Obama's legacy at the dawn of the Trump Family Business Presidency

Just as the Obama Presidency is in its last hours, Democracy presents William Galston's helpful look at Obama’s Uncertain Legacy 01/17/2017.

Galston emphasizes that the stimulus package of 2009, the auto bailout and the stabilization of the US banking system were substantial and very important accomplishments. They allowed the US economy to come back from the 2007-8 crash more strongly than the eurozone was able to under Angela Merkel's Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economic policies.

Galston also notes the critical fact that Obama and the Democratic Party were unable to turn Obama's popularity into a similar popularity and success for the Democratic Party:

If President Obama’s policy legacy is in doubt, his political legacy is not. The coalition that elected him twice turned out to be as much personal as structural. Despite his strenuous efforts, he was unable to transfer enough of the support he enjoyed from minorities, young adults, and even the white working class outside the South to elect his chosen successor.

Hillary Clinton’s narrow loss exposed a basic reality — the pervasive weakening of the Democratic Party during the eight Obama years, in part because the party machinery stepped away from its party-building mission. Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have disappeared and seem unlikely to return until at least 2020. Republicans have seized control of governorships and state legislatures across the country. Numerically, the party is at its lowest ebb since the 1920s.[my emphasis]

Al Jazeera's Empire program also presents a look at Obama's outgoing Presidency, The Reckoning: From Obama to Trump 01/19/2017:

Obama's legacy: President Trump's surveillance

Rick Perlstein has a timely reminder that Obama's surveillance policies leave a tool potentially enormously useful for domestic political shenanigans in the hands of the authoritarian President-elect Donald Trump, He’s Making a List New Republic 01/02/2017

“Over the past two decades, we’ve witnessed the building of the greatest, most pervasive surveillance apparatus and security state that humanity has ever seen,” says Jon Stokes, co-founder of the news site Ars Technica and author of Inside the Machine. “Now we are about to hand over that entire apparatus to a paranoid, score-settling sociopath whose primary obsession seems to be with crushing his personal enemies.”

Perlstein makes this observation, relying on some psychological speculation based on what we know about both Nixon and Trump in the public record:

Nixon, unlike Trump, was an introspective man. In one particularly fascinating moment of self-reflection following his resignation, he described to a former aide the habits that had enabled him to rise to the top of Washington’s greasy pole. When you’re on your way, he explained, it pays to be crazy.

“In your own mind you have nothing to lose, so you take plenty of chances,” Nixon said. “It is then you understand, for the first time, that you have the advantage—because your competitors can’t risk what they have already.” That’s an insight that Trump put to good use during the Republican primaries, when he was willing to place high-stakes bets that his more experienced rivals were unwilling or unable to match.

But then you win, and your problems begin. “It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top,” Nixon confessed. “You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it, because it is a part of you and you need it as much as an arm and a leg. You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice, because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.”

What Nixon was describing sounds like nothing so much as a seasoned heroin addict chasing the next high: It takes bigger and bigger doses to get there, until too much is not nearly enough. And a little thing like being elected the leader of the free world isn’t nearly enough to jolt a man like Nixon or Trump into rehab.

And he warns at the end, "Revenge is a narcotic, and Trump of all people will be in need of a regular, ongoing fix. Ordering his people to abuse the surveillance state to harass and destroy his enemies will offer the quickest and most satisfying kick he can get. The tragedy, as James Madison could have told us, is that the good stuff is now lying around everywhere, just waiting for the next aspiring dictator to cop."

Then there's this from Jenna McLaughlin Donald Trump's Pick for Spy Chief Took Hard Line on Snowden, Guantanamo, and Torture The Intercept 01/07/2017. That nominee for to be the next Director of National Intelligence is Dan Coats, former Republican Senator from Indiana and an Ambassador to Germany for the Cheney-Bush Administration. (Noah Bierman, Donald Trump to pick former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats to lead intelligence agencies, transition official says Los Angeles Times 01/05/2017) Bierman reports:

Coats, who served on the Senate intelligence committee, may also face a challenge in reconciling his own hawkish views on Russia with Trump’s far friendlier posture toward President Vladimir Putin,

Coats was banned, along with Arizona Sen. John McCain and a handful of other members of Congress and White House officials, from entering Russia in 2014 for backing U.S. sanctions against the country following Russia’s annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine. ...

Coats also spent years as a lobbyist between 2000 and 2010, working on behalf of a variety of clients in defense, pharmaceuticals, financial services and private equity, among other industries, according to public records. His clients included Lockheed Martin, a company Trump recently criticized for the high price of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Trump ran against Washington’s revolving-door lobbying culture, using “drain the swamp” as a prominent slogan. Yet he has chosen several former lobbyists for senior positions in his administration.

Obama's legacy: Ukraine and Syria

Obama’s failure to stand up to this neocon/liberal-hawk foreign-policy elite over Syria and Ukraine may well define his historical legacy. He allowed the Syrian conflict to escalate with shipments of U.S. weapons to rebels both directly and indirectly adding to the country’s carnage. Obama also acquiesced to the provocative overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president on Russia’s border and allowed the crisis to escalate into a risky stand-off with nuclear-armed Russia.

So writes Robert Perry in Trump’s Need to Trust Americans Consortium News 12/21/2016.

If the title seems like an impossible wish, it's because it is. But Perry is using the stock technique of giving advice in a disinterested tone to an incoming President. Even though in this case the chance of the advice being followed is somewhat smaller than that of the proverbial snowball in Hell.

