BY STAS MARGARONIS
The first volume of former President Barack Obama’s memoir of his presidency begins on a positive note. He describes the challenges and rise of the young Illinois U.S. Senator who subsequently galvanizes a grass roots movement of fellow Democrats to help elect him as the first African-American president of the United States.
In 2008, Barack Obama is elected and is immediately challenged to address the worst economic crisis the United States has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
He has agreed to support the Bush administration’s bail-out of American banks. This is necessitated by the banks’ failures in many speculative real estate investments that contributed to a global economic collapse.
This results in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a program of the United States government to purchase toxic assets and equity from financial institutions and revive the financial sector, that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008. It was a component of the government’s measures in 2008 to address the subprime mortgage crisis. The TARP originally authorized expenditures of $700 billion. [1]
Subsequently, Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, who critics say, placed banking interests ahead of public and homeowner interests, supports the TARP initiatives and the revival of U.S. banking and credit. In so doing, Obama helps save the biggest U.S. banks but also validates the notion that major banks are “too big to fail,” at a time when many U.S. homeowners lose their homes.
The question arises as to whether Obama would have been better advised to pursue major reforms of finance similar to the so-called ” first hundred days” of President Franklin Roosevelt who pursued initiatives that laid the foundation for the New Deal in the 1930s. The New Deal closed the gap between rich and poor by financing major infrastructure, investments enacting banking reform, Social Security, labor union rights and increased incomes for working people.
Roosevelt benefited from his collaboration with former social worker, Harry Hopkins, who initiated job creation programs culminating in the establishment of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that created 7 million jobs. These jobs supported minimal incomes and economic reconstruction in states and stemmed the ravages of the Depression on the American people. These initiatives did not end the Depression. The American economy was pulled out of the Depression when American businesses were mobilized to fulfil orders for weapons, planes and tanks in response to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
However, the New Deal established the basis for recovery and winning the war. Under Roosevelt, the federal government financed construction of dams, roads, airfields, bridges and prepared workers and soldiers for World War II.
Following the end of World War II, American incomes skyrocketed with a post war boom that would continue until the 1970s.
Wealthy Americans, such as the Koch family, never forgave Roosevelt and the New Deal for this success and beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, Republicans began to abolish New Deal reforms.
Incomes have declined, manufacturing jobs were lost due to companies shifting U.S. jobs to cheaper wage nations or conceding markets to foreign competitors, unions were attacked and wakened and taxes on the wealthy were reduced. Federal spending on infrastructure programs was reduced undermining the state of roads, bridges and waterways and the jobs they generated.
In 2008, many Americans who supported Obama hoped he would be another Roosevelt.
In his memoir, Obama argues in favor of his success, but ponders whether his decision to preserve the economic status quo rather than enacting major New Deal type reforms might have resulted in squandering a once in a generation opportunity to enact real economic reform and an end to years of economic stagnation and inequality for working people of all colors:
“If I had predicted on the day of my swearing in that within a year the U.S. financial system would have stabilized, almost all TARP funds would be fully repaid (having actually made, rather than cost, taxpayer money) and the economy would have begun what would become the longest stretch of continuous growth and job creation in U.S. history, the majority of pundits and experts would have questioned my mental fitness or assumed I was smoking something stronger than tobacco.”[1]
However, he also admits to misgivings:
“For many thoughtful critics, though, the fact that I had engineered a return to pre-existing normalcy is precisely the problem – a missed opportunity, if not a flat-out betrayal. According to this view the financial crisis offered me a once in a generation chance to reset the standards for normalcy, remaking not just the financial system but the American economy overall. If only I had broken up the big banks and sent some white collar culprits to jail; if only I had put an end to outsized pay packages….. then maybe today we would have a more equitable system that serves the interest of working families rather than a handful of billionaires.
I understand such frustrations. In many ways, I share them. To this day I survey reports of America’s escalating inequality, reduced upward mobility and still stagnant wages, with all the consequent anger and distortions such trends stir in our democracy, and I wonder whether I should have been bolder in those early months, willing to exact more economic pain in the short term and pursuit of a permanently altered and more just economic order….
