How much will Obama’s being black matter in the end? In, say, 20 years, will it be a major or minor aspect of his presidency and, to the extent that it will matter, in what specific way will it matter most?
No one should discount the magnitude of the ways in which race has mattered in the Obama presidency. The breakthrough of a black man into the highest and symbolically most prominent public office in the country, 40 years after voting rights were finally secured for most African-Americans, is a historic event by every measure. But at the same time, no future historian should discount the endurance of deep, persistent racism in large parts of the electorate, resurfacing now in the last years of his presidency. You see it in the extreme anger at Obamacare and the visceral reaction to Obama’s proposed easing of immigration rules—both coded not simply as unwise policy but as un-American, alien assaults on American society, the sort of thing that might be tolerated from a Lyndon Johnson or a Franklin Roosevelt but not (the subtext reads) from a black American, a second-generation immigrant from Africa.
What will be seen as Obama’s single most significant accomplishment?
My answer may not be widely shared, but given the extraordinary crash of the finance structure in 2009, and the deeply disappointing results of economic policymaking and performance outside the U.S. since then, the administration’s rescue of a badly distorted economy from outright collapse will in time, I’m convinced, be seen as Obama’s most important accomplishment. It is an illusion to imagine that public policy is ever the primary factor in economic performance. But public policies can make downturns worse, and successful rescue operations of the dimensions of 2009, even if they prop up the status quo rather than reform it, are historically very rare.
Will future historians blame Obama for not getting more done in a climate of Republican obstructionism, or will he be given a pass for it? More generally, to what degree will his presidency be seen as “transformative” (the word he used to describe the Reagan administration)?
Obama, in a sense, yearned for the part of a younger, more charismatic Eisenhower. The tragedy was that he has presided over a nation in which—thanks in part to a new political culture of quickly ignited resentments, in part to the loopholes in political-contribution rules the Supreme Court has opened up, and in part to the polarizing consequences of his own person in a nation that has not yet left the Civil War fully behind—there is no consensus to be found.
Though it sometimes seemed otherwise in the election of 2008, he never possessed a “transformative” agenda. What would have buoyed his aspirations was not a program but a dream that in his person—a fresh voice, an outsider to politics as usual—the people might come together and shape politics to their will and common aspirations. That was what the “we” in the brilliant “Yes, We Can” slogan in the 2008 campaign was essentially about. He has not called the nation to new feats of “courage” (Kennedy), to make “war” on poverty (Johnson), even to “dream” more freely than ever before (Reagan). What Obama’s words have called for is for Americans to be the people they already are.
Which of Obama’s speeches and phrases will be the most enduring? How do you assess Obama’s rhetoric?
The notion of a common public will, waiting for realization, is still the dominant theme in Obama’s oratory. “We know,” “we believe,” “we understand,” the economic principles we need to put in place—already and without persuasion—a central passage of his second inaugural ran. His powerfully effective speech on race did not highlight the burdens of being black in America, though he did not sweep them under the rug or dismiss the anger they could generate. It highlighted the common aspirations Americans had had from the beginning, however thwarted by unfortunate circumstances, and the synchrony now between what he believed and “what the vast majority of Americans want for their country.” His speech on immigration this past November challenged the nation not to change itself but to understand who it already was: a people with a “shared commitment to an ideal,” where “we were all strangers once, too.” The bitter fights that led up to immigration restriction in 1924, the fiercely fought arguments over intervention in the First World War and in the Vietnam conflict, even the Civil War, were washed away in this rhetorical manufacture of a consensual nation.