I have written several articles on President Obama. A list of the links has been provided at the bottom of this article for your convenience. This article, however, will address various aspects of President Obama’s life. The links have been provided at the bottom of this article for your convenience.

Barack Obama: One America’s Worst Presidents?

February 5, 2024

By: Peter Suciu

During President Barack Obama’s eight years in office, it was common to see a variation of the Old Glory flag of the United States where the stars in the blue field were replaced with Obama’s face. And yet, it was just as common to see bumper stickers that infamously proclaimed “Obama: One Big *** Mistake America.”

Clearly, there were those who were fans of the former president just as there were those who opposed him and all of his policies. Today, there are, not surprisingly, those who see him as one of America’s greatest presidents and those who view him as one of the worst.

A Bad President? How Bad?

There have certainly been cases made that Barack Obama was among the worst presidents in U.S. history – but that overlooks such former commander-in-chiefs as Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, and John Tyler.

Nixon, of course, is remembered today for Watergate, while his normalizing of relations with China is largely an afterthought; likewise, Hoover’s mishandling of the early years of the Great Depression overshadowed his “Good Neighbor Policy” that improved relations with Latin America. 

Tyler, on the other hand, was a slave owner who went on to serve in the Confederate House of Representatives!

Warren G. Harding would likely be the president most remembered for scandal, was Nixon not elected! Harding was a womanizing poker player whose administration is best remembered for its litany of corruption and scandals.

History has yet to truly judge Donald Trump, but those indictments aren’t exactly helping his legacy.

Barack Obama a Lame Duck From 2010

A case could be made that while the Obama administration was largely scandal-free, President Barack Obama also didn’t really do all that much. After the passage of the Affordable Care Act – commonly referred to as Obamacare – Obama largely became a caretaker president. 

It wasn’t entirely his fault, of course.

As Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institute noted in 2018 while looking back at the legacy of Obama, “By 2010 Obama’s fate was sealed. In the midterm elections, Republicans ran on the slow recovery, the perception that the stimulus package favored Wall Street, not Main Street, and the Democrats’ tone-deaf obsession with the health care bill. They easily took control of the House, picking up sixty-three seats—the biggest midterm election gains for the out party since 1938. And from then on, the Obama presidency struggled under a radicalized Republican Party.”

Obama’s Foreign Policy – His Biggest Failing?

When future historians look back at the Obama legacy, what might be most remembered is his failure with foreign policy. It is true that Obama inherited what has been described as an “awful mess,” which included the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, instead of finding a way to win them, he sought to end them by any means.

He further dismissed the Islamic State (ISIS) as the “JV team,” and within a few years, they evolved from relative obscurity to the world’s most brutal terrorist network. 

During a 2012 presidential primary, Obama won praise for a “zinger” delivered at GOP candidate Mitt Romney who had suggested Russia was “without question, our number one geopolitical foe.”

Obama stated somewhat smugly, “Gov. Romney, I’m glad you recognize al-Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what is the biggest geopolitical group facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida. You said Russia. And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War has been over for 20 years. But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policy of the 1950s, and the economic policies of the 1920s.”

Fast forward a decade, to February 2022, as Russia prepared to invade Ukraine, and CNN offered the headline, “It’s time to admit it: Mitt Romney was right about Russia.” Moreover, it was also under Obama’s watch that Russia illegally annexed Crimea and engaged in a proxy war with Ukraine in the Donbas.

Moreover, China continued to expand its presence in the South China Sea.

Finally, while Obama promised to lead “the most transparent administration in history,” it actually proved to be the least transparent, and until Trump, the Obama White House was the most antagonistic toward the media since Nixon.

Whether all that will put Obama on future “worst” lists has yet to be seen.

ASSESSING OBAMA’S PRESIDENCY

JANUARY 15, 2012

TOM PUTNAM:  Good afternoon.  I am Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.  On behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation,  and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues I thank you for coming and braving the arctic air which always seems a bit colder between our  parking lot and front door.  Let me begin by acknowledging the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation, and our media partners the Boston Globe and WBUR. 

