Scattered Thoughts On The Obama “Legacy”
For a certain kind of “Obama legacy” contemplator, the Chelsea Manning commutation announced Tuesday was sort of a disorienting gut-punch. The emotional impact of that decision was huge and undeniable. Manning had been a focal point of much Obama-critical sentiment over the past many years, and the idea that she could ever be freed was once hard to imagine. So when the announcement came down, it provoked a visceral response in me, forcing something of a reevaluation of Obama’s tenure.
I normally dislike when politics is so heavily intertwined with tortured personal narratives, but this contemplation is necessarily going to be heavily personal. So there’s going to be a lot of first-person sentence construction “I…did X.” In part that’s because my political “consciousness” was raised around the time Obama ascended to power and notoriety. As a teen inordinately interested in politics, I became an Obama supporter at an extraordinarily early stage, around the time he was elected to the Senate from Illinois. I had an “Obama for Illinois Senate 2004” t-shirt that I proudly wore in high school. Part of what endeared me to Obama, at the time, was that he seemed to value the idea of communicating in good faith with wide swaths of people of varying backgrounds. As someone who has sort of an “ecumenical” approach myself, I saw virtue in that.
The reason the Manning commutation is so salient is because it harks back to a pledge that Obama made when he was first running for president, both implicitly and explicitly. The pledge was that “change” can only really come from below, when engaged citizens organize and impose pressure on people in power. Without just such a pressure campaign, Manning almost certainly would not have been commuted. It was due to a concerted and targeted effort carried out by a committed core of activists, journalists, and lawyers that Manning’s cause increasingly came to be seen as just, and thus Obama was impelled to act. The formulation he foresaw back when he was first running — grassroots action leads to tangible political change — was at least in a narrow sense realized by the Manning commutation.
You can see echoes of such a disposition at other points in his presidency. When Occupy Wall Street erupted, he sought to grapple with the concerns being aired, rather than just rattle off rash dismissals as others might have been inclined to do. Income equality then became a theme he spoke on frequently. Activism around criminal justice reform also reached a tipping point during his tenure, and he clearly recognized this, taking symbolic acts such as visiting a federal prison, and also highly substantive acts such as commuting the sentences of hundreds of nonviolent drug offenders. Whereas Bill Clinton pardoned crooked scum like Marc Rich, Obama has focused on people who really do deserve mercy. That highlights a stark difference in ethical comportment.
Listening to him speak in an extemporaneous fashion is still often very compelling. The “No Drama Obama” affect has at times been immensely frustrating, but it’s also allowed him to ably cut through the various hysterias that constantly envelop the country. At least on a rhetorical level. One lesson of his presidency is that the rhetoric doesn’t always match the action, to the point where it might be analytically necessary to simply ignore the rhetoric wholesale. Or at least understand that rhetoric has no direct bearing on action. So for instance, to take a recent example, Obama seems relatively skeptical of the “Russian Hacking” mania that has swept through the rest of the Democratic Party. He’s often downplayed the significance of the issue, and urged circumspection and avoidance of hyperbole. And yet, he then turns around and imposes last-minute sanctions on Russia, closes reputed “spy bases” in Maryland and Long Island, and stupidly expels a number of diplomats just before the New Year’s Eve holiday.
What’s that about? Of course in politics there’s always discordance between rhetoric and action, but for Obama it really has become especially pronounced. Listening to Obama speak at length in a relatively unrestrained setting — I’m thinking of the David Axelrod podcast from a couple weeks ago — and you can get a sense of why so many people viewed him as a refreshing change from the petty rancor of the Clinton years. He wasn’t just an indiscriminate partisan bomb-thrower who’d get worked up about something like “Russian Hacking” just because it might have a short-term adverse effect on a political rival. He was more discerning and…rational. Or so it seemed.
There is plenty bad about Obama’s record. He leaves office still at war in Iraq, which I’ve previously argued should be the central tenet of any analysis of his “legacy.”
The whole reason he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2008 was because she’d stubbornly defended her pro-Iraq War position, while he took the opposite view. If not for that fissure, there would have been little reason for him to gain the traction that he did. So for the U.S. to be still mired in Iraq as he leaves office is a massive, enduring blemish. It bears repeating: there is no tenable legal rationale for the current war in Iraq — the mission was declared complete in 2011, and at that time the 2002 War Authorization vote (supported by Hillary) ceased to be applicable. Yet, despite declaring the mission over at that time, Obama continues to cite the 2002 Authorization vote as the legal basis for him to persist waging war in Iraq, including with “boots on the ground.” Obama’s obfuscation on that score has been condemnable. Upon launching the “war on ISIS” in 2014, he insisted that it would serve a purely humanitarian purpose, and require the commitment of no U.S. ground troops. That, as anyone with a brain could have predicted, proved utterly false. As we speak, U.S. troops are engaged in ground combat in Mosul and elsewhere, and we’ve just casually come to wage war in Syria too.
If you’d heard in January 2009 that Obama would finish out his term by managing wars in Iraq, Syria, and Libya (just bombed again today as a farewell gesture, apparently) — what would’ve been your reaction? I know what mine would’ve been: shock and horror.
