Obama's long goodbye

Obama would like to go down in history as a peacemaker and consensus builder, rather than a leader who was at war throughout his two terms and normalised extra-legal assassination by drone. His current 'farewell tour' is typical legacy polishing, of the kind that every president engages in towards the end of his mandate.

The symbolic value of visiting Hiroshima should not be underestimated, but images of Obama laying a wreath to commemorate the 146,000 or so people killed by a American atomic bomb will do nothing to reduce the stockpile of weapons, particularly when the US military is spending billions on new nuclear submarines, new missiles and new stealth bombers. They do make a nice bookend, though, to pair with pictures of him accepting the Nobel Peace Prize at the start of his presidency.

Ending the USA’s arms embargo against Vietnam forty-three years after the last American troops left the country is a major change in policy and a sneaky dig in China’s ribs - thanks to tensions between the two Asian nations. In Hanoi, Obama had the nerve to observe that "big nations should not bully smaller ones,” earning a round of applause.

At a town hall meeting in London last month, the President was asked what he would like his legacy to be. “I still have a few more months,” he replied. He and his family have chosen their next home, a nine bedroom mansion in one of Washington DC’s most exclusive neighbourhoods, but he is not ready to leave the White House yet.

The day after the Democratic party’s resounding defeat in the 2014 midterm elections, Obama gathered his staff in the west wing. Take an hour to sulk, get it out of your system and then it’s back to work, he told them: “We still run the largest organisation on the planet, with the largest capacity to do good.”

Obama won re-election reasonably easily in 2012, but the midterms either side were, in his words, a “shellacking” that cost his party dearly. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, then the Senate. Ten more states got Republican governors and more than nine hundred state senate seats turned from blue to red.

Conservatives argued that this was a repudiation of Obama’s agenda, and that the federal government has no business being “the largest organisation on the planet.” His response has been to use his executive powers to bypass congressional gridlock. The so-called ‘lame duck’ years have been among the most effective of his presidency.

Obama is the fifth president in the modern era to face a House and Senate controlled by the opposition party in his last two years. In theory, this severely limits his ability to get things done, as passing legislation he supports is all but impossible. In practice, it has proved liberating.

There is no longer any need to seek common ground with Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, who infamously declared that his party’s “top political priority… should be to deny President Obama a second term”. He can dispense with the charade of trying to work with a House of Representatives that has voted to repeal or gut Obamacare, his signature legislative achievement, more than fifty times.

The new Republican Senate majority had barely had time to take their seats when Obama announced that his administration had struck a deal with China to limit greenhouse gas emissions - a vital step towards a global deal, and much more than could be expected from a Congress packed with climate change deniers.

A week later, he issued a hugely consequential executive order shielding the parents of US citizens and legal residents from the threat of deportation and establishing a path to citizenship for people brought to the country as children.

Congress had tried and failed to pass immigration legislation so often that Obama could present the order as necessary and timely, but it was also smart, cynical politics. By 2060, a third of the USA’s population will be Hispanic. Although there have been more deportations under Obama than any other president, his party can count on the Latino vote. It may save Hillary Clinton.

Next, Obama announced that his government was seeking to normalise relations with Cuba, another genuinely historic advance. At his State of the Union address in January 2015, he couldn’t resist taunting his Republican adversaries. “I have no more campaigns to run,” he said. “I know because I won both of them.”

At the White House Correspondents Dinner three months later, Obama joked about his new, carefree attitude: “After the midterm elections, my advisers asked me, 'Mr. President, do you have a bucket list?’ And I said, well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list…Take executive action on immigration? Bucket! New regulations? Bucket!”

The legacy interviews have begun to pile up. In recent months, Obama has defended his handling of the economy to Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times and his foreign policy to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic. He has visited comedian Marc Maron’s garage for an episode of his podcast and invited actor Bryan Cranston to the White House for a chat.

“Sometimes the task of government is to make incremental improvements or try to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that, ten years from now, suddenly we’re in a very different place than we were,” he told Maron.

The Affordable Care Act has reduced the number of people in the USA without health insurance by up to twenty million (the government’s figures are contested). Medical costs continue to rise, but much more slowly than before. The Congressional Budget Office has cut its projection for government spending on health in 2020 by $175 billion.

In January 2009, the month Obama was sworn in as president, the USA’s economy lost 820,000 jobs, then a further 681,000 in February and 652,000 more in March. The unemployment rate peaked at just over 10% of the working age population in October of that year and has been in decline ever since. It is currently less than 5%.

The $800 billion stimulus package, derided on the right as big government cronyism at its worst, and on the left as far too small, looks a lot better in hindsight. Some $90 billion was directed to green energy projects. The failure of solar panel manufacturer Solyndra got all the press, but that $535 million loss is the exception to an otherwise successful portfolio of investments that has driven a rapid expansion in renewable energy.

Energy policy offers a good example of the Obama administration’s ability to achieve by administrative fiat what it could not hope to pass through Congress. Emissions restrictions introduced under the Climate Action Plan have shuttered a third of the USA’s coal plants (expect to hear Donald Trump talk about this a lot in Ohio). Tough new standards for cars, trucks, fridges and air conditioners are projected to reduce emissions by three billion tonnes in the next decade.

Obama’s conservative critics have often charged that he is a “dictator” making unprecedented use of his executive powers. So far, he has issued 235 executive orders, meaning that he is roughly on track to equal George W. Bush’s 291, but is unlikely to match Richard Nixon’s 346 or Ronald Reagan’s 381.

The one area in which he has used executive power to a previously unthinkable degree is in waging the “War on Terror”. Obama was not the first president to authorise the secret killing of suspected terrorists using armed drones, but he has vastly expanded the practice. According to the New America Foundation, US drones have killed between 1,900 and 3,000 people in Pakistan and between 980 and 1250 people in Yemen under Obama, including at least 200 civilians.

In most instances, the Obama administration refuses to even acknowledge that the drone attacks have taken place. Officials were compelled to release a redacted legal rationale for the assassination of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, but there has otherwise been close to zero accountability.

Having promised to run the “most transparent administration ever” Obama has earned a reputation for obsessive secrecy and a desire to control the message at all times. He has prosecuted more government employees under the Espionage Act for leaking information than all other administrations combined. The Washington Post has not been granted an interview with Obama since 2009.

In January, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough promised “audacious executive action” in Obama’s final year. An order requiring state schools to let transgender pupils use whichever bathrooms they feel most comfortable in was issued earlier this month. Eleven states have already sued to block it.

The Stonewall Inn, in New York, is likely to become a national monument, to commemorate the birth of the modern gay rights movement in 1969, when patrons fought back against the police. Although these are significant symbolic advances, they are hardly “audacious”.

Three days before he left office, on January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the “military-industrial complex” would lead the USA into needless wars. Having come to power in 1953 as the Korean War was winding down, he presided over a steady escalation of hostilities with the Soviet Union, but his last speech is the only one anybody remembers.

If Obama wanted to make a bold statement about the expansion of governmental surveillance powers, he could pardon Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. If he wanted to follow through on the Fair Sentencing Act he could order the release of 50,000 non-violent drug offenders who have spent a decade or more in federal prison. In theory he could close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay - agreements are in place for the transfer of two dozen prisoners, but Congress has made sure the rest have nowhere to go.

In an election year, chances are he will do none of the above. Obama has not been a popular president for much of his time in office, but in March, around the time of his victory lap in Havana, his approval rating crept back above 50% for the first time since April 2013. People are starting to miss him. His top priority now is to ensure that the next president, and the next president’s Supreme Court picks, will not undo his work.