Obama's Wars, the Great Recession, and Healthcare
* What: The end of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, avoiding war in Iran, the Arab Spring, preventing another Great Depression, and the very imperfect but still landmark healthcare program.
* The Number of Lives Saved: There are 30,000 preventable deaths in the US a year by inadequate healthcare. Each additional year of war in Iraq or Afghanistan would likely have cost hundreds of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives. Another Great Depression would have seen unemployment and poverty double, leading to higher death rates.
* Who Also Gets the Credit:
* The Iraqi government which told Obama to leave, as it had told GW Bush for years.
* The Afghanistan government, which also told Obama to leave. Both nations had agreements negotiated under GW Bush, designed by his administration to give the appearance of independence. Much to the surprise of both US administrations, neither government wanted US troops to stay. The final sticking point was the US demand that US troops be above Iraqi and Afghan law. Neither government wanted that due to high profile cases of US troop or mercenary (contractor) murders of civilians.
* The Iraqi and Afghan public, both overwhelmingly opposed to a US military presence in their nations from the beginning. Within a week after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis held huge demonstrations calling on the US to leave.
* The American public and antiwar activists who pressured Obama to leave, and were greatly responsible for electing him. Obama's winning the Democratic primary in 2008 was largely due to antiwar activists favoring him over Hillary Clinton.
* US healthcare activists, particularly unions, doctors, nurses, and patients' rights groups had pushed hard for a public healthcare law for decades.
* Michael Moore probably did more than any other single person to bring the public healthcare issue center stage with his documentary Sicko, in spite of an extraordinary effort by the health insurance industry and corporate media to sabotage the film and demonize him personally. Most notably, CNN's Sanjay Gupta falsely claimed Moore lied in his film. CNN later issued a partial apology. Gupta's nomination for Surgeon General of the US failed because of opposition from Moore's supporters.*
* Moore also played probably the single greatest role of any one person in mobilizing antiwar sentiment with the enormously successful Fahrenheit 9-11, the most popular documentary in all of film history, again in the face of an enormous campaign attacking him, even efforts to ban the film. There were no less than four anti-Moore “documentaries” put out in the month after Fahrenheit was released. All four failed, both at the box office and in trying to blunt Fahrenheit and Moore's influence.
* By this point, Obama's faults are familiar to most. (His actual faults, not imaginary ones like birthed claims. See Section Eleven.) This entry is written with the caution that at this writing, there are still over two years left in his term. Future editions will update this entry.
* Much like Carter, it is difficult to imagine Obama could win the presidency in any other election except after another president's disastrous failures. In 2008, the US had been in two disastrous wars for over five years, with most of the public strongly opposed to them. GW Bush was actually less popular than Nixon was before resigning because of the Watergate Scandal. Bush's administration was one of the most corrupt and incompetent in history, equal to Harding's and Reagan's. Bush bungled not just both wars but the response to Hurricane Katrina. (See Section Four.) On top of that, the economy had just collapsed in 2007 due to inequality, plus theft and corruption on the part of the banking and housing industries. When Obama was elected, satire website The Onion posted the headline, “Black man given nation's worst job.”
* In the face of all these challenges, and judging him not on politics and ideological tests, Obama can point to humanitarian victories, limited but still impressive. Yet understandably most who voted for him are disappointed because he did not do anything close to what he could have, or what he was elected for. Those in the left progressive community hoped for a Franklin Roosevelt, and quickly expressed their disappointment he was closer to Clinton, a moderate compromiser who looked good only compared to the president before.
* Actually Obama is closer to both Carter and Grant, with somewhat successful humane victories and opposition that demonizes him. Those on the right saw him sometimes literally as the devil incarnate. There are large segments of conservatives who claim, in all seriousness, that he is the Antichrist, a lizard man in human form, a secret Muslim, a Communist, a fascist as evil as Hitler, a would be dictator, or somehow a bizarre combination of all these already ludicrous claims all at once. Most on the right said, in Rush Limbaugh's words, “I hope he fails.” They were so fanatically opposed to him many were willing to sabotage the government, the economy, the country itself in the failed hope it would bring Obama down.