And yet…it’s impossible to deny a certain personal affinity for him. Just as some people feel intrinsically repulsed by certain political figures, my intrinsic reaction to Obama was one of attachment and even adulation. Why that came to be the case I can’t quite say, but it did — and at a formative stage in my development, so it’s not something I can ever really cast off, even if I wanted to.
Obama perhaps knew that there was a certain flank of his supporters who became increasingly angered and disillusioned over the course of his tenure. So now he’s doing some things to placate them, rather than placate the military brass or “apolitical” technocrats, as had been his instinct for much of the first term. I think it takes a unique figure to feel as though it was the proper course to commute Manning: huge factions of the “establishment” view that as an extremely radical, verging-on-treasonous act. To do that required something of an ethical core, which I do believe Obama possesses, even if it was subordinated for much of his presidency. The reasons it was subordinated — whether by his own personal volition or by institutional constraints — will be the subject of much debate as his “legacy” is considered. But, it pretty clearly exists.
The fact that he won at all against Hillary ought to have been seen as a harbinger for the notion that entirely new modes of politics are possible. He trailed her a few months before the 2008 Iowa Caucus by 50% in some national polls. It’s hard to recollect now, but at that time the Pundit Received Wisdom was that Hillary was going to run away with the nomination, and that Obama was mostly just a curiosity. Yes, Obama had some establishment support, and it came out later that Harry Reid himself urged him to run. Even so, his victory proved that politics was not a foreordained business.
That’s why I still view my involvement in the 2008 Obama campaign as good and justified, notwithstanding any subsequent failures in his tenure. The campaign itself was a self-contained success, in that it mobilized people who otherwise would have seen no reason to get involved, and it produced tangible results such that those who were involved (like myself) understood acutely and directly that they could make tangible change. Put another way, whether Obama failed over the course of his presidency, which he most certainly did, has no necessary bearing on the utility of that campaign, which showed that the inconceivable could become conceivable. Eight years later the Sanders campaign proved something similar, under even more far-fetched circumstances. Who’s to say what could come in the years ahead?
I was what you might call a “Super Volunteer” between 2007–2008 for the Obama campaign, partly out of animus for Hillary and what the “Clinton Brand” of politics represented, and partly out of personal affinity for Obama. Underlying this, of course, was a resentment for Bush and especially the Iraq War. I successfully lobbied my College Democrats group to endorse Obama over Hillary; I registered literally hundreds of voters for the New Jersey Democratic primary that year. I traveled to New Hampshire and canvassed some far-out rural areas covered in several feet of snow, and seemed to persuade a bunch of folks to vote for Obama: it was my real experience of retail politics, and it had value in that it forced me to tailor arguments to a multitude of different audiences. I really recommend that anyone do some canvassing at some point, it can be a very enlightening experience. As can phonebanking, by the way. I “phonebanked” for the general election and ended up having hour-long conversations with elderly ladies in Nevada, who just wanted to talk about how they were perceiving the campaign.
While canvassing in North Philadelphia in Fall 2008, I encountered shocking racism from many of the older folks who explicitly told me — a stranger who just appeared on their doorstep — that they’d not vote for Obama specifically because he was black. One man named Melvin said he doesn’t vote for two types of people: Republicans and blacks. (North Philadelphia was an overwhelmingly white working class, Democratic area.) Another lady told me she hated blacks, but would vote for Obama anyway because at least he had a “white half.” That stuff is real and it would’ve been hard to believe had I not experienced it up-close.
There’s a lot I’m leaving out: I even worked for the NJ State Democratic Party at one point because it had been converted into a de facto Obama Headquarters. The point is, I was intensely invested in the process. That investment remains, but it has taken other forms. Part of what’s so pernicious about the “objectivity” ethos which pervaded journalism for the longest time, but which is now thankfully on the outs, is that becoming “invested” on this level would’ve been seen as antithetical to carrying out journalism. However, my granular involvement with a national campaign much better equipped me to analyze politics going forward, because I had some semblance of first-hand knowledge. On Election Night 2008, I was elated. I spent the entire preceding weekend canvassing, and shook Joe Biden’s hand the night before in Philadelphia. “We’re gonna win it,” he told me.
Probably I’ll never have that kind of “attachment” to a politician or campaign ever again, because my role is different now as a journalist and critic. That said, it was still hugely worthwhile, even apart from all the subsequent frustrations and outrages: the shoddy healthcare law, the drone strikes, various illegal wars and war continuations. “We tortured some folks” — come on. All that said, I remain glad to have been involved in the campaign and I have no remorse at all.
Obama has a fundamentally conservative temperament, which his detractors on the wild-eyed conspiratorial Right always missed. He would probably be a member of the Conservative Party in Britain. That kind of personality style produces some good qualities and some bad ones. Kind of a banal point, but it’s true — I made it during the 2012 campaign as a way to argue that conservatives ought to have supported him over Romney:
Though I wasn’t anywhere close as “involved” in the re-election campaign, I’m still glad that he defeated Romney, that insufferable phony.
I realize this “commemoration” might come across as overly laudatory, and there’s a version of it I could’ve written that is wholly negative. But the Manning commutation compels me to focus on the good, at least for now. There will be plenty of time for denunciations and “disavowals” in the future.
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