Invictus

Obama Year Five

Discovering Our Inner Lyndon Johnson

It is, for me, the height of irony that Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential coronation was ganked by Barack Obama’s insurgency. Hillary Clinton made Barack Obama possible in the sense that, once the nation accepted the idea of a woman as a viable presidential candidate, the door flew off its hinges, meaning a black or Latino candidate would also be taken more seriously than at any other point in history. However, Barack Obama’s presidency has in turn been ganked by the Duck Dynasty Congress, a Congress that would have despised Clinton equally, but would have lacked the irrational imperative of the racial component and would have feared playing the sexism card in ways they do not fear playing the race card: we’re staying home in 2014 and they know it. They’ve redistricted the hell out of the Congressional map; the old boat anchor reactionaries are secure in their jobs (which is all they demonstrably care about), do not fear this president, and don’t seem to mind being labeled a bigot.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, lacks either the skill or the will to find his inner Lyndon Johnson. The birth certificate nonsense dragged on and on not because of Donald Trump or the Tea Party but because the president refused to just stand up and call them all out on it. His mother was a U.S. citizen. Barack Obama could have been born on the moon, he'd still be a U.S. citizen. It was a non-story. There were matters of desperately vital importance which were not being written about because ignorant, Stupid People refused to let the story die. I shudder to imagine the tantrum Lyndon Johnson would have thrown in the press room, likely threatening to revoke the credentials of the next nitwit who wrote about that idiotic story. There's important work to do. I understand Obama's reluctance to ever complain about the racism routinely hurled at him, but only the president can sound like the president, and this whole birther thing is a prime example of how Obama's mannered "no drama" disposition harms his presidency.

The little movement the president had gotten out of these people in the past couple of months has been due, in large measure, to his willingness to play hardball. Every time this president shows even a little gumption, his numbers go up and these morons in Congress get a black eye. He seems to be slowly, far too slowly, learning this. Obama is not chummy. Johnson had Congressional leaders over all the time, friends and foes alike. Jeff Bridges showed us how this is done in the excellent but little-seen film The Contender, schmoozing with recalcitrant Congressman Christian Slater over a shark sandwich. This is not Obama, and this is why his agenda is in shambles.

Discovering Our Inner Lyndon Johnson

Presuming that somebody had the healthcare website well in hand was a mistake of inestimable proportions, but not nearly as big as what is a shockingly naive political mindset of this Administration in presuming the website would be part of their overall strategy, a spoke in the wheel rather than its hub. Congressional Republicans have smartly and successfully convinced the Stupid People in America that Healthcare.Gov is Obamacare, that they are in fact one and the same, which is ridiculous, but that’s the mindset of Stupid People. Young people, most especially, tend to be Stupid People not because they actually are stupid per se but because they are immature, lacking reason and experience. Young People presume the Facebook website is Facebook, missing the point Facebook is a $68 billion corporate monolith. Young People, most especially, presume the web interface factually is Obamacare and therefore a malfunctioning website undermines their confidence in the entire program. Not that young people were planning to sign up anyway: the fatal flaw in the Affordable Care Act is its reliance upon the young, what are being called The Young Invincibles, to sign up. Young people are focused almost exclusively on self-gratification. They buy car insurance because they can be arrested if discovered driving without it. The penalties for not having health insurance are absurdly ephemeral, and young peoples' financial priorities go something like this: sex, dope, clothes, toys, munchies. Young people pay rent only under protest. They will cry broke over the measly $150 or whatever Obamacare will cost them, but look around Friday and Saturday nights: they’ve got gas money, they’ve got beer and pot money. This is their world, and only a real threat (homelessness, or, more accurately, being forced to move back with their parents, utilities disconnect, incarceration) will convince them to spend their money on things that do not immediately gratify themselves. The president sounds less than confident and his eyes tend to wander a little whenever he makes a case for the young to purchase health insurance, as if the young can actually hear him over the music most of them are blasting 24/7. I can’t depend on these people to walk my dog, yet the president is betting the nation’s healthcare reform on them.

The colossal failure of the healthcare rollout is all most anyone will remember about the president’s first post-reelection year, not the 4% GDP growth, 7% unemployment, or the president’s amazing stare-down of the Nutty 112th Congress over Ted Cruz’s ridiculous $20 billion government shutdown. In truth, 2013 marked the beginning of our finally reaping some dividends from the president’s hard-won successes. This is the likely reason he ran for reelection in the first place: anyone with half a brain would know things were bound to improve sooner or later. Had the president not run, we’d likely see the 4% anyway but Mitt Romney would be taking a bow for it. If for no other reason, I’m sure this president wanted to be sitting in the big chair when his hard-fought battles began to, at long last, bear the nation fruit.