But in a later piece, The Good That Trump Could Do 12/23/2016, he spins a really optimistic scenario in which Trump challenges "the neocon/liberal-hawk establishment that rules the roost of Washington’s foreign policy."

I don't see any clear signs that Trump's crew is going to be fulfilling such optimistic hopes.

Obama's Legacy: The political loss in November and Obama's lame-duck leadership

Cenk Uygur gives a progressive-Democratic perspective on Obama's immediate political legacy and more specifically his policy preferences that he's showing in the lame-duck period of his last weeks in office, Why I'm Mad at Obama 11/25/2016:

I can't compete with Cenk's dramatic presentation style, in print or otherwise. But I'm on board with what he says here.

Obama's Legacy: "Look forward, not back" on torture crimes

I said when President Obama took office that the most important thing he needed to do to protect the Constitution and the rule of law was to investigate and prosecute the torture perpetrators of the Bush Administration as the Torture Convention requires him to do. Because the one thing that was missing from Dick Cheney project to make torture a regular practice of the United States was for a successor Administration to validate it by refusing the prosecute the perpetrators.

Obama did exactly that: he validated the practice by refusing to prosecute the perpetrators. Because he wanted to "look forward, not back."

And Digby gives us a grimly probable look at what comes after Obama (Donald Trump is bringing torture back: His entire foreign-policy team is comprised of big fans of the worst Bush-era practices Salon 11/18/2016):

And sadly, despite ending the practice upon taking office, President Barack Obama didn’t require any accountability for what had happened and the whole question was swept under the rug. Indeed, the administration fought the release of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s torture report and to this day has kept the full report under wraps. And so it became further normalized — never punished or fully repudiated — leaving it there for someone to come along and pick right up where the Bush administration left off.

Our next president is downright eager and excited to do it. He has proclaimed that he loves waterboarding, and has repeatedly promised to do “a lot more than that” as president. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he has insisted that it works and “if it doesn’t work they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.”

David Cole wrote about this problem six years ago to the date in Obama’s Torture Problem NYR Daily 11/18/2010. I think he was right in saying, "It turns out that looking forward, not back, will never resolve the torture legacy.... Torture and its after-effects will be with us until we are willing to confront them head-on."

The legacy of President Obama's decision to "look forward, not back" on the torture crimes will be with us for a long time.

Trump's threatened deportations - and Obama's actual ones

For those of us who worried for the last eight years about President Obama's fondness for Bipartisanship, Donald Trump's election gives us repeated occasion for deep, weary sighs.

Like Trump's promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. One of the BBC Mundo articles uses "irregular" instead of "undocumented." The threat being bandied about right now is to deport three million with criminal records. Not surprisingly, that estimate seems to be anywhere from four to ten times the available estimates that are worth considering as serious for undocumented immigrants. There may be more legal immigrants with some kind of criminal background. Minor offenses on ones record are not a ban to American citizenship.

What progressives are pointing out, and what rightwingers will toss back at those of us who object to Trump's deportations is that in his two terms in office, the Obama Administration has apparently deported at least three million. Gerardo Lissardy reports that the Administration deported 2.5 million between 2009 and 2015.

• ¿De dónde sacó Donald Trump el número de hasta 3 millones de indocumentados que dice querer deportar de Estados Unidos? BBC Mundo 14.11.2016
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• Gerardo Lissardy , Estados Unidos: así se compara el anuncio de deportaciones de Trump con el récord de deportados de Obama BBC Mundo 14.11.2016

Of course, the people who are most concerned about Trump's anti-immigrant deportation threats were also complaining about Obama's level of deportations.

Still, that doesn't mean we can't make real distinctions between what happened during the Obama Administration and whatever it is Trump may do, when appropriate.

For instance, deporting three million people within one or two years would be a whole different operation in terms of scope, intensity and bad consequences.

Still, even though Obama has taken measures to protect some categories of undocumented immigrants, like the mothers of American citizen children, in his first years in office he pushed deportation and border-fence building, justifying it as a Bipartisan way to get the Republcians to agree to comprehensive immigration reform. Whether he actually thought that was feasible or it was just an excuse to tell Democrats, the results are the same: no comprehensive immigration reform and the Republican Party doing major demagoguery over it.

Obama's deportations, as Lissardy reports, are a Presidential record. He notes that some Latino leaders refer to Obama as the Deporter-in-Chief.

I wonder if that may have affected the enthusiasm among the Latino community for voting for Hillary Clinton, who was clearly campaigning to have Obama's Third Term.

Unfortunately, Obama's deportation record means that Jimmy Dore's prediction in this report may not be off the wall, although I'm not nearly as optimistic on that score as he is, PREDICTION: Trump Will Deport LESS Immigrants Than Obama The Young Turks 11/13/2016:

Obama legacy: Cenk Uygur says Obama "never wanted to fight" on progressive programs

Cenk Uygur hs a good analysis of President Obama's consistent failure to frame major issues in progressive Democratic terms, Does Obama Really Care About A Public Option? 07/16/2016:

Obama's Democratic apologists have tended to mock the notion of the "bully pulpit." But the point Cenk makes here is similar to the point that George Lakoff has been making for years about the importance of framing issues in Democratic terms. A chronic problem for the Democrats has been that for decades they have accepted Republican framing of issues. Cenk explains well how that works with this example.