* At the core of perhaps half those who oppose him is their deep racism. The right often portrayed him as a monkey, a witch doctor, a pimp, a gangster, dressed in a turban or Muslim robes. The most common image during the healthcare debate was Obama in white face, portrayed as the Joker. This is a rather surreal claim that by trying to pass public healthcare, Obama is a psychotic who will murder us all. Sarah Palin race baited Obama as “shucking and jiving” while Glenn Beck accused a half white Obama raised by a white mother of “deeply hating whites.”
* It is difficult to find examples of presidents as fanatically opposed as Obama. In some ways his opponents are much like John Quincy Adams's, where Jackson's supporters spent an entire four years sabotaging Adams just to put Jackson into power next election. Some Obama opponents resemble the most fanatic FDR haters. Where the American Liberty League plotted to overthrow Roosevelt, many conservatives outright threatened that Obama be overthrown if he does not give in to their demands. The Tea Party movement featured rallies with heavily armed members demanding Obama leave office or be overthrown, and engineered several government shutdowns. The number of militias tripled once Obama became president. Gun sales spiked and threats to assassinate him are so numerous the Secret Service cannot handle them all.
* Roosevelt had comfortable majorities in Congress most of his time in office and huge popularity. Obama's party had control of Congress only a few months, while his support was almost never higher than slightly over half. His opponents set new records, the most filibusters in US history, government shutdowns, and refusals to allow officials to be appointed.
* Yet much of Obama's problems were self inflicted. An overly cautious man, he also tended to give way to opponents and instead concentrated on getting his allies to compromise too. The most dramatic example happened early. To deal with the recession, Obama called for a large financial stimulus. This was the old Roosevelt solution that worked well in the Great Recession, stimulate demand using the government.
* Republicans, not wanting Obama to succeed anyway, concentrated on tax cuts and sabotaging unions, both guaranteed to worsen the economy. The stimulus was limited, almost as much tax cuts for the well off as spending to help the economy. Republicans deliberately limited federal money to keep teaching jobs since teachers vote Democratic. Republicans also sent the Post Office into bankruptcy, forcing the funding of their pensions for 80 years, to try to break postal unions.
* In spite of sabotage, the stimulus did work. It prevented the Great Recession from becoming a Second Great Depression. Even conservative media like US News and World Report admit its success, as did 80% of economists in one survey. Six economists' studies found it worked very well. Without it, unemployment would have gone to perhaps 12% instead of its high at slightly under 9%. The stimulus also boosted the economy by half a trillion dollars and saved or created up to 3.7 million jobs.
* One way where Obama failed was in challenging wealthy elites. Where Roosevelt encouraged unions as a way to reduce inequality but kept them under government control, Obama never challenged anti unionism. He could easily have pushed for card check, a measure to make it easier for unions to organize. He could have supported unions in their struggles to stop union busting, but did not.
* The supposedly socialist Obama instead courted Wall Street, and refused to prosecute virtually anyone in the banking industry. Where FDR sent hundreds of bankers to jail, Obama sent no one. Not only did Obama bail out the banks, as Bush did before him, Obama gave over $7 trillion in loans to banks, over half the value of the entire US economy. Like Roosevelt, Obama practices corporate liberalism, not anything resembling socialism.
* The second big compromise Obama did was on wars and terrorism. Immediately he refused to prosecute the many war criminals in the Bush administration. About half of the public wanted trials for war crimes, and the evidence is absolutely clear. Bush and several others openly admitted their crimes. But where Ford had pardoned Nixon for Watergate, Obama tried to avoid the subject entirely. Putting US war criminals on trial would have sent a strong message to anyone daring such atrocities in the future. It would have exposed their crimes more fully and made it impossible to deny these crimes happened. Yet for convenience, in the name of illusory public unity that never happened for either president, both men sent the message that leading criminals in the government are above the law.
* Obama did try to shut down Guantanamo Prison, a worldwide scandal of abuse and torture that harmed America far more than terrorists. Virtually all prisoners in Guantanamo were innocent, over 90%. Yet with shameless fear mongering and bigotry, Republicans portrayed them all as terrorists who were too dangerous to be let go or tried in civilian courts.
* For Obama, Iraq was always the wrong war, while Afghanistan was the good and necessary war. He did cautiously and slowly end the Iraq War, in spite of yet more fear mongering and delays by opposition. In the end what pushed Obama out of Iraq was the Iraqi government. In Afghanistan he actually increased the number of troops at first. In the end Obama was driven out, again, by an Afghan government and public that had not wanted the US there for years.