I‟ve spent a portion of my weekend reading our two panelists books on Barack Obama.  In Obamanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era, Hendrick Hertzberg chronicles the once in a lifetime campaign of 2008 in which the nation elected its first African American president who was also a progressive.  He concludes his book with The New Yorker’s endorsement of Obama – signed „the editors,” though Mr. Hertzberg and David Remnick were the principal drafters.  Let me read a short excerpt:  “We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy.  And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential.  At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness.  It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe.  That leader‟s name is Barack Obama.” Jonathan Alter‟s book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One picks up where Mr. Hertzberg‟s leaves off.  The book is generally laudatory of our 44^th President‟s first days in office, though concludes more cautiously:

“Obama‟s leadership will look good if he succeeds in bringing down unemployment and flawed if he fails to do so with foreign policy a political loser only if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on or he mishandles a crisis.  The political repercussions of the enactment of health care reform could take years to play out.”

We gather today as some of Mr. Alter‟s projections two years ago unfold in a highly charged political environment – and the question before us stems directly from the title of the book – what happened to The Promise – and why does it not feel like we are living in the Promised

Land?  I can‟t imagine two individuals who I would rather listen to on this crucial topic.

Jonathan Alter is an award winning author, reporter, columnist, and television analyst.  He spent 28 years at Newsweek and is currently a contributing correspondent to Bloomberg View, NBC News, and MSNBC.   My favorite anecdote is the story he shares in the acknowledgements of his volume on FDR‟s famous first 100 days in office: President Roosevelt, The Defining Moment.  While writing that book he discovered a school report he wrote in 1968 at age 11 in which he penned “FDR was an amazing man and a great president because he knew what he was doing.  He was not physically strong but his spirit was.”  For anyone who doesn‟t have time to read the book, Mr. Alter writes in his acknowledgements, “That‟s all you need to know.”  But I urge you to make the time to read it for it is a thoroughly engaging work of history.

Hendrick Hertzberg was last at the Kennedy Library on the day it was dedicated and officially opened by President Jimmy Carter.  In fact, Mr. Hertzberg crafted the speech that President Carter delivered on that day.   Since 1992, he has been a staff writer and editor at The New

Yorker where he also worked in the 1970s before becoming President Carter‟s chief speechwriter.   He is a former naval officer and an award-winning editor of The New Republic.  Allow me to read an excerpt from the introduction of Obamanos! about his political views and why he is proud to call himself a liberal which will likely help endear him to many in today‟s audience.

“I value political liberty and political rights more highly than economic liberty and economic rights.  I‟m in favor of progressive taxation and generous public provision of education, pensions, and health care.  I reject the idea that the market is the singular bedrock of society.  I want government to do something about environmental degradation and gross social and economic inequality.  I‟m a secularist and a supporter of equal rights for women and gays.  And when it comes to wanting world peace, I‟m practically a Miss America contestant.”  

And while having a Robert F. Kennedy 1968 campaign poster still hanging in your living room is a not a requirement to speak as part of our forum series, knowing this is the case for Mr. Hertzberg makes it especially sweet to welcome him back to the Library accompanied today by his wife and son.

Our moderator this afternoon is Renee Loth, who served as the Editorial Page Editor of The Boston Globe for nine years, during which she was the highest ranking woman at the Globe.  She is currently the editor of Architecture Boston, the quarterly “ideas” journal published by the Boston Society of Architects, and while we miss her daily editorial voice she remains an occasional guest columnist for the Globe.

Barack Obama has often been compared to John F. Kennedy, and I still recall the day when literally hundreds of students and neighbors gathered in this hall to watch President Obama‟s inauguration, recognizing the historic nature of that event.  Yet, I am also reminded of the quote that one of President Kennedy‟s advisors, Richard Neustadt, shared in 1961 with historian William Leuchtenberg.  “The Kennedy Presidency will be many things, but the New Jerusalem will not be one of them.”  Later that year President Kennedy quipped, “The only thing that really surprised us when we got into office was that things were just as bad as we had been saying they were (in the campaign); otherwise we have been enjoying ourselves very much.”  

I‟ll let our panelists comment on how much President Obama is enjoying himself and how much worse the situation was that he inherited compared to what he described to us in the last campaign.  [laughter]  And so without further ado, to provide an assessment of the presidency of

Barack Obama and his prospects for re-election, please join me in welcoming Jonathan Alter, Hendrick Hertzberg, and Renee Loth to the Kennedy Library.  [applause]

RENEE LOTH:  Thank you. Thanks Tom. Thanks everybody for coming out on this day in which winter has finally arrived in Boston. And it’s a winter of discontent for many Americans in society today, who share a kind of economic insecurity, exceeded only by their disgust at Washington’s apparent inability to do anything about it.

