Obama Presidency: Hope and Politics

On February 10th, Junior Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States. On that day he brought hope to millions of Americans by vowing to give a voice to the people and to bring about sweeping change—change that would reshape the economy, end the war in Iraq, combat terrorism, and fight climate change. This was complemented by a promise to push for this to be the generation that helps to end poverty in America, through providing a living wage and affordable childcare for all Americans. Obama wanted to be the person responsible for changing the healthcare system by providing universal healthcare in America, and he strived to do it by the end of his first term. Inspired by Obama’s message and the change he symbolized; Barack Obama was able to win the presidency by bringing hope to millions of Americans. During his candidacy, people all over the world began to idolize Obama and find security in the future he promised. However, eight years later Obama left office being yet another politician who failed to deliver the impossible promises he made during the election. Throughout his time in office, President Obama presented hope for change but lacked the resources to effectively execute his promised changes.

Through the 2008 election season, then-candidate Barack Obama reached millions of Americans and started a movement that he promised to finish if the people elected him. On November 8th, 2008, the American public rallied for Senator Obama and elected him as the 44th President of the United States. During his eight years in office, President Obama was able to complete many of his smaller campaign promises, bringing in an era of hope for millions of Americans who, at that point in time, felt hopeless in the current state of the economy and wartime. A reason for the widespread sense of hopelessness was that the American people felt excluded from the decision-making of the country. During his 2008 announcement speech, Obama advocated for such change by saying, “They get the access while you get to write a letter, they think they own the government, but we are here to take it back.” (Obama, 2007). To solve this, President Obama provided information to voters about the ethics of our government by creating ethics.gov, now known as https://www.oge.gov/.  As promised in his campaign, President Obama provided voters with direct information about what was happening in their government through these resources. Through this accomplishment, President Obama provided the American people to have a voice and demand their representatives to take responsibility for their actions. Some of Obamas’ actions, like this one, helped to redevelop stronger support in the actions of the American government and can be labeled as successful as promise of his presidency.

Another example of a promise that he was able to fulfill was ending the war in Iraq. On December 15th, 2011, almost ten years after the fighting began, the United States declared an end to the war.. President Obama’s actions helped provide a sense of peace to the families affected by the events of September 11th, 2001. During Barack Obama’s tenure as president, he relentlessly promoted the campaign to combat terrorism. Obama led a persistent campaign of drone strikes and commando raids with the goal of breaking down the Al Qaeda organization and re-instilling hope in American supremacy after the attacks on 9/11. Another shining star in this goal for President Obama came on May 2nd, 2011, when he led a U.S. SEALS team into Abbottabad and killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. In Obama’s memoir A Promise Land, he recounts that, on that day, “People took some satisfaction in seeing their government deliver a victory. Meanwhile thousands of families who’d lost loved ones on 9/11 understood what we’d done in more personal terms.” (Obama, 698). Obama continues to describe a story of a younger girl who lost her dad in the Twin Towers on 9/11 and how “Although nothing could change the fact of his absence, she wanted me and all those who’d been involved in the raid to know how much it meant to her and her family that America hadn’t forgotten him.” (Obama, 698). Within the few items that President Obama was able to fully accomplish during his time in office, he gave hope to the people that the American dream of freedom and democracy was not lost, and it was still the American people that mattered.  

During his campaign, candidate Obama secured 52% of the popular vote, totaling 69,498,516 Americans. When it came to racial lines, candidate Obama received 43% of the white vote, 95% of the black vote, and 66% of the Hispanic vote. After the election, many were hopeful for the united future Obama called for.  As put by Bacevich in The Age of Illusion, “For a sliver of an instant, it seemed as if Obama might actually succeed in doing so, healing the racial divide that has haunted America for centuries.” (Bacevich, 119). In the beginning, it seemed that Obama was doing just that, healing the racial divide. He was doing the impossible and going where no African American had before, taking the next step in creating a post-racial society. At the time, President Obama had created the most diverse administration in history, as he put women and minorities in top positions. Obama’s cabinet was 36% women, 45% nonwhite, 32% white males, along with 86% of members having prior government experience. For comparison, President Trump’s cabinet was 18% women, 18% non-white, 73% white male, along with 68% of members having prior government experience. To American citizens everywhere, this seemed like an enormous step in the right direction, but racism is deeply rooted in American society. For every person that experienced the change, there was another who felt attacked and whose life was being uprooted by an outsider.

