Rebuild the Dream (11 page)

In 2008, then-senator Obama campaigned on the promise to end the war in Iraq. This war violated international law and was waged under false pretenses. No one will miss Saddam Hussein, but the war in Iraq was an ugly chapter in our nation's history. It cost more than $704 billion, and it cost 4,482 American soldiers' lives. In 2010, Obama announced an end to combat operations, and in 2011 he announced all combat troops would be home by Christmas. In
some ways, Obama had little choice; agreements made by the Bush administration created the exit ramp for U.S. forces. But Obama did not override those accords or take other extraordinary measures to lengthen the U.S. occupation. That said, several thousand armed, private security contractors remain in Iraq, and Congress has not rescinded the authorization for military force there. And we still have 68,000 troops in Afghanistan at the beginning of 2012.

The president repealed the discriminatory piece of legislation that had forced members of our armed services to lie about who they were. This has been a historic step toward greater freedom and equality for our sisters and brothers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor to be the U.S. Supreme Court's 111th justice. She is the court's first Latina or Hispanic justice and its third female justice.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as the healthcare bill, is remembered by those who worked on it as a bitter partisan fight that left no one feeling particularly satisfied. Many Obama supporters, in particular, felt that the president did not push hard enough for a “public option.” They felt that a government-run alternative (essentially a slight expansion of
Medicare) would provide more choice to consumers and more competition for the private insurance companies. The right wing resents the idea that American citizens are required to purchase health insurance; the left wing resents the fact that they must give their money to a private corporation to get it.

History, however, may have a slightly kinder take on some of the positive aspects of the bill. When fully implemented, it will make healthcare affordable for 32 million Americans who previously couldn't afford it. It will also ensure that no company can deny a person coverage because of preexisting conditions, a practice that the health insurance industry has long used to deny help to those who needed it most.

At the same time, any significant reform of America's health insurance system has eluded many previous presidents, including President Bill Clinton. The specific provisions of the bill, from addressing discrimination against women to making coverage available to 4.9 million children, are too numerous to comprehensively list here. It is the signature achievement of President Obama's first term.

The administration has implemented a number of reforms of and investments in every level of education. The stimulus bill saved an estimated 200,000 education jobs. The Race to the Top program has given grants to eleven states to reward those making tough choices to turn around failing schools. The administration launched
Teach.gov
, a program to recruit more top-quality teachers to our most struggling schools. All reforms in education are controversial and can trigger legitimate concerns; nonetheless, Obama has been active in trying to make our schools better serve the next generation of Americans.

President Obama made much-needed reforms to student loans programs. He eliminated subsidies to middlemen who were profiting from the government's low-interest loans to students; instead, he put those dollars into increased funding for Pell Grants. Obama also limited the amount that graduates must pay per month, based on a percentage of a graduate's income, and he extended a tax credit for tuition expenses. The reform also makes loan forgiveness more accessible for teachers, nurses, and members of our armed forces.

The stimulus bill also dedicated $80 billion to help solve our environmental problems, funding, for example, research into new battery technologies and providing loan guarantees for green businesses. It was the largest investment in the clean economy in America's history.

Under the Environmental Protection Agency's administrator Lisa Jackson, it has tightened standards for air quality, including the first-ever standards for mercury emissions. (Unfortunately, Obama's shameful September 2011 decision to delay stronger ozone air pollution standards undermines his record on air quality.) Obama also established new safety regulations on domestic petroleum production, following the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

In the fall of 2011, the administration announced a $4 billion commitment, partly by private companies and partly by the administration, to invest in energy efficiency. These investments will help adapt our buildings so that they waste less energy, while creating thousands of clean energy jobs for working-class people. Carol
Browner, Obama's top energy and environmental advisor, worked out an agreement with automakers in 2009 to raise the average fuel efficiency of American cars from 25 mpg to 30 mpg for trucks and to 39 mpg for cars. The administration later announced an agreement with the auto industry to ensure that American-made cars will nearly double their fuel efficiency by the year 2025.

In 2011, the president expanded the federal labor standards on minimum wage and overtime pay to 1.8 million in-home healthcare workers, who work round the clock to take care of our elderly. Over 90 percent of these workers are women, 30 percent are African American, and 12 percent are Latino.

Ten years after the September 11, 2001, attacks, the man responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans was finally killed. Acting on uncertain intelligence, Obama made the call to send SEAL Team Six into a walled, military compound in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden had been hiding for years. Not only did bin Laden's death eliminate a serious threat to U.S. national security, but a powerful symbolic blow was struck against violent extremism everywhere.

It is a low bar to set, but one of the most reassuring accomplishments of Obama's presidency has been that things in the federal government work as they are supposed to work. Hurricane Irene,
which made landfall along the Atlantic Coast in 2011, came and went with almost no casualties, and certainly there were no major American cities left to fend for themselves for days and weeks. Perhaps it isn't saying much that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was actually prepared for a natural disaster and responded appropriately. But after eight years of George W. Bush, we learned not to take anything for granted.

