Obama After One Year

The Nation asked a number of liberal-left thinkers to share their take on Obama's first year.  Here's a sampling of that opinion:

Marcia Angell, MD

President Obama's greatest success has been to show the rest of the world a new face of understanding and cooperation. Still, count me among those who are disappointed in his first year. He seems to lack the courage to push for the fundamental reforms necessary to deal with the enormous problems we face, and instead appeases the very forces that have gotten us into the mess. By appointing Geithner and Summers, for example, he ensured that Wall Street, but not Main Street, would be rescued. More dismaying, he extended Bush's policy of detaining certain terrorism suspects indefinitely, and he is well on his way to expanding the self-destructive war in Afghanistan.

As for healthcare, my area of expertise, the reform bill Obama is cobbling together wrongly retains the central role of the private insurance companies and requires millions of people to buy their products at whatever price they charge.

Katherine Newman, Princeton University

For progressives who supported John Edwards--before his personal implosion--the first year of Obama's presidency has been, more or less, what we expected. The symbolic victory of our first African-American presidency gave way to disappointment over his centrism, which comes as no great surprise, since Obama never advertised himself as a man of the left. And indeed, he isn't.

Accordingly, we should not be surprised that Obama did not bring to heel the Bush administration's Great Giveaway to the nation's banking sector. This is a travesty of the highest order, a betrayal of millions of taxpayers whose savings have been swallowed by those well-heeled Wall Street tycoons busily doing "the Lord's work."

On the plus side of the equation, and with a nod once again to the erstwhile Mr. Edwards, we have to count the deeply flawed but nonetheless historic healthcare bill. It is no panacea and may even drag the Democrats down if its benefits do not kick in before 2014. But the extension of health insurance to millions who were previously left on their own is a social policy victory.

Adolph Reed, University of Pennsylvania

In January 1996 I wrote the following about Barack Obama in my Village Voice column: "In Chicago, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program--the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics."

The only surprise about his presidency is how many ersatz leftists cling to the fiction that he's anything other than a superficially articulate neoliberal Democrat in the Clinton mold and that his administration would act in any other way.

Andrew Bacevich, Boston University

As a conservative who voted for Obama, I hoped his election would signal a clear repudiation of his predecessor's reckless and ill-advised approach to national security policy. A clear break from the past just might create the space for a principled debate about the proper direction of US policy after the cold war, after 9/11 and after the passing of the neoconservative moment.

This has turned out to be a great illusion. Obama's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan indicates that he will not break with the existing national security consensus. The candidate who promised to "change the way Washington works" has become Washington's captive. Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009, was truly a great day, for all sorts of reasons. But it's been all downhill since then.

Glenn Loury, Brown University (black conservative turned progressive)

From where I sit, the high point of President Obama's young administration was its inauguration. Much seemed possible on that glorious day, but it has been downhill since. Hope, it would appear, is more easily inspired than it is justified. And those eloquent speeches about change during Obama's historic and euphoric campaign look now to have been precisely what the candidate's detractors said they were--just words.

Specifically, my hope had been that elevating a progressive African-American Democrat to the nation's highest office would do two things: help to bring about an effective engagement with America's unresolved problems of racial inequality, and begin to reverse our headlong march toward a Hundred Years' War with radical Islam. I did not expect these things to happen overnight, but I did expect to see movement in this direction. This administration has shown scant inclination to do either, which is disappointment enough. But worse--far worse--is the likelihood that Obama's failure even to attempt such changes will discredit the very idea that these are worthy objectives for any Democrat.

Obama has said little of substance about racial inequality since moving into the Oval Office, and what he has said leaves much to be desired. His speech to the NAACP convention was a rehash of his by now familiar "family values" homily. His comments on the arrest last summer of a black Harvard professor were shockingly inept.

As for the new American militarism, Obama has not really changed the direction in which we are headed. Indeed, and ironically, his speech in Oslo accepting the Nobel Peace Prize attempted to justify American military hegemony as the necessary precondition of global security and prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century. His conduct of the "war on terror" and, most distressing, his escalation of our involvement in Afghanistan's civil war is eerily reminiscent of the approach of his immediate predecessor.

This is not change of any kind, let alone of the kind that we can believe in.

Deepak Bhargava, Center for Community Change

The healthcare bill is, for all its flaws, a momentous accomplishment. It is the first major expansion of the federal safety net since the 1960s, and not only extends coverage to more than 30 million Americans but reverses the conservative string of successes in shrinking the role of government.

On the downside, the president has put together an economic team that has delivered for Wall Street but not for hurting communities. Their caution in light of the unfolding unemployment crisis has created the conditions for a right-wing populism that could be the undoing of a progressive agenda for a generation. Unless we force Washington to reverse course and pursue a bold full-employment agenda, the window for big change could close very quickly. The president's odd decision to demobilize his base in 2009 in favor of an insider approach to governance was a colossal mistake, and underlines the critical role for independent movements to create political space.

Eduardo Galeano, Author

The highest points have been his incarnation of the fight against racism, still alive after the long battle for civil rights and his plan for healthcare reform.

The sharpest disappoints:
§ Guantánamo, a universal disgrace
§ Afghanistan, a poisoned chalice, accepted and celebrated
§ His raising of the war budget, still called, who knows why, the defense budget
§ His nonanswer to the climate and yes-man answer to Wall Street, a contradiction captured perfectly on a poster outside the Copenhagen conference: "If the climate were a bank, it would be saved"
§ His green light to the authors of the military coup
in Honduras, betraying Latin hopes for change after
a century and a half of US-fabricated coups against democracy in the name of democracy
§ His recent speeches praising war, hymns to the ongoing butcheries for oil or the sacred cause of racketeer governments, so utterly divorced from the lively words that put him where he now sits

I don't know. Perhaps Barack Obama is a prisoner. The most powerful prisoner in the world.