By Ray Rivers
January 19th, 2017
BURLINGTON, ON
America’s first black president. That is how Barack Hussein Obama will be remembered in the history books. His 2008 campaign logo, “Yes We Can”, was forgotten long ago. People might well ask what it really meant anyway.
The best orator the Western World has heard in decades.
It’s not that he was a bad president, like Nixon, the crook, or GW Bush, the war monger, or even Bill Clinton, the womanizer. Having achieved the highest honour the nation could bestow, he was someone to look-up to for his meteoric rise to power, particularly if the ones looking were non-white Americans.
Trump’s people called him an elite, and he was. He was consumed with the bigger picture, worried about the ins and outs and the every detail of everything he did. Analysis, vision and debate are his strengths. Articulate and a great speaker even if his speeches were dotted with enough pregnant pauses to start a new family. He’ll do well in academia and on the speaker circuit in days to come.
Obama, the idealist was also a compromiser, the art of the deal, something Trump should appreciate. Though history may disprove of his deals. His Obamacare was neither an efficient single payer system nor a purely private affair between an insurer and the patient. His was a costly compromise which will be axed, deservedly by the new administration.
President Bush meets in the Oval Office with Former President Jimmy Carter, Former President George H.W. Bush, Former President William J. Clinton, and the President-elect Sen. Barack Obama, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009. (Doug Mills/ The New York Times)
He settled for the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons in lieu of the destruction of its leader, and set up, for failure, the rebels he’d promised to support. In the interest of minimizing American casualties he fought the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen with drones or precision jet fighters and proxies, hurting but never really eliminating his enemies.
True enough, he succeeded in rescuing the US economy after the crash in 2008. And he got bin Laden. But he choked when it came to Russia, giving sway to that global lesser power in Syria and Ukraine. Having won the Nobel peace prize, in large part for his commitment to work towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, he should have made Ukraine a real red line.
The expressions on their faces tells the story; there was no respect between these two men.
After all Ukraine, once with the third largest nuclear stockpile, gave up its weapons in exchange for written guarantees of security from the USA, UK and Russia, guarantees which were ignored by all the signatories following Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. In the face of that breach of trust why would any nation hesitate to develop its own nuclear defence arsenal, as North Korea has done?
There was the Paris climate change agreement which the US signed on, and on which Trump promises to white-out the words USA, once in office. And there was the multilateral Iran deal which Trump would like to re-negotiate but can’t – though everyone knows it is only a matter of time until Iran has its own nukes. And Cuba finally got formal diplomatic recognition, though GITMO is still operating and Guantanamo Bay is still occupied by the Americans, and the Cubans are wary that one day soon their little bit of progress will get Trumpled.
President Barack Obama receives a standing ovation from guests as he is introduced by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada, Wednesday, June 29, 2016. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press via AP)
This relatively unimpressive record is reflected in his mixed popularity numbers. And in the end it’s hard to figure out what all the commotion was about, and why the celebrities loved him. But then, how many US presidents were really that much better? Maybe the problem is that being head of state and head of government is too big a job for one person – the imperfect American political system. Or maybe his heart wasn’t really in it after all – to be the leader of the free world.
They say it’s hard to turn around a big ship in a short water, but eight years in office is still a long time. Did he just give up convincing the Republicans and so many Americans of the wisdom of his ways, particularly after he lost Congress mid-way though his first term? That was perhaps his biggest failure – his inability to get people to share his vision, be they the Congressional Republicans, the Russians and Chinese or even the Israeli leadership which, despite its unveiled acrimony, will be receiving its largest US aid package ever under Obama.
Finally having helped elect one of their own, what did black Americans get out of this contract? To be fair Obama only ever promised to lift ethnic minorities with the same wave that lifted all the ships in the good fleet America. Still, today with a near booming economy, home ownership is on the decline generally and black ownership has fallen from 46% in 2009 to 43% 2014.
The poverty rate for blacks is 26% and fewer than half young black men have full time jobs, though unemployment has fallen to pre-2008 levels. But the median ethnic minority family’s income, at $18,100, is 20% lower than when Obama took office. At the same time national median wealth has increased by 1% to $142,000. And while white households were 7 times wealthier than black households back then, they are now 8 times richer.
Michelle and Barack changed the way the world saw Presidential couple; she added to the Jackie legacy.
At the least one would have expected America’s first black president to have made an effort to raise the standard of living of those in need who share his minority status. Or was ‘Yes We Can’ just about winning the election. I’ll be expecting a better performance from Michelle Obama after she wins the presidential campaign in 2020. It should be an easy win in light of the upcoming Trump legacy.
Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington in 1995. He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject. Tweet @rayzrivers
Background links
Obama and African Americans – Obama and Syria – Obama and Drones –
