Probably Obama himself would not
have guessed then that he would ascend to the White House just four
years later. But he certainly wouldn't have imagined that a full decade
on, nearing the halfway point in his second term, he would find himself
dragged down by precisely the same set of issues that vexed his
predecessor.
After a month that saw Iraq
unravel and job growth continue to plod along, while the stock market
soared, the central paradox of the Obama years, as historians will
undoubtedly view it, has never been clearer. It's Obama's presidency,
but he's still governing in Bush's world.
Obama's critics will no doubt
hear in this an excuse for his stymied agenda and limp approval ratings,
but that's not the point. The fact is that it's always hard to assign
credit or blame for conditions in the country to any president at any
one time; the lines demarcating one presidency from the next are like
arbitrary and porous borders, freely traversed by longer-term trends
that don't neatly conform to the timelines of our elections.
Did the fault in Vietnam lie with John F. Kennedy (who committed
troops in the first place), or with Lyndon B. Johnson (who escalated the
war), or with Richard Nixon (who failed to end it)? Did we owe the '90s
economic expansion to Bill Clinton, or did the recovery take root under
George H.W. Bush?
The political reality is that a
president has to own whatever happens on his watch, for better or worse,
and without any whining. Polls show the voters now blame Obama more
than George W. Bush for the painfully slow economic recovery, and after
enduring five and a half years of constantly shifting rhetoric and
strategy and White House staff, you really can't blame them.
But it's hard to think of any
second-term president in the past century, at least, who's been so
completely consumed by issues he inherited. With the notable exception
of the health care law, which will stand as his signature initiative,
Obama's agenda has been dominated by crises that predated his tenure and
have eluded his grasp.
The most obvious of these at the
moment is the situation in Iraq, which Obama had vowed to put behind us
once and for all, and which is now devolving into a morass of tribal
and sectarian warfare — an outcome that should have seemed inevitable to
anyone who ever visited the country or bothered to read a history book.
There's also the mess in Afghanistan and the cresting tide of Islamist
militancy in Syria and throughout the region, all of which came in a
package deal with Bush's global war on Terror.
Then you have to consider
security conundrums closer to home, like domestic spying (which Obama
had excoriated as a candidate) and the quasi-legal prison at Guantanamo
Bay (which he had vowed to shutter). Turns out that it takes an awful
lot of resolve for any president to turn off the giant sucking machine
of high-tech intelligence once the government has turned it on. And what
do you know: There's no good place to send the prisoners at Gitmo,
after all — unless you want to unload them for an American prisoner of
war, like the Marlins at the trading deadline. Obama hasn't yet solved
either problem.
The defining issue of Obama's
presidency remains an economic recovery that continues to leave behind
most Americans while enriching a relative few, for which the president
mostly blames Congress, almost six years after the Wall Street meltdown
that helped propel him to the White House. The mounting debt Democrats
derided as irresponsible in the Bush years has only intensified under
Obama, with no greater clarity on how to get it under control.
And let's not forget the toxic,
paralyzing political atmosphere Bush bequeathed his successor. Obama's
central promise as a candidate was to unstick us from all of that (hope
and change, etc.), but his presidency has been swallowed by it, instead.
Now he's resorted to exactly the same type of governing by executive
fiat for which Democrats assailed Bush.
The question great thinkers will
long debate, of course, is exactly why Obama has remained so imprisoned
by his predecessor's choices. Will history treat Obama as a victim of
dire circumstance? Or was he too little prepared for what his first
chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, once described to me as the "shit
sandwich" he inherited?
You'd have a hard time arguing
that Obama didn't underestimate or mishandle a lot of the challenges
that have shaped his presidency. His economic policies may well have
averted the worst-case scenario, which seemed very real and very scary
in 2009, but it's also clear that the administration managed to do very
little to change the long-term trajectories in housing and education,
where rising costs are changing what it means to be middle class.
It was nice to talk about
rebuilding America's tarnished image in the world, and when Obama was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for no other reason than having
succeeded Bush, it seemed imminently achievable. But whatever moral
standing Obama had to work with was probably squandered by his own
inconstancy in foreign crises and revelations that he has expanded
America's spying apparatus around the world, rather than reining it in.
But the larger miscalculation
here, and Obama's advisers were hardly alone in making it, was to see
the destabilization of the Bush years as just another political cycle,
the result of policy choices that could be readily reversed by some
other set of policy choices. The mistake was in seeing the period before
Obama as a moment that would pass, rather than as the onset of an
entirely new era of governance, beyond any one president's control.
Bush didn't create the uncorking of religious and nationalist
extremism, or the rise of borderless capital and the decline of American
industry, or the retirement of the boomers, or the steadily rising
temperatures in the Arctic. It's true he didn't seem very well-equipped
to deal with any of them, and his policy solutions — democratization by
force, bottomless tax cuts, the deregulation of industry — mostly made
things worse. But we were going to have to reckon with these challenges
no matter what, and no set of simple, short-term solutions exist.
Just as the end of World War II
ushered in both the Cold War and the industrial boom that would define
American politics for the better part of 50 years, so too did the
terrorist attacks of 2001 and the subsequent economic crisis mark the
arrival of what you might call the era of globalization — an era of
often agonizing transformation that will span several presidencies and
demand some very fundamental reforms before it's through.
Ultimately, history will likely
record both Bush and Obama as presidents grappling in different ways
with the same array of overarching change, at the dawn of a long period
of readjustment. We may yet find some national consensus about how to
confront it. In the meantime, we might as well settle in.
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