He actually had a very good year, but it is remembered, at least in the short term, as the worst of a presidency stuck in gridlock. And, while it’s fun to blame the whack jobs in Congress, all of us—including the president—share blame in the government dysfunction. The president is a black man. Ray Charles, even in his current state, could see the Ignorant Racist Know-Nothing crowd coming. But it seemed to take this president by surprise and he seems way too reluctant to do the inelegant dirty work of the presidency, the ends-justifying-the-means sausage making. That reluctance has crippled his presidency more than anything these nut jobs have done.

You and I (or people like us) caused this to happen. Supporting Obama is, in itself, tribal. Many black Americans, myself included, feel a visceral moral obligation to support this president in ways we’d never support other presidents. From my chair, the president gets an A+ for his amazing vision and ambitious goals, but perhaps a B-minus for his actual achievements if we’re grading on a curve. After the long winter of the Bush Legacy, it is deliriously refreshing for the nation to once again be led by someone who is aggressively if not fanatically dedicated to bettering the lives of all Americans. However, virtually everything he’s done has been watered-down and compromised so much they became at best a shadow of the potent change we all voted for. We organized and worked hard and pressed our way in 2008 but were too stupid, yes stupid, lazy and, I guess, dizzy from all the high-fiving over Obama’s win to understand how essential 2010 was. This is why we are suffering today. The 2010 crowd of naïve, inexperienced wingnuts have unquestionably prolonged the recession, wrecked the nation’s credit, initiated the sequester, ended extended unemployment benefits, spent over two million dollars on symbolic votes to repeal Obamacare and cost the nation $20 billion (that’s with a “B”) over the government shutdown—all of this out of political interest. We’re furious at them, but it’s really not them: they’re just doing what they do. It’s us. We didn’t show up, Grampa And The Klan did, and these are the morons those people picked out. Why any of this surprises us or the president is beyond me. The nation’s wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted. The world most certainly think us idiots to invent problems that didn’t exist and to deliberately sabotage our nation’s future out of tribal paranoia over the color of the president’s skin.

My most optimistic sense of 2014 is that, being an election year, things may likely get worse. Conservative Republicans want to be able to run on a record of obstructing President Obama, which plays the irrational hatred card of the disenfranchised Stupid People who so viscerally and personally despise the president. This hurts farmers. Cops. School teachers. Dog walkers. Whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Evangelicals, Atheists. Everybody. All in an effort to please the intransigent racist minority in this country who would prefer nothing get done in Washington at all then to support this president in any way. Given this dreadful reality, the president has won some amazing achievements, all of which surely vex both the rednecks and the liberal elites who believe they are above racism. I can't imagine why the president even ran for reelection and openly wonder if that wasn't a selfish act, knowing the gridlock will continue so long as he's in the White House. Given that the president has not managed to effectively focus his own massive electorate on mid-term elections, 2014 is poised to be yet another electoral bloodletting for the president, the cement hardening on Capitol Hill all the more.

Christopher J. Priest
29 December 2013
editor@praisenet.org
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The Age of Obama

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A collection of essays covering the 2008 election and President Barack Obama’s first term..

Obama's Top 50 Accomplishments

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Washington Monthly

1. Passed Health Care Reform
After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). It will cover 32 million uninsured Americans beginning in 2014 and mandates a suite of experimental measures to cut health care cost growth, the number one cause of America’s long-term fiscal problems.

2. Passed the Stimulus
Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs.

3. Passed Wall Street Reform
Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.

4. Ended the War in Iraq
Ordered all U.S. military forces out of the country. Last troops left on December 18, 2011.

5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan: From a peak of 101,000 troops in June 2011, U.S. forces are now down to 91,000, with 23,000 slated to leave by the end of summer 2012. According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the combat mission there will be over by next year.

6. Eliminated Osama bin Laden
In 2011, ordered special forces raid of secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the terrorist leader was killed and a trove of al-Qaeda documents was discovered.

7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry
In 2009, injected $62 billion in federal money (on top of $13.4 billion in loans from the Bush administration) into ailing GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added more than 100,000 jobs. In 2011, the Big Three automakers all gained market share for the first time in two decades. The government expects to lose $16 billion of its investment, less if the price of the GM stock it still owns increases.

8. Recapitalized Banks
In the midst of financial crisis, approved controversial Treasury Department plan to lure private capital into the country’s largest banks via “stress tests” of their balance sheets and a public-private fund to buy their “toxic” assets. Got banks back on their feet at essentially zero cost to the government.

9. Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
Ended 1990s-era restriction and formalized new policy allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military for the first time.

10. Toppled Moammar Gaddafi
In March 2011, joined a coalition of European and Arab governments in military action, including air power and naval blockade, against Gaddafi regime to defend Libyan civilians and support rebel troops. Gaddafi’s forty-two-year rule ended when the dictator was overthrown and killed by rebels on October 20, 2011. No American lives were lost.

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