* Does he deserve credit for being, technically, forced out? Yes. By the account of his own Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, he was never committed to these wars and always looking to leave quickly. GW Bush, for example, would have found a way to stay at war, and every major Republican leader called for these wars to continue, as did some Democrats like Lieberman.
* Two other wars are relevant to Obama's record. In 2011, the Arab Spring uprisings forced out long time dictatorships in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, with failed efforts in almost every other Arab nation. Obama, along with most other western leaders, realized these were widely popular and largely nonviolent uprisings too big to dismiss, cheered these revolutions, and recognized them. To the surprise and often horror of many US conservatives, these nonviolent revolutions were far more successful at bringing democracy than a decade of war and hundreds of thousands of US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. Many US conservatives reacted with hysteria, claiming these revolutions must be “radical Muslim.” To many bigots or the ignorant, Islam must be radical, anti US, and anti-Israel. Yet except for some Egyptian and Palestinian protesters, there was little sign of any concern with Israel at all for most in the Arab Spring.
* In Libya, the uprising turned into an armed civil war. Led first by France and then Russia, eventually over a dozen western states, mostly part of NATO, invaded to help Libyan rebels. Obama ordered US planes to join French and Russian ones enforcing a no fly zone and naval blockade. For both his roles, Obama deserves praise. Conservatives split in their criticism, some wanting a larger invasion, others none at all. Both conservative views were proved wrong.
* On another war, Syria, Obama's actions were mixed. Assad has been a brutal dictator ruling the nation for over a decade. Rebels trying to overthrow him are not much better, actual allies of Al Qaeda. Obama went to the public with reports that Assad had used poison gas against the rebels, and called for bombing Assad. Reporter Seymour Hersh presented evidence that Obama knowingly used poor intelligence, that poison gas could have come from the rebels.
* If true (and Hersch’s report was rejected by two media outlets), that is as contemptible as GW Bush’s lies on Iraq. But there were still two pieces of good news on Syria. One is that Assad agreed to remove his chemical weapons. The other is the US public reaction. More than eight tenths of the public, both left and right, opposed going to war in Syria. Obama listened to the public and backed down from his call for bombing. GW Bush would not have, and gone to war anyway, continuing to lie about his reasons like he did in Iraq. Obama may have set a new precedent for presidents backing down from starting a war when the public demands so.
* One dramatic success Obama can point to is Iran. In spite of decades of neo conservative calls for war with Iran going all the way back to the 1990s, Obama not only refused to go to war, he negotiated a treaty to stop Iran from developing an atomic bomb. The UN and US government had before agreed to a near blockade of Iran, and the treaty traded a partial end to the blockade in exchange for inspections.
* Both this treaty and the blockade actually unfairly targeted Iran. There was no evidence at all Iran ever tried to develop an A-bomb, and no effort at all to rein in Israel which has over 100 H-bombs since the 1970s, its weapons developed from an alliance with South Africa under apartheid and plutonium stolen from the US. Still, the treaty between the US and Iran is as big a landmark as when Nixon recognized China. It virtually guarantees better relations and makes a war very unlikely. As of this writing, the treaty is still being debated, with a strong pro war and pro Israel faction in Congress hoping the treaty will fail, looking for an excuse to target Iran with US or Israeli bombing. Should the treaty succeed over the long term, the number of deaths prevented are easily in the thousands, likely tens of thousands.
* Healthcare, or Obama care, is likely what he will be remembered for as much as Roosevelt is remembered for Social Security. Much like FDR, Obama was pushed from his left, and like FDR, Obama took a far more corporate approach. Obama care began as Romney care The program is Republican in origin, first passed in Massachusetts by Governor Mitt Romney, Obama's opponent in the 2012 elections. Even more Republican, the proposal was first written by the Heritage Foundation, a Republican think tank.
* Obama care/Romney care/Heritage care is a good example of corporate liberalism, designed to benefit corporations as much or more than the public and head off any truly radical solutions. It is not even remotely socialist or government run. It is in fact corporate welfare, giving enormous amounts of government money to insurance corporations for customers they would not have had before.