In my opinion, President Obama was playing a balancing act when it came to race relations. On one side he wants to be seen as an American President but on the other hand is seen as an African American president. This was most evident in the recount of the arrest of African American Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr at his home in Cambridge that Obama described in his memoir, A Promise Land. As the situation went, Professor Gates returned home to find his door jammed shut. A neighbor, after watching Gates try to open the door, reported a break-in. The responding officer, Sergeant James Crowly, arrived and asked Gates for his identification. To this, Gates refused and called him a racist. Eventually, Gates produced ID but allegedly continued to berate the officer from his porch. This resulted in Sergeant Crowly and two other officers handcuffing Gates and taking him to the police station. When asked about this incident, President Obama said, “I don’t know, having not been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African American and Latinos being stooped by law enforcement disproportionately.” (Obama, 396).

This particular comment led to an uproar from conservative news outlets everywhere, calling his opinion race biased. This incident led to Obama’s role as a representative of the people being overshadowed by the media's portrayal of him as an African American president. The incident with Professor Gates was not the only example of the increasingly aggressive race relations that arose during Obama’s presidency. Time and time again people expected Obama to be their champion and create change as he once promised, but in trying to find a balance between the two, Obama failed. He ended his presidency with neither side being appeased with the progress he had made. President Obama was once a pillar of hope to repair race relations within the United States, but by the end of his time in office, he had the opposite effect. Americans from all over the country rose to openly defend their racist views on American leadership, leading to the election of Donald Trump.  

The economy that President Obama inherited from President Bush was crumbling. Thousands of American jobs were being lost, and in turn, unemployment skyrocketed to 10% nationally, a height that hadn’t been reached since the great depression. The price of real estate was plunging and leaving millions of Americans without homes or with mortgages that exceeded the value of their homes.  Auto companies and investment banking firms were filing for bankruptcy, putting at risk millions of American jobs, and there was nothing that could easily be done to fix it. During his campaign, candidate Barack Obama vowed to end the recession, fix the then-broken Wall Street, and create jobs.

Both the president-elect and the president saw the dire need for economic relief. This change started with the then-President George Bush through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).  TARP brought about large-scale bank bailouts to the auto companies and investment banking firms that were filing for bankruptcy. Once Obama was inaugurated, it became clear that the second round of TARP was needed to further stimulate a very broken economy. Without the passage of the second round of TARP, Obama feared that the situation would escalate to an American Depression. President Obama used an extensive amount of political capital to pass the second round of TARP in congress in record time. Although the second round of TARP was necessary to stimulate the economy past the recession, politically, TARP was a way for the Republican party to push the blame onto the Democrats. As the second round of TARP was passed under President Obama, a democratic president, the Republican party was able to pin a rising national debt on the party to cover up the economic failings of Republican President George Bush. Obama presented himself as a champion for the underdog and in passing TARP legislation he provided direct recovery for the richest Americans, going against his campaign promise to equally spread the wealth. After the loss of Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts, “Voters in focus groups couldn’t distinguish between TARP, which I’d inherited, and the stimulus; they just knew that the well-connected were getting theirs while they were getting screwed” (Obama, 523). People believed that President Obama’s efforts were one-sided and that the TARP legislation went against his campaign promise.  Although Obama was not the main target of the Republican party’s backlash, his direct connection to TARP and its implications on the nation’s debt meant his reputation was diminished as well.

