Eight years after the financial crisis, unemployment is at 5 percent, deficits are down and G.D.P. is growing. Why do so many voters feel left behind? The president has a theory.
“If you ask the average person on the streets, ‘Have deficits gone down or up under Obama?’ probably 70 percent would say they’ve gone up,” Obama said, with some justifiable exasperation — the deficit has in fact declined (by roughly three-quarters) since he took office, and polls do show that a large majority of Americans believe the opposite.
.. Obama is animated by a sense that, looking at the world around him, the U.S. economy is in much better shape than the public appreciates, especially when measured against the depths of the financial crisis and the possibility — now rarely even considered — that things could have been much, much worse.
.. The budget deficit has fallen by roughly $1 trillion during his two terms. And overall U.S. economic growth has significantly outpaced that of every other advanced nation.
..A large swath of the nation has dropped out of the labor force completely, and the reality for the average American family is that its household income is $4,000 less than it was when Bill Clinton left office.
.. Many within Bush’s own party were supporting an alternative bill that was focused on mortgage-asset insurance and tax cuts. But Obama, convinced that anything short of a major bailout could lead to economic catastrophe, said Democrats should back Paulson’s plan. They did.
It was a rare moment of bipartisanship, with long-term political consequences. To Obama, this was a necessary alliance with Wall Street and a Republican president. To many others, it looked like a sweetheart deal for the same people who created the mess ..
.. “The whole thing about financial crises is the tools that work are the ones that will make you look like you’re in bed with the banks,” said Timothy Geithner, an architect of TARP whom Obama made his Treasury secretary.
The Legacy of Obama’s ‘Worst Mistake’
The Libya intervention marked the third time in a decade that Washington embraced regime change and then failed to plan for the consequences. In 2001, the United States toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan but gave little thought about how to stabilize the country. In a memo to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld early in that campaign, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith argued that Washington “should not allow concerns about stability to paralyze U.S. efforts to oust the Taliban leadership. … Nation-building is not our key strategic goal.”
.. Symbolizing the lack of concern for rebuilding the country, Bush’s pick for Garner’s successor was L. Paul Bremer—a man Bush had never met, who wasn’t an expert on Iraq or post-conflict reconstruction, and didn’t speak Arabic.
.. It was a cheap war for the United States at just $1.1 billion. But these days, it seems, a billion dollars buys you a shit show. Libya could end up looking like, in the wordsof British special envoy Jonathan Powell, “Somalia on the Mediterranean.”
.. We might be able to explain a one-off failure in terms of allies screwing up. But three times in a decade suggests a deeper pattern in the American way of war.
.. In the American mind, there are good wars: campaigns to overthrow a despot, with the model being World War II. And there are bad wars: nation-building missions to stabilize a foreign country, including peacekeeping and counterinsurgency. For example, the U.S. military has traditionally seen its core mission as fighting conventional wars against foreign dictators, and dismissed stabilization missions as “military operations other than war,” or Mootwa. Back in the 1990s, the chairman of the joint chiefs reportedly said, “Real men don’t do Mootwa.” At the public level, wars against foreign dictators are consistently far more popular than nation-building operations.
.. When I researched my book How We Fight, I found that Americans embraced wars for regime change but hated dealing with the messy consequences going back as far as the Civil War and southern reconstruction.
.. But many Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, and Australians see peacekeeping as a core military task. Japan will only send its forces outside the homeland for peacekeeping missions in places like Cambodia and Mozambique. In a poll in 1995, Canadians said their country’s top contribution to the world was peacekeeping
.. So why do Americans fight this way? The practice partly reflects the country’s success at winning interstate wars versus its struggles at nation-building and counterinsurgency. People naturally want to stick to what they’re good at.
.. Americans often believe that malevolent actors repress a freedom-living people: Get rid of the evildoers and liberty can reign.
.. And so America goes to war with an extremely short-term mindset, quickly toppling the bad guys but failing to prepare for the later challenges to come. All eyes are on smiting the oppressor because this is the kind of war people want to fight. The problem is that societies like Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan are deeply traumatized by years of dictatorship, sectarian division, or civil war. Thomas Jefferson is not going to suddenly pop up when the wicked rulers are dispatched.
Is Barack Obama a nice person when there isn’t a camera around?
Senator Obama, Mrs. Obama and their two daughters were always extremely cordial and appreciative for everything that we provided them. They were engaging with us, asking us about our families and making sure that we were provided for. On numerous occasions, Mr. Obama would ask me how my wife was doing (she was pregnant with our first child), and wished her the best. I never, never saw him belittle another person, I never witnessed him do anything behind his wife’s back….. For all of my political differences with Barack Obama, I will be the first to say that he is a very decent man.
.. Please note, that was prior to his time in the Oval Office. I have not interacted with him since then, but everyone who I worked with who was affiliated with him said that he had not changed.
Obama has been disastrous for Democrats
It may be churlish to question the political acumen of the first African-American to be elected (and reëlected) President, but it is true that Obama’s tenure has been disastrous for Democrats. The Party has gone from a Senate caucus of sixty members to forty-six, and from a substantial majority in the House of Representatives to a seemingly permanent minority. In the states, Democrats have lost ten governorships and nine hundred and ten legislative seats.