Man's Best Friend



Philip Collins writing in The Times makes a strong case that Barack Obama's political legacy will be remembered as successful for his achievement in delivering 'affordable health care' and that's even before President Obama's latest initiative on immigration has taken root.

I especially liked Philip's comment on Bill Clinton that the has "all the qualities of a dog except loyalty".   

Now that is funny.  

Yes he could. Obama is a truly great president

By Philip Collins - The Times

He succeeded where illustrious predecessors such as FDR, JFK and Clinton failed – and he’ll leave an impressive legacy

Everyone who was alive at the time knows where they were when John F Kennedy tried to kill them. Or at least they know where he was, which was in the White House, playing at nuclear brinkmanship with Khrushchev over the Cuban missile crisis. The reason it is hard to recall where you were whenever Bill Clinton did anything important is that he never did.

As the judgment settles that Republican control of the Senate in the mid-term elections is all the fault of a lofty professorial president, it is worth noting that, long after the mid-terms have been lost to memory, Barack Obama’s name will be attached to a more substantial body of legislation than his illustrious predecessors ever managed.

The results were, to be sure, poor for the Democrats who lost control of the Senate; and the culprit had been fingered before the results were even in. Displaying, as usual, all the qualities of a dog except loyalty, Bill Clinton told candidates to disparage the president because their terms would outlast his tenure. Democratic candidates erased the president from campaign material and Mr Obama barely featured in person. A week last Sunday, at a rally for Governor Pat Quinn back home in Chicago, Mr Obama lost his voice. It felt like an allegory as much as an ailment.

It’s not as bad as all that, even at face value. In the dreary permanent campaign of American politics, the mid-terms are more or less designed to be an unflattering referendum on a battle-weary president. The race for the Senate was concentrated in states that the president lost even when he was popular. Mr Obama does indeed have the lowest approval ratings on record, but the real story is not the unpopularity of the president; it is the unpopularity of politics itself. All politicians are loathed; Mr Obama just more so.

As it happens he is a supreme electoral politician. In 1992, with 43 per cent of the vote, Mr Clinton won only with the help of Ross Perot’s 19 per cent. Mr Obama is the first president in more than five decades to win more than 50 per cent of the electorate twice, a feat beyond even Ronald Reagan. The final verdict on a president, though, has to be about what he got done, and on this substantive measure Mr Obama stands comparison with the best.

Leave aside foreign policy, on which Mr Obama is criticised for doing exactly what he pledged, which was to tell the world to clear up its own mess, based on the insight that American intervention, however well meant, tended to make things worse. Cast in that light, ending the war in Iraq, drawing down the troops in Afghanistan and ordering the capture of Osama bin Laden looks like success. But, in any case, the main point is on the home front.

Joe Biden called it straight. When Mr Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in March 2010, the vice-president was heard to whisper by his side: “This is a big f***ing deal!’’ It really is, too. This is as good as it gets for Democrats of every vintage. Franklin D Roosevelt tried in 1944 to put health into a second Bill of Rights. Mario Cuomo asked how Hillary Clinton had made her husband so mad that he had given her the task of getting her 1,342 pages on healthcare into statute.

When he had signed the bill that did what Democrats have always wanted to do, Mr Obama made a gift of his pen to Victoria Reggie Kennedy, the widow of Ted Kennedy, who had made this legislation his life work and who had, alas, not lived to see the day. In return, Ted’s son, Patrick J Kennedy, of Rhode Island, gave the president a copy of his father’s 1970 bill to introduce national health insurance.

This is a political legacy all on its own and Mr Obama has his name on it. Ten million Americans who had no insurance before 2010 do so now. Premiums are lower than feared and the rate of the uninsured has fallen from 20 per cent to 15 per cent. Into the bargain, Obamacare has also created nine million jobs.

Which is the second part of the case for Mr Obama. The inheritance from George W Bush was awful but where Reagan inflated the deficit, Mr Obama has reduced it. The unemployment rate, which almost doubled under Mr Bush, has fallen from 10 per cent to less than 6 per cent under Mr Obama. The $800 billion pump-priming plan attracted criticism but it helped to stimulate a recovery that has been quicker than in any European nation.

Mr Obama’s grander plans for a cap-and-trade system was stymied by a Republican victory in the last mid-terms but the president’s executive addenda to existing regulations has meant that the use of renewable technologies has grown dramatically in America, fuel efficiency standards for cars and heavy vehicles are tougher and oil imports have fallen more than 10 per cent since 2010.

The president has done all this despite puerile resistance from the Republicans in Congress. Mr Obama is often denounced for being no Lyndon Johnson, the famously adept Congress tactician, but Robert Caro’s monumental three-volume study of LBJ made unlikely stars of the grown-up Republicans who were prepared to do business. Mr Obama, by contrast, has faced an opposition that has decided to protest at losing the presidency by making the country ungovernable.

Mr Obama’s critics on the right, given histrionic voice in John Bolton’s The Obama Administration’s War on America, have alighted on one truth. In the most unequal rich democracy in the world he allowed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire, and higher taxes on the rich are helping to pay for Obamacare.

Mr Obama has also won victories in the chronic culture war. His first executive act was to sign the Fair Pay Act into legislation. Two women have been appointed to the Supreme Court and Mr Obama lifted the ban on gays in the military, another cause that eluded Mr Clinton.

Mr Obama has actually done, in other words, what Democrats have before only talked of doing. The gap between the appearance and the reality is precisely because Mr Obama was such a good talker. Ascending to the White House on a wave of gorgeous sound, Mr Obama excited hopes that could never be satisfied but that should not obscure the fact that he has achieved more than the Kennedys or Clintons that British politicians so oddly revere.

It is probable that American politics after Barack Obama will restore one of the twin monarchies from the houses of Bush and Clinton. It is a mark of Mr Obama’s achievement that the best way either could seek a domestic record would be to extend the healthcare coverage that, against all odds, Mr Obama has begun.

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