Confessions Of A Former Obama Skeptic: Obama will emerge as one of the half-dozen greatest [View all]

[malaise]

presidents of all time

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/confessions-of-a-former-obama-skeptic_us_578f74e7e4b0f529aa076e88
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Obama’s steady competence brings to mind the long-term successes of great sports teams such as the San Antonio Spurs over the past twenty years, or the Dallas Cowboys under Jimmy Johnson. These teams succeeded because they adapted to change without overreacting to short-term trends. In the corporate world, this kind of leadership is called vision. In earlier eras, America would have called it integrity.

Integrity seems to be a particularly important label in the context of the fights that Obama has picked in the twilight of his Presidency. As we noted in the Progressive Policy Institute blog, Obama in 2015 repeatedly stood up to powerful interest groups of the left, right, and center to do what was best for America. Those include:

Standing up to left-wing college students who were trying to impose campus speech codes;

Standing up to the fossil fuel industry by forging a climate deal among 196 nations;

Standing up to education bureaucrats by appointing long-time reformer and educator John King as Secretary of Education;

Standing up to xenophobes and nativists by welcoming Syrian refugees;

Standing up to warmongers including powerful interest groups in Washington DC by negotiating a diplomatic settlement regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions; and

Standing up to big labor by ignoring their protectionist and backwards-looking attacks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Furthermore, in assessing Obama, we need to be blunt: Obama faced a racist backlash and related domestic political challenges unlike those faced by any of his forebears.

In an odd sense, the mobilization of latent racism may have been inadvertent. Most of the funding for the Tea Party came from the Koch brothers, who wanted a libertarian counterweight to the Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. Unfortunately, the Tea Party soon shed its libertarians and coalesced around angry, disaffected, and older white males. Establishment Republican figures frankly encouraged these voters’ fear and hatred, seeing it it as electorally useful. Long before he formally announced his presidential campaign, Donald Trump took advantage of the Koch-backed movement to promote the “birther” conspiracy that Obama was a foreigner and (gasp) a Muslim from Africa rather than an American-born citizen. These actions by Republican leaders consolidated and fanned a growing racial hostility among anti-Obama white Americans. As documented by American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein:

One year into his presidency, ABC News catalogued an array of racially tinged and overtly racist statements or actions taken against Obama. They came from election and party officials and media figures, including Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. In the years since, the number of prominent figures using race as a wedge only grew. They include a New Hampshire police commissioner using the “N” word to refer to the president, a Montana federal district judge sending racist emails, and many others.

This level of race-based hostility complicated Obama’s already-difficult job. Scholarly research has confirmed that anti-black racism influenced Obama’s approval ratings. The organized core of anti-black racism made it difficult for Obama to work with Republican members of Congress even in areas of mutual interest.