that issue as well. Trump is supposedly not a hawk, but we’ll see. C’mon, Iran is friends with Russia, our new best-bro!
Lobohan, there was no price for obstruction because Obama couldn’t impose one. Clinton and Reagan before him could. In fact, opposition to Obama was extremely profitable for Republicans, aided by his refusal to change course after not one, but two huge midterm defeats. I wonder if he’d change course now if he could?
Matt Yglesias isn’t the only pundit to make this argument, but he makes it better than anyone else:
Are the couple of you that are mentioning the race relations deterioration actually BLAMING Obama for that? Seriously? I knew the Usual Suspects were reality-free but this is too much.
Absolutely true. It is an excuse for one’s own racism or at least tolerance of it. If it was Obama’s fault as President, why was I getting racist emails from Republicans before he even secured the nomination, let alone the Presidency?
Obama has no military training. Any contribution he made to bagging Bin Laden involved staying out of the way.
Obamacare drove up the cost of healthcare and is responsible for both houses flipping.
He once said that the 4 trillion of additional debt Bush left was unpatriotic. When he leaves office he will have added 10 trillion additional debt.
He criticized the removal of Sadam Hussein and then turned around and did the same thing in Libya. But that doesn’t count because… I don’t know. Fewer boots on the ground?
As to the economy bouncing back, we’ve had less than 3% GDP growth for the longest period in history. That’s what we got from the 10 trillion dollars. The only thing that saved us was domestic oil production driving down energy costs and he did nothing toward this goal.