History Will Eviscerate Him: Obama Will Go Down as America's Gorbachev

[WestVirginiaRebel]

New York Magazine:

Democrats nominated Barack Obama in 2008 to extract America from George W. Bush’s Iraq misadventure and to spread more fairly the proceeds of a quarter-century-old boom for which they credited Bill Clinton. The Election Eve collapse of Lehman Brothers changed things. It showed that there had been no boom at all, only a multitrillion-dollar real-estate debauch that Clinton’s and Bush’s affordable-housing mandates had set in motion. It also showed how fast historians’ likely rankings of presidents can shift: Clinton went from above average to below average, Bush from low to rock bottom.

 

Obama may wind up the most consequential of the three baby-boom presidents. He expanded certain Bush ­policies — Detroit bailouts, internet surveillance, drone strikes — and cleaned up after others. We will not know for years whether Obama’s big deficits risked a future depression to avoid a present one, or whether the respite he offered from “humanitarian invasions” made the country safer. Right now, both look like significant achievements. Yet there is a reason the president’s approval ratings have fallen, in much of the country, to Nixonian lows. Even his best-functioning policies have come at a steep price in damaged institutions, leaving the country less united, less democratic, and less free.

 

Health-care reform and gay marriage are often spoken of as the core of Obama’s legacy. That is a mistake. Policies are not always legacies, even if they endure, and there is reason to believe these will not. The more people learn about Obamacare, the less they like it — its popularity is still falling, to a record low of 37 percent in November. Thirty states have voted to ban gay marriage, and almost everywhere it survives by judicial diktat.

________

 

Gorbachev wanted less socialism. Obama wants more...

[righteousmomma]

I explored the entire link, WVA Rebel, and comments from the various "historians" on the 0

 

With no comment from me , read and ponder these various "historians " world views and perspectives. For the most part, obviously lefties

 

"For a generation, there has been too much private wealth in politics; Obama’s innovation has been to bring private wealth into government. He has (with others’ help, certainly) begun to emancipate the presidency from Congress’s control of the budget. In 2013, JPMorgan Chase, Obama’s most important early contributor, paid the Justice Department about $20 billion in fines (involving no high-level prosecutions), all of it redeployable by the administration. Federal stimulus funds incentivized states to approve Bill Gates’s Common Core curriculum. Michael Bloomberg’s Young Men’s Initiative, a private endeavor, has been adopted with modifications by the White House...."

 

"Obama’s legacy is one of means, not ends. He has laid the groundwork for a political order less answerable to voters. His delay of the Obamacare employer mandate by fiat, his provision of working papers to immigrants by executive order — these are not applications of old tricks but dangerous constitutional innovations. After last fall’s electoral rout, the president claimed to have “heard” (presumably to speak on behalf of) the two-thirds of people who didn’t vote. And he has forged a partnership with the country’s rich — not the high-earning professionals calumniated in populist oratory (including his own) but the really existing Silicon Valley and Wall Street plutocracy."

 

"Obama’s presidency was restorative, not transformative.

He was most effective as a “normal” president, and he helped put the presidency back on a human scale. He was a devoted and involved father, a loving husband, a man with acknowledged (albeit minor) vices, and someone who made it clear that he did not regard himself as omniscient. As president, he showed that effective governing requires careful deliberation, discipline, and the willingness to make hard and imperfect decisions, and he let us all watch him do just that. Even when one disagreed with his choices, one knew that his acts were never impulsive or cavalier. Future historians will give him full marks for that.
– Stephen Walt"

(Sorry I could not resist "comment" on that one)

 

"What buoyed his aspirations was not a program but a dream that in his person, 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."
– Daniel Rodgers Read the full questionnaire

(Sorry )

 

"His great appeal as a candidate was that he was not interested in traditional politics. That quality, inevitably, has not helped him in Washington. He seems to have the rhetorical and conceptual tools necessary to use the “bully pulpit” power to great effect. Forging a popular coalition, however, requires a galvanizing inspirational agenda. His policies were too moderate to electrify the public.
– Stephen Kinzer Read the full questionnaire"

 

"It is difficult to see how his presidency can be viewed as “transformative” when so many of his policies represented a continuation of the past rather than a break.
– Miriam Pawel Read the full questionnaire"

HUH??? (Sorry again)

 

"His contributions were sometimes remarkable, but Obama’s primary legacy is his destruction of political idealism for the foreseeable future. He proved an impressive steward of the traditions of his party since the 1970s. Where Obama differed was his brief but unforgettable achievement of a surprisingly large consensus around a belief — or delusion — that Americans rarely entertain. Put simply, it was that American politics could and must fundamentally change. The energies he conjured will not reappear soon and are less likely to do so because he summoned them for so ordinary and predictable a set of policies." Samuel Moyn

 

No question on this one: Obama will get much more credit as time passes for saving the U.S. and global economy from a major crash and launching a robust and sustained economic recovery. The question mark will remain how equitable the recovery proves to be.
– Theda Skocpol Read the full questionnaire

Obama’s establishment of the U.S. Cyber Command in 2009 will likely mark the moment that U.S. global-force projection began a historic shift from the Cold War’s heavy-metal military of aircraft carriers, strategic bombers, and tanks to an agile array via aerospace and cyberspace.
– Alfred McCoy Read the full questionnaire

 

"With the caveat that his administration is not yet finished, and two years is a long time, how will history judge Obama?

Obama has put a giant roadblock in the rightward movement in the United States. Even though the social cultural movements in the country have kept moving to the left over the last half-century—race, gender, sex, environment—the national government has kept moving to the right, very much including Bill Clinton, who moved to the center-right and publicly gave up on the idea of government!

Obama came from a different place—he was a participant in these social movements himself—and he drew a line in the sand. He has restored the integrity of “big government.” He’s done a number of things that only big government can do, including regulating various aspects of Wall Street. Of course the test case of all of this is Obamacare, which seems to be working very well. He has shown the power of the government to do good and, by doing so, has powerfully restated the case for the liberal, progressive tradition. Obama’s presidency has been caught in a whiplash of the left being dissatisfied with him and the right being furious at him. He’s polarized the right because he’s refused to do what Clinton did. He could have moved to the center; he could have compromised more with the Republicans; instead, he wanted to draw a line around a progressive agenda and protect it."

 

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/53-historians-on-obamas-legacy.html

 

A link worth exploring.

"The contributors tilted liberal — that’s academia, no surprise — but we made an effort to create at least a little balance with conservative historians. Their responses often echoed those from the far left: that a president elected on a promise to unite the country instead extended the power of his office in alarming, unprecedented ways. Here, we have published a small fraction of the answers we found most thought-provoking, along with essays by Jonathan Chait, our national-affairs columnist, and Christopher Caldwell, whom we borrowed from The Weekly Standard. "

[Draggingtree]

Obviously, the Social Justice warriors only have one recourse:

Continue reading → http://politicalhat.com/2015/01/18/only-oppressors-read-books/