Barack Obama’s election as the first black President was a historic moment in US history. It also resulted in high expectations amid a gloomy global scenario. Here’s taking a look at his performance during the past seven and a half years, both in the domestic and foreign arenas
While Barack Obama has nearly eight more months to serve as the US President (till the next President elect is sworn in and takes office on January 20, 2017), it may not be out of place to evaluate his presidency from the day he was first sworn in on January 20, 2009 till now.
Although sometimes the final year of a US President is termed, erroneously as it happens, lame duck (most recently Senator Marco Rubio, at one of the Republican debates, said: “I do not believe the President should appoint someone to the Supreme Court. It has been over 80 years since a lame-duck President has appointed a Supreme Court Justice”), there is a lot that a President can accomplish during the last months of the term. Here’s analysing President Obama’s performance during the past seven and a half years, both in the domestic and foreign policy scenarios.
Domestic issues
Obama’s election as the 44th President was a historic moment in US history as he was the first black President; it also resulted in high expectations worldwide, although circumstances were gloomy globally.
The world faced its most serious crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s with all sectors of US economy — including housing, banking and insurance — being the immediate casualties leading to bank failures and mortgage foreclosures in the housing sector. The economy was in recession and unemployment rates were touching 10 per cent.
Not unlike Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and Ronald Reagan in 1981, Obama had to address this major economic crisis even as he was inaugurated. The economy occupied most of his attention during much of the early years of his administration.
Fortunately, the outgoing President George W Bush had already initiated some recovery measures. Even before taking the oath of office, Obama had endorsed President Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a $700-billion initiative to rescue the nation’s major banks by lending enough money to keep them solvent.
Upon taking office as President, he directed some TARP funds to General Motors and Chrysler in an effort to keep the automobile industry from going bankrupt. TARP worked — all the banks and auto companies survived and by the end of 2009, they already had repaid the Government more than $600 billion. However, his actions were not without costs. Many voters perceived the programme as a bailout for wealthy bankers and corporate executives.
Obama followed this by recommending to the Congress an $800-billion economic stimulus package — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This package envisaged giving grants (about a third of the package) to State Governments to keep them from laying off public employees or reducing unemployment compensation; another one-third went for bridges, highways, sewage treatment facilities, and other infrastructure projects; and the remaining third was for middle-class tax cuts.
Although Obama hoped to pass the Recovery Act with bipartisan support, not a single Republican House member and only three Republican Senators voted for it. Fortunately, Democratic control of the Congress was strong enough to secure its passage, and President Obama signed the Act into law on February 17, 2009.
In 2010, Obama persuaded the Congress to enact financial reform legislation, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, designed to prevent economic meltdowns like the one he inherited when he took office. The legislation, which ran into more than 2,200 pages, limited Wall Street’s riskiest trading schemes, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and created a system to wind down failing banks without taxpayer-funded bailouts and break up banks that don’t comply, in the face of vehement opposition from Wall Street.
While repairing the damaged economy was a priority, Obama was not unmindful of the other issues that he had campaigned for during the presidential election. Running for President in 2008, he had set ambitious goals, including measures to prevent climate change, revamp the immigration system, and achieve universal health coverage.
On healthcare, Obama wanted to do more as President than put out fires. He sought to enact a major reform of the nation’s healthcare system. Healthcare reform had been a leading Democratic Party goal since the presidency of Harry S Truman.
In 1965, lyndon B Johnson had secured the enactment of Medicare for older Americans and Medicaid for the poor. The next two Democratic Presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, each failed to persuade the Congress to pass a legislation to guarantee healthcare coverage for everyone else.
Although Obama had only promised during the election campaign to address this issue “by the end of my four-year term”, he decided that his best chance of success was during his first year in office when his popularity was likely to be at its highest.
He faced extreme legislative hostility to his healthcare reform proposals. However, On March 23, 2010, after some elaborate legislative wrangling to get the House to pass the Senate Bill, Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) into law. One week later, he signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, which restored some of the House’s preferred features.
The Affordable Care Act created a new Patient’s Bill of Rights that protected the patient from a variety of restrictions, exclusions and other abusive practices that were common in the US private health insurance schemes. Obamacare was opposed by the Republicans in the Congress and Republican-governed States, and faced many legal challenges and hurdles. It was only in June 2012 that the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare by a narrow 5-4 majority and upheld the Affordable Care Act.
The 2010 midterm Congressional elections saw the Democratic Party suffer major losses. President Obama’s party lost its majority in the House and only retained a slim majority in the Senate. With a divided Congress and faced with a hostile Opposition party, Obama could do little to advance his goals on other major issues — immigration reforms and climate change.
At the beginning of his second term as President, in his State of the Union address in February 2013, Obama elaborated on the agenda that he offered at the inauguration, while adding to the list calls for greater federal support for early childhood education, immigration reforms to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, an increase in the minimum wage, and new gun control legislation.
The last of these issues had taken on special urgency after December 14, 2012, when a young gunman killed 20 school children, six teachers and staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
However, notwithstanding some losses in the House by the Republicans, Congressional Republicans (strengthened by the addition of vocal and active conservative “Tea Party” members) were loath to do any of the actions the President had proposed. For example, in 2013, the Senate passed a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform Bill. And yet, House Speaker John Boehner and the House leadership refused to even bring the Bill up for a vote.
