PRESIDENT BARACK Obama is scheduled to deliver a "valedictory" address in Chicago this January.
No doubt he will tout his administration's accomplishments. He may even include his signature bromides about there being "no red states, no blue states, but the United States of America."
Obama's speech will be the first official attempt at shaping the perception of his presidency and its place in history. Many more gauzy portrayals will follow, and they will appear more and more attractive as the reactionary and endlessly corrupt Trump administration takes over in Washington.
Obama's 2008 election certainly marked a historic moment--the election of an African American president in a country that was founded and sustained for a lot of its history on slavery. A sense of hope and optimism pervaded the multiracial crowd of hundreds of thousands who rallied in celebration of Obama's win in 2008 in Chicago's Grant Park.
But a recognition of the importance of that history in time shouldn't blind us to a clear-eyed view of what the Obama administration did--and didn't--accomplish.
Obama assumed power at a time when the U.S. economy was in free fall in the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
On the eve of President Barack Obama's inauguration in January 2009, Obama's popularity reached 80 percent, and large numbers of Americans had sky-high expectations for the incoming administration. A USA Today poll showed that seven of 10 people believed the country would be better off after Obama's first term.
After two straight national elections in which the Republicans took a beating, the largest Democratic majority since the 1970s looked like it would shift mainstream American politics away from three decades of conservative domination. The American right looked small, irrelevant to the concerns of most Americans, and likely to spend years in the political "wilderness."
Yet two years later, the previously discredited and out-of-touch Republican Party scored a historic landslide in the 2010 midterm election. In the largest congressional midterm shift since 1938, the Republicans captured 63 seats in the House of Representatives, ending a four-year Democratic majority.
LIBERAL commentary will portray Obama as a good and decent president who tried to accomplish big goals against unscrupulous opponents who used every dirty trick they could--including promoting the racist myth that Obama wasn't born in the U.S.--to undercut him at every turn.
Obama himself often compared implementing change in Washington to "turning an ocean liner." It's as if Obama, the most powerful man in the world for eight years, was a helpless bystander to historical events.
That's why any evaluation of the Obama years should focus on the first two years of his term, when the Democrats had huge majorities in both houses of Congress and a mandate to enact big changes in an atmosphere of national crisis.
The Great Recession, set off by the bursting of a Wall Street-engineered credit bubble, dominated every aspect of politics and popular consciousness through most of Obama's first term. The administration would rise or fall on how it dealt with the economic crisis.
But Obama was--and still is--dedicated to the pro-business neoliberal agenda that has dominated Democratic Party circles since the Clinton administration of the 1990s.
MUCH MORE ........
https://socialistworker.org/2017/01/06/the-obama-years-of-squandered-hopes
No doubt he will tout his administration's accomplishments. He may even include his signature bromides about there being "no red states, no blue states, but the United States of America."
Obama's speech will be the first official attempt at shaping the perception of his presidency and its place in history. Many more gauzy portrayals will follow, and they will appear more and more attractive as the reactionary and endlessly corrupt Trump administration takes over in Washington.
Obama's 2008 election certainly marked a historic moment--the election of an African American president in a country that was founded and sustained for a lot of its history on slavery. A sense of hope and optimism pervaded the multiracial crowd of hundreds of thousands who rallied in celebration of Obama's win in 2008 in Chicago's Grant Park.
But a recognition of the importance of that history in time shouldn't blind us to a clear-eyed view of what the Obama administration did--and didn't--accomplish.
Obama assumed power at a time when the U.S. economy was in free fall in the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
On the eve of President Barack Obama's inauguration in January 2009, Obama's popularity reached 80 percent, and large numbers of Americans had sky-high expectations for the incoming administration. A USA Today poll showed that seven of 10 people believed the country would be better off after Obama's first term.
After two straight national elections in which the Republicans took a beating, the largest Democratic majority since the 1970s looked like it would shift mainstream American politics away from three decades of conservative domination. The American right looked small, irrelevant to the concerns of most Americans, and likely to spend years in the political "wilderness."
Yet two years later, the previously discredited and out-of-touch Republican Party scored a historic landslide in the 2010 midterm election. In the largest congressional midterm shift since 1938, the Republicans captured 63 seats in the House of Representatives, ending a four-year Democratic majority.
LIBERAL commentary will portray Obama as a good and decent president who tried to accomplish big goals against unscrupulous opponents who used every dirty trick they could--including promoting the racist myth that Obama wasn't born in the U.S.--to undercut him at every turn.
Obama himself often compared implementing change in Washington to "turning an ocean liner." It's as if Obama, the most powerful man in the world for eight years, was a helpless bystander to historical events.
That's why any evaluation of the Obama years should focus on the first two years of his term, when the Democrats had huge majorities in both houses of Congress and a mandate to enact big changes in an atmosphere of national crisis.
The Great Recession, set off by the bursting of a Wall Street-engineered credit bubble, dominated every aspect of politics and popular consciousness through most of Obama's first term. The administration would rise or fall on how it dealt with the economic crisis.
But Obama was--and still is--dedicated to the pro-business neoliberal agenda that has dominated Democratic Party circles since the Clinton administration of the 1990s.
MUCH MORE ........
https://socialistworker.org/2017/01/06/the-obama-years-of-squandered-hopes