During his announcement for candidacy for president, Obama promised the country Universal Healthcare. Throughout the campaign, Obama emphasized a clear plan for healthcare reforms. The plan had goals to cover every uninsured American, create uniform national rules for the individual insurance market, expand the employer roles in providing health benefits, expand Medicaid/SCHIP, decrease families’ exposure to health care costs, create a child healthcare coverage requirement, and cover 34 million uninsured Americans within 10 years of being implemented. After winning the presidency, then-President Obama attempted to create the healthcare system reforms that he had laid out in his campaign, efforts that were strongly opposed by Republicans in Congress. In July of 2009 under the Obama administration, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and a group of other Democrats released their healthcare system bill, called H.R. 3962 the Affordable Health Care for America Act. H.R. 3962 was different from the healthcare plan Obama had outlined a month earlier in a press conference and bore no resemblance to the plan presented by Obama on the campaign. In an article published by The Guardian in June of 2009 covering that previous conference, Obama was quoted proposing, “The establishment of a health insurance exchange, which would set up a government-backed insurance scheme in competition with private health insurance companies.” (MacAskill, 2009). The article continued to say that his healthcare plan would allow for a “one-stop-shop for a healthcare plan, compare benefits and prices and choose the plan that’s best for them. None of these plans would be able to deny converse on the basis of a pre-existing condition, and all should include an affordable, basic benefits package...And if you can’t afford one of the plans, we should provide assistance to make sure you can.” (Obama, 2009).

In the end, President Obama passed legislation that removed lifetime dollar limits on insurance coverage for 105 million Americans and provided coverage to 129 million Americans with pre-existing conditions who could no longer be denied coverage or up charged. Obama also passed reforms for more affordable coverage and, since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, prices have risen at the slowest rate in nearly 50 years. In addition, more than 16 million Americans have gained health coverage after 5 years and 5.7 million young adults have gained coverage, as the act allows children to remain on their parent’s plan until they reach the age of 26. Finally, the act provided more than 9.4 million seniors with Medicare benefits and saved them more than $15 billion dollars on prescription medication. Although President Obama’s reforms in healthcare are not seen as a missed opportunity, they could be looked at as an opportunity where more could have been accomplished. The political system in our country prioritized budgets and spending over American lives. This limited the reforms Obama was able to enact from what he initially promised, and, in turn, millions of Americans suffered.

Obama’s presidency was as much of a missed opportunity as it was a success. Barack Obama gave Americans a renewed sense of security through access to their representatives, ending the war in Iraq, and dismantling al-Qaeda by leading the strike that killed Osama Bin Laden. President Obama also put two women on the Supreme Court, created opportunities for the LGBTQ+ community and women everywhere, rescued the auto industry, accelerated the creation of clean energy, and created more than 11 million jobs, all of which had monumental impacts on American history. However, what caused such disdain towards President Obama from the American public was that he was unable to provide the life-altering policy changes he promised, such as Universal Healthcare and a living wage for American citizens. During President Obama’s eight years in office, the American people rallied around change that would take a lifetime to complete; the opportunity that was missed was the ability to continue to capitalize on the progress created. Obama’s successor was a representation of everything Obama was not, and a stain on everything Obama had accomplished. In Peter Baker's Obama: The Call of History, Baker claims that Trump’s approach to Obama’s policies was to eliminate any evidence of Obama’s presidency, saying, “If his predecessor did it, not only was it wrong, it must be destroyed. And that was the way his supporters wanted it. They did not send him to Washington to become a member of the club, but to tear the club down.” (Baker, 380). Overall, President Obama accomplished meaningful and impactful change during his time in office, but his presidency concluded as a missed opportunity because of elements that were outside of his control. In the end, many of Obama’s problems came from an overestimation of his ability to create change. He pulled at the strength that Abraham Lincoln once had and “called for a house divided to stand together”, grasping for unity when unity was long gone. He planned on cooperation and the ability to branch the gaping political divide as a way to pass the legislative changes he guaranteed. President Obama’s enacted policies will outlive his time on the political stage, and in the end, the American people failed to capitalize on the opportunity and optimism that President Barak Obama carried within himself.