In that sense, my first hundred days in office revealed a basic strand of my political character. I was a reformer, conservative in temperament, if not in vision. Whether I was demonstrating wisdom or weakness would be for others to judge.”[2]
Even so, in 2009, Obama wins passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that injected over $800 billion into the U.S. economy. The Act reduced unemployment according to most economists. It provided funding for unemployment benefits, job training, food stamps and some funding for infrastructure.[3]
Obama has been criticized for not making a bigger investment in infrastructure. He does sign into law two highway and transportation bills that invest over $400 billion in funding for highways and mass-transit. [4]
In 2010, Obama also wins passage of the Affordable Care Act. This is a landmark legislation that finally provides a means to provide healthcare to uninsured Americans.
Obama, supported by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, must fight growing Republican resistance to his initiatives that helps spawn the Tea Party and the so-called grass roots opposition financed by radical right billionaires including oil and gas magnates, Charles and David Koch, who oppose any government role that prevents the rich becoming richer.
At the same time, Obama comes under growing attack because of his race.
In July, 2009, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, an African-American, is arrested by a white police officer as he tries to break into his own home. Obama criticizes the police response causing a national uproar among white Americans. While Obama tries to argue that both Gates and the police overreacted in the incident, he suffers serious political damage for criticizing the police. He learns from polling that his response resulted in the biggest drop in support among white voters throughout his entire presidency.
The unresolved conflicts between police forces and black Americans will come back to haunt all Americans in 2020. In the middle of the Covid pandemic, rioting breaks out across the country in response to actions taken by police officers in Minneapolis who detain and forcibly restrain George Floyd, a black man, resulting in his death. The video showing the police treatment of Floyd shows him unable to breathe. The video goes viral sparking national outrage.[5]
The effect of attacks on Obama’s policies begin in 2010 with the loss of the Senate seat to the Republicans of the late liberal icon, Edward Kennedy. In 2010, Scott Brown a conservative Republican ran a grass roots campaign against the Democratic candidate Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley in a special election following the 2009 death of longtime liberal Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy. While initially trailing Coakley by a large margin, Brown posted a come-from-behind win to become the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts since Edward Brooke in 1972.[6]
In 2011, Donald Trump supports attacks against Obama by claiming that Obama lied about being born in the United States and so gained the presidency illegally. Trump’s resorting to the ‘big lie’ campaign typical of fascist and communist regimes, is supported by social media and radical right outlets. The intent is to encourage hostility toward a black man in the White House. It is reflected in the hostility shown by some Republicans toward Obama following the Gates incident.
Obama is alarmed to discover that Trump’s so-called ‘birther’ campaign gains so much credibility that a poll showed that “roughly 40 percent of Republicans were now convinced that I hadn’t been born in the United States.”[7]
The political reaction generated by Trump’s “birther” allegation force Obama to produce a second, longer more detailed copy of his birth certificate instead of the shorter form certified by the State of Hawaii. That shorter form was made public by Obama when the issue originally surfaced several years before proving he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and so legally a U.S. citizen. Trump argued that the failure to produce the longer birth certificate showed Obama was lying.
When Obama provided the longer form, he proved the true liar was Donald Trump. Unfortunately, this appears to have had no negative impact on Trump’s political support. Quite the reverse, the tactics he deployed against Obama are a dress rehearsal for the campaign he will wage against Hilary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and subsequently against American democracy.
The success of Republican attacks against Obama including questioning his legitimacy as president of the United States, allowing Trump and others to race-bait him and attacking Obama successful efforts to stimulate the economy and provide affordable health care to the uninsured succeed: Republicans will regain control of the U.S. House and Senate during his presidency.
The culmination occurs in 2016 following the completion of Obama’s second term as president. The momentum Trump generated by his false “birther” allegations helps propel him to the Republican nomination and subsequently election as president of the United States.
An accomplished and decent president is vilified by hate and racism.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Barack Obama, A Promised Land, (Crown: 2020) pages 304-305.
[2] Obama, pp-304-305.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_bill
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Brown_(politician)
[7] Obama, p. 674