I was thinking about this Forum – and I was at the Inauguration of President Obama on an also very chilly day three years ago – and thinking about the historic realignment that many of us thought we were observing at the time – southern and western states that had voted Democratic for the first time in decades, even 30% of evangelical Christians said they had voted for Barack Obama. Of course, that might be sort of like all the people who say they were at Woodstock who really weren’t. [laughter] So for a while it was really kind of fashionable to have voted for President Obama. And all of that seems just so fragile today. We’re here this afternoon to assess the Presidency of President Obama and his first term. I can’t imagine two better people to do it with. I, too, have an excerpt to read, and I hope all of you know that Jonathan Alter’s book has a new epilogue. Although it is mostly about the first year of President Obama’s term, it’s terrifically relevant today. 

But the brief reading that I wanted to open up with is from Rick Hertzberg, which was in The New Yorker in October in one of the “Talk of the Town” pieces. I almost hesitate to open with this because it kind of says it all and we can just all go home after I read it, but I’m sure we’ll find some other things to talk about. He says:

“Obama took the oath of office determined to change the way things were done in Washington, by which he meant a turn toward civility, comity, cooperation, and mutual respect – honest debate and earnest, public-spirited compromise. He did not grasp how profoundly the transformation of the Republican Party into a disciplined, nearly monolithic agent of radical reaction and ruthless obstruction – a transformation that has only accelerated since that day – had changed things already.”  And then he says: “Chronically, within the White House and on Capitol Hill, Obama sought consensus as a starting point – the tranquility of resolution without the catharsis of conflict.”

Very well put, I think. So my question to you, gentlemen, both of you, and maybe we could start with Rick, I think there’s ample evidence that Obama’s quest for compromise and bipartisanship and civility has been a failure. But was it also a mistake?

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  That’s a really great question. I don’t think it was a mistake. I think it was a kind of inevitability, given his character, given his temperament, given where he was coming from and where he thought he was going. I think he had to make that his opening bid, as it were. He couldn’t have gone right to the fight. 

I thought that he was doing it largely for tactical reasons, and I’ve become persuaded that he actually meant it and that this really is a firm, solid part of his character, his temperament, his personality. He’s turning to the fight now. I think he’s given that approach every opportunity, every chance, and it hasn’t worked in the sense that there was not a negotiating partner, there was not someone to compromise with that was at all inclined to compromise. 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a failure. He still represents something that people want and would like to have. If they can’t see it, if they can’t see past the rhetoric of false equivalents and equal blame and the idea that it’s Washington that’s to blame – that there’s this entity called Washington that is against compromise, that is dug in, that doesn’t care about the public interest – if he can get over that hump and, as Jonathan– the other thing that says it all is what Jonathan said in the bit that you read, 70 or 80% of this is going to depend on events beyond anyone’s control and beyond the President’s control.

RENEE LOTH:  Do you agree, Jonathan, that it was in President Obama’s DNA to be a compromiser and really there was no other way he could have approached his first term, even given the intransigence of the other side?

JONATHAN ALTER:  Yes. I remember during the campaign he said to me in South Carolina, just before the South Carolina primary four years ago, that basically what he brought to the party was taking people who seemed to have nothing in common and finding common ground. He actually, contrary to some of the spin, he actually did have some real achievements in the Illinois State Senate where he did that. He got unanimous support for a bill, for instance, requiring videotaping of police interrogations. And all these Republicans who are super hard-line, got together with ACLU types and they found common ground and worked out a bill.

He felt that that’s what he had been doing in his personal life, because he’s so different from so many of the people that he went to school with, he grew up with, was bridging gaps between people, and he thinks that that’s what his gift is. He had not been a gifted speaker as recently as when he first started running for the US Senate; his speeches were not particularly well regarded. He thought that his gift as a politician and as an individual was bringing people together.  So I think it was terribly disheartening to him to find that that wasn’t going to be possible. One of the things that I explore in my book is when he realized that that was going to happen. And one of the amazing things is, he understood it very, very early on, but continued, both for political reasons and for these personal reasons, to stick with consensus and compromise for much too long.

But it wasn’t as if he was naïve about it. At the very beginning of the Administration, you remember that the stimulus, $787 billion stimulus. There’s been a lot of foolish argument, to my mind, particularly on the Left, that somehow this was insufficient. I think Drew Westen said that this was the cardinal sin, that the stimulus wasn’t big enough. It was three times as large as what Ed Rendell, Mr. Infrastructure, thought was possible at the time and as much as the political process could bear.  