* A true socialist solution would obviously be government run healthcare, and it would be far more efficient and life saving than any corporate or conservative solution could ever be. This has been done successfully in one nation after another, across most of Europe, Israel, Japan, Canada, and Australia. Even Cuba, a very poor country under a blockade for over 50 years, has better healthcare than the US. Socialism does a very poor job of running industries like airlines and mines, but it almost always does a better job on healthcare. The obvious evidence of that is clear: In every single nation mentioned before, people live much longer and healthier lives and their children are less likely to die young precisely because they have government run healthcare.
* In the US, such a solution was called Medicare for all. Medicare for retirees is an enormously successful and efficient program, and it is somewhat socialistic. What many forget is the huge conservative outcry against Medicare and Medicaid when they were proposed. Reagan gave speeches warning that, if Medicare passed, “one day we will be telling our grandchildren what freedom used to be like.”
* The military healthcare system is also socialist, and though its bureaucracy can be frustrating, servicemen get extremely good healthcare. A dramatic example is that one out of three soldiers wounded in combat in Vietnam died. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, fewer than one in six wounded soldiers died. A true conservative system would have servicemen pay for their own insurance and combat medics, doctors, and hospitals. Yet there is no conservative outcry against the military's socialist healthcare, simply because it is part of the military.
* Obama made the huge strategic error of agreeing not to push for Medicare for all. Some progressives then hoped for a compromise called the public option. Members of the public, or state governments, could choose to get government run healthcare while others could choose to stay on their private insurance. Conservatives and corporations immediately rejected the public option for the obvious reason: Government healthcare is more efficient, better and cheaper. There is no way corporations could compete since what they do in inherently inferior, costs more and saves fewer lives since its main motive is profit, not health. Obama accepted their objections. The public option was also never proposed.
* What was left then was only the corporate welfare option, the Republican plan from the Heritage Foundation. The insurance industry supported this since they would benefit. Doctors and nurses, as professions trained to aid the sick, also favored it though most preferred Medicare for all. The only real opposition was ideological political posturing. The nation saw the surreal spectacle of Republicans and conservatives opposing a conservative Republican healthcare solution, simply because Obama agreed to it.
* This is beyond ideological blindness to schizophrenia on an enormous scale. Such schizoid reasoning bizarrely has conservatives demonizing a conservative solution because they demonized a timid moderate compromiser as a socialist-fascist-Communist-Muslim-Antichrist. Once healthcare passed, Republicans in Congress then tried to repeal Republican healthcare over 40 times. Republican leaders even led campaigns urging people not to sign up, hoping to sabotage Republican healthcare. Hackers even tried to attack healthcare websites.
* From any humanitarian's point of view, this is incredible moral callousness, literally wishing thousands of poor people die just to make your ideological point. And indeed, during the Republican primary debates in 2012, a conservative audience did precisely that, actually cheered letting people die rather give them “government” (actually corporate and Republican) healthcare. There has probably been no more surreal and morally degenerate episode in recent US elections.
* But by passing this healthcare, as inadequate and corporate as it is, Obama likely will be well remembered. Recall that Social Security and Medicare were equally demonized and not very well run in the beginning. (See the earlier entry on FDR in this section.) So far the biggest problem with Obama care has been a poorly run website, and that is a failure by a private company, not any defect of government healthcare. Thought it was once Heritage care and then Romney care, the name Obama care will likely stick, and will be remembered as the start of something quite great. For by its passing, tens of thousands of people will live every year.
* A final accomplishment which has received almost no attention: the ending of one of the worst, most destructive, and most racist parts of the Drug War. Under Reagan, the laws were changed to sentence crack cocaine users to 100 times prison time that powdered cocaine. Racist media coverage led to racist targeting of minorities for arrests and prosecution. The law locked up primarily Blacks for longer sentences, though most cocaine users and dealers, both crack and powdered, are white. (See Section Six.) Obama tried to end the law entirely. Some Republican congressmen tried to block the change. A compromise settled on eighteen times as long a sentence for crack compared to powdered cocaine. Still since many of these prison times began in the 1980s, quite a few drug users who had served more time than most murderers were finally set free.
* Taken together, all of Obama's accomplishments, limited, very compromised, and getting done only because he was pushed from his left or by Afghans and Iraqis, all still add up to potentially being remembered as a good president. The one thing preventing him from being judged as an unqualified humanitarian president is his drone assassination program. That puts him in the same category as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, presidents who carried out both great good and horrific evil.