Obama’s second-term efforts to get gun control legislation and then bipartisan immigration reform through the Congress have failed. The administration is under siege in the Congress with no hope of the Congress — with both the House and Senate under Republican control — being supportive of any Obama initiative.
Faced with an uncooperative and hostile Congress, Obama has used executive authority to achieve partial versions of what he’d hoped to achieve through legislation.
On immigration, Obama announced in November 2014 two deferred action initiatives — Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The DAPA programme offered “deferred action” to undocumented immigrants who are law-abiding parents of American citizens. Twenty six States challenged the initiative in courts and obtained an injunction staying the operation of these initiatives. The administration appealed to the US Supreme Court to reverse the lower court’s order.
Finally in April 2016, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in United States v Texas, a lawsuit brought by the 26 States challenging Obama’s immigration policies. The case deals specifically with the constitutionality of the President’s 2014 immigration executive actions. The court’s ruling is awaited.
Similarly facing an obdurate and obstructive Congress on environmental issues, President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on August 3, 2015, the Clean Power Plan — a historic and important step in reducing carbon pollution from power plants that takes real action on climate change. This too was challenged in the courts and on February 9, 2016, the Supreme Court stayed implementation of the Clean Power Plan pending judicial review.
The two landmark Bills that President Obama signed into law — the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act — both happened during the first two years of his tenure, when Democrats controlled both Houses of the Congress. Since then big ideas requiring big laws to achieve big goals have been stalled by partisan gridlock. This partisan gridlock has crippled the administration’s governance capabilities by the Republican-controlled Senate refusing to act on the various nominations forwarded by the administration.
Currently, nearly 90 such nominations are pending in the Senate — some from as early as January 2015. A number of judicial seats are to be filled. This inability of Obama to make any progress on any of his programmes — gun control, immigration, minimum wage reform — is the result of some major developments in the American society.
Firstly, the US society has become ideologically polarised. Secondly, the Republican Party has developed a strong visceral aversion to and dislike of President Obama, which has been present ever since he took office.
Obama’s overall approval ratings have been in line with the average ratings of all Presidents, while his rating amongst Republicans has been consistently well below that of all Presidents. This strong negative reaction of the Republican Party is a result of both the general societal changes and their almost pathological hatred of Obama as a black President.
All this can only lead to the conclusion that on the domestic front, where the Congress has major influence, it will not be possible for Obama to effect any new legislation — whether it be trade related, immigration, climate change or any of the major issues that the US will be confronted with in the coming years.
Foreign Policy issues
US Presidents have far greater freedom of action on foreign policy issues, at least far more than on domestic issues. President Obama made his debut in this field in a big way with his Prague speech on nuclear disarmament and the subsequent Nobel Peace Prize, although in the subsequent years many of his promises made in Prague remained unfulfilled.
On other aspects, it is a mixed bag. He dealt as promised, almost, on troop reduction in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he could not deliver on his promise on closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
His major achievements on the foreign policy front were the Iran nuclear deal and the resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba. The former was universally welcomed — with the exception of Israel and the Republicans — and the latter was also universally welcomed, especially in latin America. The Cuban initiative will assist the US immensely in reforging its relations with latin American countries, especially given its frayed relations with Venezuela and Bolivia.
It was on the counter-terrorism front that Obama’s actions have made a difference. The strike against Osama bin laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, resulting in his death, is, of course, well known. His approval ratings jumped after the Abbottabad raid. However, it was his policy on the use of drone strikes that changed the nature of counter-terrorism operations. He expanded both the area of operations of drone strikes and the frequency.
While there has been criticism of his drone policy, there is no doubt that such operations are one of the most effective counter-terrorism tools.
When Obama took office, there had been only one US drone strike in Yemen — in November 2002. By 2012, there was a drone strike reported in Yemen every six days. As of April 2016, 117-137 drone attacks have been carried out in Yemen. As of April 2016, more than 522 people had been killed in drone strikes in Yemen alone.
However, contrary to popular impression, these attacks have been proved to be very effective in reducing civilian casualties. In December 2009, when the Obama administration signed off on its first covert airstrike in Yemen — a cruise missile attack — it killed more than 40 people, most of them women and children. However, civilian casualty rates have fallen dramatically since the drone operations began in earnest.
In the reported 45 drone strikes in Yemen since 2013, only five civilian casualties have been reported, and that too mostly in 2013. (All data in respect to drone strikes has been collected by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism). The per drone strike civilian casualty dropped from an average of two such casualties per attack in the period till 2010; the average for such civilian casualties during the period 2013 till now has been less than 0.1 civilian casualty per drone strike.
Although Obama had made some changes to counter-terrorism operations, he has not had much success in operations against ISIS. Similarly, he damaged his and America’s reputation when after drawing a red line against chemical weapon usage in Syria by President Bashar al-Assad, he took no action when such weapons were actually used against civilians.
Thus, while his record in foreign policy has been a mixed one, there is no question that it has contributed positively towards global response to international security challenges, especially by reining in the historical propensity of the US to military means, often unilaterally, to solve them.
The writer is a Consulting Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses where he heads the Centre for North American Studies