Unfortunately, it seems that President Obama’s final State of the Union has become a litmus test on the whole legacy of the Obama Administration. Before, during, and after, Obama and his supporters rallied to the key high points of his presidency and made the fundamental (if reductive and somewhat silly) argument that we are better off than we were when he came to office. Of course we are, that’s how growth rates work. However, a State of the Union is not explicitly a past reference or defense of the Administrations actions, that’s called an election. Had that been the case, the final few SOTUs made by Bush in ’07 and ’08 would have been unmitigated nightmares. A State of the Union is a speech where the administration outlines its policy goals for the next year. Tax cuts, killing terrorists, reforms of all shapes and colors are all examples of things that could be included in a State of the Union. Rewriting the narrative of your legacy before you leave office is not.
However, because the topic has been brought up, we now have to address it. Was Obama a good president? It’s hard to evaluate a president during and then immediately after office because the full scope of the implications of their presidency won’t be felt until long after. That’s why Jimmy Carter now gets a better reception because of the circumstances he was stuck with, and Bill Clinton’s time served is looking less rosy due to continued deregulation and NAFTA. But, being smart intelligent people with little else to do other than hypothesize and argue, we can try none the less.
Many people give Obama credit for ending the 2008 Financial Crisis and the Recession, but that is reductive and not totally true. In 2008, in the final moments of the Bush years, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke largely saved the capitalist system by bailing out banks, lowering interest rates, and absorbing toxic commodities. These actions prevented the collapse of the banks and ended the cataclysm that would have been an economic meltdown. Obama did approve the end of the TARP programs and did initiate stimulus spending in 2009, but to give him full credit would be reductive at best and wrong at worst. Also, he avoided passing serious Finance reform by passing it off to the legislature. Speaking of a failed supermajority, Obama also lost out on making a serious reform in healthcare by creating the more moderate Affordable Healthcare Act instead of a more radical effective plan. However, “Saving Detroit” by bailing out the automotive industry proved to be an effective maneuver that boosted job stats and American Moral. Internationally, he wound down conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which ended war weariness back home, but miffed reactions to the Arab Spring movements, which combined lead to the rise of the Islamic State. So, safe to say the jury is still out.
But, many of these harsh realities were obviously lacking from the speech. Instead, Obama used his signature charm and charisma to frame the narrative around the key current Democratic frame story of the little hard-working guy abused and ignored by the big bad elite to explain himself and his comrades, which worked well from a rhetorical standpoint but ended up being belabored.
Obama may be a divisive political figure, but you can’t say he isn’t a likable person or a great performer. The way he jokes and reacts, never taking himself too seriously, yet never over deprecating, reveals an intimate humanity that is hard to ignore and is dispassionately lacking from nearly all of the current presidential candidates.
He did announce some new initiatives like one to beat cancer, which considering his time left in office, seems impractical and foolhardy. A good one that got little screen time was a measure to improve tech literacy and computer skills in high schools across the country. There was even a move towards some campaign finance reform (Bernie?). However, much of the time was used to bolster the administration’s past actions and current trends, such as with ISIS, guns, healthcare reform, the aforementioned Detroit bailout. Overall, it felt like he was trying to explain his entire legacy to the many average Americans watching at home as if he still had something left to prove.
Despite these defenses, the real theme of the speech, at least the concluding one, was a return to empathy in American politics, which rang painfully true. If there is one major thing everyone could agree on when regarding Obama’s presidency is the sheer difficulty he has had convincing Congress to act or even consider numerous issues from Climate Change to guns to Iran to the budget (which has been hijacked numerous times) that has amounted to little if anything. No modern president has seen such a level of insurgency since Wilson’s attempts to join the League of Nations in the hangover after World War I, which literally nearly killed him. The degree which the president has had to defend himself, his staff, or even his ideas in front of the legislature is ridiculous given the historical context of the presidency and the power the job entails and curses.
These disparaging trends towards factionalism were the same that Madison warned about in Federalist #10 and Washington in his Farewell Address. However, it seems no one, especially now, has taken these dire warnings that threaten most of our democratic institutions very seriously or else the level of political discourse in the country would be more at polite intrigue than vengeful screaming especially on social media. Hopefully, we can all take the President’s advice and learn to see things from a different point of view.
