Quote:You’ll miss Obama when he’s gone: Why Obama will be remembered as a good President and maybe a great one
BY JONATHAN ALTER
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, January 17, 2016, 5:00 AM
I had one overwhelming thought watching President Barack Obama give his final State of the Union Address:
We're gonna miss this guy.
The slogan that any GOP administration would 'die for' to be able to run on again, and again, and again, and....LOL!
It's at least arguable that it was an effective 'short hand' to help '12 voters understand two pivotal domestic and foreign policy events, and vote their approval.
We'll miss his graceful style and an undervalued record of achievement that - with a year to go — has already put him in the ranks of fine American Presidents.
Of course we won't all miss him, but even many Republicans who despise Obama may look back with nostalgia at low inflation, low interest rates and low unemployment, with no American troops other than a smattering of Special Forces in combat abroad.
Despite persistent income inequality, stagnant wages, a broken immigration system, the threat of ISIS and plenty more woes, Obama's legacy has been one of slow but consistent progress.
He will likely end his presidency with the unemployment rate cut in half (to 5%) and the budget deficit cut by more than two-thirds.
But there's a binary quality to the larger Obama legacy: If he is succeeded by a Democrat, his achievements will be solidified and built on. If a Republican takes over, the new President will join with a Republican Congress to dismantle much of what his predecessor built.
Meaning: We already know history will judge him as a good President; whether or not he'll be seen as great depends on what happens at the polls in November.
The Obama record could also be enhanced or marred by how he reacts to the unpredictable events of 2016. Recall how the last year of George W. Bush's presidency brought the Great Recession, which further stained his legacy.
I'll get to Obama's shortcomings, but let's look to the positive side of the ledger first.
The vast majority of Americans are better off than they were when he first took office. And their children are better off, thanks to a President focused more on the long-term than the news cycle.
On a personal level, Obama is honest, smart, far-sighted, decisive, eloquent and, yes, cool — in both senses of the world.
I've known Obama since 2002, interviewed him often and talked with scores of his friends and aides in the course of writing two books about him. He's cucumber cool in a crisis, which is an important trait in a President whose nuclear codes hold all of our fates in his hands.
And he's much hipper than most politicians — likely the coolest president we'll get for a while.
Who else could get away with singing Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" at the Apollo Theater, a duet with B.B. King at the White House and "Amazing Grace" at the memorial service for the victims of the church shooting in Charleston?
The temperament of a President is important for assessing his (or her) legacy. It's how we remember them as human beings.
"No Drama Obama" has the right emotional equilibrium for the first African-American President. It has allowed him to put up with venomous attacks without getting distracted from the job at hand.
All presidents have fierce critics, but the racist messages and death threats (several times the number received by his predecessors) directed at him and Michelle Obama might have demoralized other first couples or provoked counter-productive public anger.
Instead, the dignity and excitement they brought to the White House — not to mention the way they've raised their daughters in the public glare — made them role models for millions of people, a valuable legacy even if Obama had accomplished little else.
Beyond temperament, historians are interested in what Obama the basketball player would call "points on the board."
Here are his four biggest plays for history.
Preventing a depression
When Obama took office seven years ago, the economy was losing 850,000 jobs a month. If we had stayed on that path, with no intervention by the government, we would have sunk into another Great Depression by the end of 2009.
Cool in both senses of the word
Even before taking office, Obama pushed through the second half of the $700 billion dollar bank bailout and — shortly after becoming President — administered stress tests to the banks that allowed them to return to solvency.
He did it holding his nose — who likes bailing out the rich? — but banks provide the lifeblood of the economy and they had to be saved. Within a short period, all the bailout money had been repaid to the government, with interest.
Over the objections of all Republicans, he rescued General Motors and Chrysler, savings hundreds of thousands of jobs in the auto industry and related businesses. Today's American car industry enjoys record sales.
The $800 billion stimulus was unpopular. But the huge bill touched nearly every aspect of American life in a positive way.
It saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of state and local government workers (including first responders), cut taxes on the middle class, accelerated the transition to clean energy, hastened electronic medical record-keeping, incentivized accountability in public education (through the Department of Education's "Race to the Top"and began the rapid expansion of college loans, among hundreds of other investments.
The 2010 Dodd-Frank bill, while too modest, sharply increased regulation of Wall Street and lessened the chance of another crash and bailout. It also included Elizabeth Warren's proposed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has labored quietly and successfully on behalf of ordinary people victimized by predatory lenders.
Obamacare
The Affordable Care Act, signed in March of 2010, was a big, overly complicated bill that was rammed through the Democratic Congress without a single Republican vote amid clamor in both parties and phony claims about death panels and job-killing taxes. As we all remember, the rollout in 2013 was disastrous because of problems with the website.
Yet Obamacare has mostly worked. It is expanding access to care and bending the health-care cost curve better than any other policy intervention of recent years.
That said, it has problems, including higher deductibles and less choice in doctors. And the bill created enormous partisan bitterness, with Republicans — once they regained control of the House and later the Senate — voting to repeal it every chance they got.
If a Republican wins the White House in November, he (and it would certainly be a he at this point) would move to scuttle the law, throwing 17 million people off their health insurance and dealing Obama's legacy a severe blow.
But even repeal would likely not include removal of the ban on discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions.
That means that, at a minimum, Obama will be remembered as the President who ended a long and shameful era in American history where people were forced to sell their homes or declare personal bankruptcy if someone in the family got sick.
Like Social Security and Medicare, Obamacare will need fixes. But after the failure of every president back to Theodore Roosevelt to establish some form of universal coverage, this is, as Joe Biden said on the day the bill was signed, a "big f----ing deal."
The environment
Legacies are meant to extend far forward in time. That's why so many Presidents consider the environment an important part of how they want to be remembered.
Obama expanded fuel economy standards to 54.5 mpg by 2025, required much greater energy efficiency in other industries, sharply boosted solar, wind and other alternative energy sources, and for the first time regulated carbon emissions from coal-fired plants, a huge source of CO2 that's filling the atmosphere and hastening climate change.
In 2009, Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to crash a meeting at the Copenhagen climate change conference just to get China to even record and post its carbon emissions.
By the 2015 conference in Paris, Obama had brought the Chinese around entirely, probably the greatest personal diplomatic victory of his presidency.
The Paris Accords, praised to the skies by the administration, are only aspirational; they could easily founder with the usual squabbling.
But for now, Obama gets points for leading nearly 200 nations to go on record for the first time saying that humanity will do something about climate change. Even conservative parties in Europe and elsewhere were not against the accord, which leaves the U.S. Republican Party standing alone against the world.
b]Ending and preventing wars[/b]
Obama will be remembered for killing Osama Bin Laden, an important measure of justice for the events of 9/11.
Meanwhile, the President wound down long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving only a small presence of troops.
He'll be remembered for not getting a lot of American soldiers killed. We don't know how relations with Iran will go. If last week's brief hostage-taking at sea is any indication, 2016 could bring skirmishing between U.S. and Iranian forces.
But Obama's historic nuclear deal has unquestionably made the world safer. Just this month, Iran began fulfilling it end of the bargain, mothballing nuclear facilities and shipping its enriched uranium to Russia in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
Without the deal, we would likely have had to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, providing only a short-term fix. Instead, Obama bought time — a decade or more of not worrying as much about a nuclear Iran.
Beyond the big achievements, Obama has a long list of smaller wins, many the product of executive orders rather than legislation. Among them:
He ended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the military and encouraged an historic shift in attitudes toward gay marriage; allowed women into combat roles; protected young "Dreamers" (and tried to do so with older undocumented workers, now tied up in court); made school lunches healthier, cutting obesity; helped boost high school graduation rates; increased workplace apprenticeship programs; and negotiated the (still unratified) Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest trade deal in history.
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