During the last three decades, Bert Rockman has produced a number of edited volumes summarizing the legacies of presidential administrations. The Obama Legacy, coedited with Andrew Rudalevige, stands out as one of the most insightful works in this collection to date. One of its strengths is aptly identified in its preface. Typically, scholarly appraisals of this nature occur shortly after or even during the course of a presidency. Although that decision allows for timely assessments of an administration, the need for speed also leads to hasty and superficial evaluations. By making an editorial decision to wait until two years after the end of the Obama presidency, the authors in this volume are able to make judgments that are both measured and reflective but still relevant.
Presidents are often trapped between the expectations of their supporters and the difficult political impediments they must overcome when trying to enact major policy changes, as the Trump administration discovered when it tried unsuccessfully to get a Republican-controlled Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act. One of the key themes of this book, however, is that Obama faced both a greater level of expectations from key constituency groups than previous Democratic presidents and a higher wall of stubborn obstacles to surmount before being able to enact needed reforms.
In part, these expectations were raised by Obama’s reliance on strategic ambiguity during the 2008 campaign. As Alvin Tillery argues in his contribution to the volume, Obama often presented himself as an arbiter, not an umpire, in dealing with disputes that supporters saw as having a moral dimension. Instead of fighting consistently against systematic injustice, Obama often voiced what Tillery describes as a form of racial neoliberalism. This doctrine placed a portion of the blame, as well as the solution to the problems of racism, in the hands of the individuals who had suffered discrimination. At the same time, Obama’s approach was unlikely to persuade many of those white voters who blamed most of the ills of discrimination on individual behaviors. As Tillery points out, every presidential administration had a racial legacy. However, the starkly divided public reaction to the killing of Travon Martin and the Republicans’ ongoing attempts to roll back the Voting Rights Act were bound to be a challenge for a president who was a “racial insider,” but who also wanted to address the country’s long-standing racial issues. Tillery presents a balanced assessment of Obama’s accomplishments and shortcomings in this area.
Angela Gutierrez, Angela Ocampo, and Matt Barreto demonstrate that Obama initially faced a period of uncertainty among Latino supporters during the first years of his presidency but was eventually able to overcome this apprehension. During the 2008 campaign, he started out as unknown, but was able to win the support of a growing number of Latinos over the course of the contest. Still, many Latinos became skeptical of Obama after the initial efforts of his Department of Homeland Security to increase the number of deportations of undocumented immigrants. Obama was able to transform these misgivings into a deep well of Latino support through the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court, and his support for legislative and administrative efforts to protect undocumented young people. The resulting surge in Latino support was evident in his 2012 election and is likely an enduring part of the political landscape.
The tension between these political expectations and the ability of the Republican congressional opposition to thwart the administration’s legislative initiatives did create a number of political dilemmas for Obama. Although better bargaining skills may have helped, Molly Reynolds demonstrates that Republican legislative opposition and institutional gridlock made securing an effective legislative majority impossible. In response, Rudalevige argues that after the 2010 midterm elections the Obama administration relied to a greater degree on unilateral mechanisms to implement many of the measures necessary to deliver on the president’s promises to his supporters. Although previous Republican presidents had used this approach, prior Democratic administrations had been more reluctant to do so (William F. West, “Presidential Leadership and Administrative Coordination: Examining the Theory of a Unified Executive,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2006). Sharece Thrower makes a convincing argument that, although some attempts were made to promote the reach of the Executive Office, these uses of executive power fell well short of what critics charged was happening and were often less expansive than those efforts of previous presidents. Although this method of policy making had some short-term successes, it also left many of these policies vulnerable to repeal by the incoming Trump administration.
One of the most daunting challenges facing editors is the dilemma of confronting an almost infinite number of world-altering events when covering an entire presidency and its legacy while possessing a finite amount of space. Even so, more space could have been used to cover the trade-off between the administration’s usage of political capital during the first two years to enact the Affordable Care Act and its inability to mount a more concerted effort to fight for a more robust economic stimulus. On the one hand, as Joe Biden was famously overheard saying, the passage of the ACA was “a big f---ing deal” of historical importance. On the other hand, an inadequate stimulus that was seen to ignore the middle class may have arguably been a factor in the decline in white working-class support from 2008 to 2012. Still, Alyssa Julian and John Graham provide a useful summary of the domestic policy legacies of the Obama presidency, especially the challenges of implementing the ACA.
Julia Azari crafts a concise chapter that skillfully summarizes Obama’s efforts at building the Democratic Party in a country with both institutionally weaker parties and growing partisan polarization. She points to a number of instances, such as the shift in control of the political group, Organizing for America, from the Democratic Party to the White House, as examples of how Obama embraced the presidentialization of this organization. Azari also addresses the cost of this approach to other officeholders and to the party’s electoral future.
Because of limited space, little material explicitly addresses Obama’s long-term effect on the Republican Party, such as the electoral surge and eventual decline of the Tea Party, as well as the GOP’s efforts to oppose the first African American president in a country with an increasingly diverse electorate. One can argue that, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, Obama had the greatest effect on an opposition party’s future direction of any president since Franklin Roosevelt. Although some of the internal changes in the GOP were caused by the failures of the Bush administration, it can be argued that Obama had less of a long-term effect on his own party than he did on the opposition, especially as the Republican Party’s electoral support seems to have shifted from its traditional upper-middle-class base to a party that ran better among the white working class, particularly in the 2018 midterm elections.
In many ways, scholars have fruitlessly searched for the next reconstructive presidential regime (Stephen Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal, 2008). Although Obama’s presidency does not meet Skowronek’s standards, his effect on reshaping the opposition party is certainly worthy of greater reflection. This volume presents a balanced and nuanced overview of the legacies of the Obama presidency. Even though Obama’s presidency was not a reconstructive one, this volume demonstrates why it will be one whose accomplishments and failures will have an impact that will shape US politics for decades.