As much as Obama has accomplished, America's economy is still in very bad shape. Any solution will always be measured against the size of the problem. At the beginning of 2012, polls showed sagging confidence across the board in his ability to manage and fix the economy.

Obama's overall political skills have also come under fire, as his party lost state houses, U.S. Senate seats, and control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010.

The movement, which had been gathering strength since 2003, ran suddenly aground after Obama became president. Many of his most fervent supporters have been in a state of shock and mourning. Different groups have become disenchanted—and demobilized.

Below is a listing of the basic sources of sorrow for Obama's “post-hope” constituents:

• Labor unions broke the bank to elect Obama, but Obama and the Democrats left them high and dry on their number-one priority: the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), or card check neutrality. Labor leaders were counting on the measure
to help unions recover some of the strength they have lost over the decades.

• Civil rights advocates grumble (sometimes loudly) about a lack of attention to the African American community, much of which is in financial freefall. Immigrants' rights advocates are outraged that the rate of deportations has been higher under Obama than under Bush.

• Civil liberties stalwarts bemoan the fact that the administration has done nothing to seek accountability for abuses during the Bush era. They are dismayed that Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president. They shake their heads at the fact that Guantánamo, a disgraceful symbol of lawlessness during the Bush era, remains open as an indefinite holding center for those accused of terrorism. They are appalled that Obama signed into law a measure that allows American citizens to be detained forever without trial.

• Feminist women were happy in 2009 when the president signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to protect women against employment discrimination. But they were let down in 2011 when his administration blocked the nonprescription sale of “morning after” birth control pills.

• Climate hawks, environmentalists, and green jobs advocates were disappointed that the White House did not fight harder to pass a climate and energy bill.

Key members of the “hope and change” coalition have failed to get their needs met, and enthusiasm has waned. But no group has felt more aggrieved or let down than those who wanted Obama to
be tougher on Wall Street and to stand up to the GOP on economic policy.

From the very beginning, many Obama supporters were alarmed and dismayed by the president's decision to place Wall Street insiders Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers in key roles. For those who loved Bill Clinton but didn't like his administration's perceived coziness with high finance and corporate America, it was an alarming development. For those who supported Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton precisely because they wanted the White House go in a new direction, there was a deep sense of betrayal. A bitter assessment began to circulate in whispers among crestfallen Obama backers: “Obama had the capacity to win an election, but not to govern; Clinton had the capacity to govern, but not to win an election. So Obama's team won, and Clinton's team still got to govern.” For those who were outraged by Wall Street's recklessness and greed, the disgust was total, and the deflation was instant.

Alarm bells began to seem justified. The administration failed to hold Wall Street accountable for the fraud and misrepresentations that melted down the economy and reduced the net worth of the middle class by nearly 30 percent. During the savings and loan debacle in the 1980s and '90s, President Ronald Reagan had his Department of Justice put more than one thousand bankers in prison. Obama prosecuted none of the major banks, and none of the banksters went to jail (except a handful on unrelated insider-trading charges).

Obama didn't deal with the “too big to fail” phenomenon by insisting that the banks be broken up. In fact, the bailout of the big banks has meant even greater consolidation in the banking industry. The big banks did not use the federal bailout money to lend money to Main Street, but instead to buy up small- and mid-size
banks. Today we have an even smaller number of even bigger banks, which are even more prone in the future to bring down the economy than they were in 2007–2008. Worse yet, Obama gave the banks trillions without imposing conditions such as lending money to Main Street and limiting bonuses. In the minds of many ordinary people, there was a real moral hazard in bailing out the very people who had crashed the economy. The sense of injustice in this area hurt Obama's image as a man of high ideals, awoke grave doubts in his strongest supporters—and opened the door both to the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements.

Other positions on the economy also troubled his base. For example, Obama seemed to cheerlead for austerity by appointing the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission, pushing for $3 to $4 trillion in deficit reduction in the debt-ceiling negotiations and then agreeing to set up the so-called Super Committee. He put Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid on the deficit-reduction chopping block in the debt-ceiling negotiations. In the process, as often as not, he seemed to accept—rather than challenge—the key Republican economic theories that government spending is the root of all evil. The whole time, the Keynesians in Obama's base were screaming that a major recession was no time to cut public spending.

To make matters worse, high-ranking officials continually dismissed liberal or progressive concerns as coming from the “retards” of the “professional left.” These kinds of slights—some in public and many more in private—added to the sense of estrangement and aggrievement.

By the 2010 midterm election, the forces that had fought to elect Obama were as depressed and discouraged as they had been in the worst of the Bush years—and less well-organized. The hope bubble had burst.