He decided in the second week of his Presidency that in order to make it bipartisan, the way the Reagan economic plan had been bipartisan in 1981, that he would go to Capitol Hill, do something that may even be unprecedented – I’m not sure anybody’s researched it – but go to Capitol Hill as the sitting President and meet just with the other party. So he went up and Joe Biden met with the Senate Republicans, Obama met with the House Republicans. Before the meeting, when he was on the way over, he learned that John Boehner had instructed the Republican caucus that there would be no negotiation, there would be no deal-cutting with the new President about his economic plan and that they were all going to be against it. So he felt like he was wasting his time, but he went ahead with the meeting anyway. 

Well, why did Boehner do that? There’s a tendency on the Left to say, Well, it’s because they’re big, bad Republicans and they’re evil. The President told me when I interviewed him in 2009 and asked, “What’s the biggest surprise of your Presidency?” He said, “The biggest surprise is I thought that they would have more interest in governing.” And that was a kind of mild way of framing – my answer was, I thought they would be more patriotic. I mean, the country was losing close to a million jobs a month, we were headed for another Great Depression, and they decided to pick up their marbles and leave.  But my point on that is that it was entirely rational for the Republicans. Obama understood this. If they had joined with him in rescuing the country on the stimulus and it had succeeded and the economy had come roaring back, Obama would have gotten all the credit. If they had joined with him and the economic program had failed, they would have shared the blame. So if they had all voted for the stimulus, or a large number of them, they would now have a much harder time making the argument that Obama’s to blame for the economy.

If they opposed him and the stimulus worked, then they would be screwed anyway, because he would be easily reelected. But if they opposed him and they could make it seem that the stimulus failed, they would have a route back into power. So it was a very simple equation for them to do what they do. And he understood it immediately and he understood immediately that the Tea Party and everything that followed came out of those decisions in the very early days of his Presidency.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Jon, I’m curious. Do you think that his experiences during the transition and even before the election when the TARP and the bailout all happened, and there was that meeting where he and McCain came … The TARP and the bailout, after all, were passed with huge bipartisan support, and he and Bush were sort of aligned in a way during that period – that may have also strengthened his notion that that kind of cooperation might continue after his Inauguration. Do you think there’s anything to that?

JONATHAN ALTER:  Yes, I guess that makes sense. TARP was in two what they call tranches, which is a fancy way of saying sort of two phases, each of $350 billion. The first one went through under Bush and the second $350 billion was passed during the transition, in January of 2009. Obama had to lobby to make that happen, and he told me later that he knew it was “suicidal,” because he knew that these bailouts would be toxic. So I think he knew that everybody would be running for cover afterward.

Where I think he failed was — since he did know this and sensed that this was the way things were moving — he didn’t use his fantastic campaign organization from 2008, Obama For America, to build some counter force to the Tea Party. So in August of 2009, when these members of Congress would go to these town meetings, they were only seeing the Right Wing.

Where were the Obama people?

He said in 2008, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Well, we didn’t show up. And so there was clearly a fight by the summer of 2009, but only one side showed up. Everybody else believed in the magic wand theory of Presidential leadership: “Oh, I voted for Barack Obama, we elected him. He can now wave a magic wand and we can go on Miller Time. We did our work, we got him in there. It’s his time now to deliver.”

Well, that’s not the way politics works. They had all the energy, and I blame David Plouffe, the whole organization. They were tired from the campaign, but they did not keep it going. They had 13 million names in their database; they’re now using them to get him reelected, but they should have used them to push the agenda. 

Just very quickly, having said that, JFK had a Democratic Congress; Obama had a Democratic Congress. Obama’s record – this is why the word failure I have some problems with – Obama’s record on Capitol Hill just leaves JFK in the dust. He got a huge amount of legislation through, and the only one in modern times who’s been close is Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Nothing’s happened in the last two years of his first term, but the first two years were enormously productive. 

RENEE LOTH:  You mentioned earlier the sort of Left critique of the Obama Administration so far and here we are in Boston, so why not talk about that? There’s a website that I sort of like that can’t be named in a family forum, but it’s what the blank has Obama done for me lately. You click on it and it’s just one after another incredible achievements of the Administration. I think you said in your latest edition of your book that something like 500 of the 600 promises that Obama made on the campaign trail have actually been kept.  This website just says Head Start, funding for Pell grants, all the stimulus, every individual thing practically, the first Latina appointed to the Supreme Court, ending the gag rule for family planning overseas, one after another after another. And at the bottom it says “big deal, what else?” And you click again, “so, what else?” and you click again. It’s really a great website for people who are feeling kind of down about the Presidency.  So my question becomes then, why is there this pervasive sense that nothing has been accomplished? Is it just because the last two years have been so difficult? Why are so many liberals disappointed?

JONATHAN ALTER:  It’s interesting. Not that long before the Kennedy assassination – I think the week before – James Reston wrote a column on what a mediocre President John F. Kennedy was. The Left – how do I put this politely? – I think the Left has a whining problem [laughter] and it has for many, many years. 

When I was researching the Roosevelt book, the Left was very unhappy, for instance, with the Social Security Act of 1935. They were right in the same way that people were right, that the healthcare bill should have had a public option, that the Social Security Act was a racist bill, that it excluded all occupations that African Americans held, it insured fewer than half of seniors. Roosevelt had made all sorts of other concessions to Southern conservatives and in his own party. He hadn’t been able to pull his own party along with him for the really ambitious version of the Social Security Act. But he understood that you have to start somewhere, in the same way Obama did with healthcare and that change is hard and it’s a process.

I don’t know if it’s because of their idealism – I should say “our” because I consider myself a liberal – our idealism, our faith in the power of the government to improve people’s lives, or whatever it is, but there’s a kind of persistent naïveté about the real world of politics that I think has sapped energy on the Left for many years. 

RENEE LOTH:  It’s also, though, a revolution of rising expectations, right?

JONATHAN ALTER:  Yes, good point.

RENEE LOTH:  We just felt – I don’t mind saying “we” – just felt that this was our moment. 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Well, there’s a cult of the Presidency, too. And the Left, which is very good at looking at how systems work in the economy and how the incentives are perverse and lead to income inequality and all of that, and very good at looking at those structures, but not at the structure of the kind of governance that we have. A presidential campaign is always an exercise in setting up the public for disappointment. You don’t run for President by saying, “And if elected, I will try to enact a healthcare program that won’t be that great. I’m afraid we probably won’t be able to get the public option. We’re going to have to buy off the pharmaceutical industry. It’s going to be ugly and dirty and once it’s done, you’ll still have all the bureaucratic forms to fill out, all that awful stuff you have with your health insurance company, but, by heaven, we are going to accomplish this halfway goal.” [laughter] Nobody votes for a candidate who says that.  You set out a vision and that vision is, of necessity, beyond accomplishment.  Then this is subjected to our system of democracy, which is unique in the developed world in having so many veto points, where moneyed interests and well-organized interests can stop action. And they stop action. 

It’s kind of a miracle that we got what we got after all these years, that we finally joined as a very junior, misbehaving member of the club of advanced countries that have more or less universal – or we will if the bill isn’t repealed – healthcare. That’s kind of a miracle, given our system. 

But the Left still has this notion – and the Right has it, too; it’s just that the Right doesn’t really want to do anything domestically. The President has a lot of power in foreign policy, so he can get things done there by himself. But the Left has a notion that it’s the President and if it doesn’t happen, it’s the President’s fault. And the Left has been disappointed in every Democratic President, whether they deserve it or not. We can argue over whether they deserved it. I come from a family … my parents always voted for Norman Thomas; they never voted for FDR. [laughter] FDR wasn’t pure enough. Of course, there was never any danger that Norman Thomas would do a Ralph Nader and deprive Roosevelt of a majority.  The weaknesses in our system, which is my obsession, some day a President will be able to – it’s usually an ex-President that has to do it – be able to educate the public about this basic reality and we can start doing something about it. 

RENEE LOTH:  You mentioned the moneyed interests in our system and how they pervert any kind of effort at government reform. I don’t want to be too woulda/coulda/shoulda in this discussion, but a number of people have suggested that President Obama shoulda, before healthcare, either taken on financial sector reform because that’s where the energy and anger was in the country at the time he took office, or, maybe better, tried to do some kind of campaign finance reform that would have diminished, or maybe not eliminated, certainly, but diminished the influence of the special interest money in diminishing the power of the healthcare bill. 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  I think no. I think if Obama had given up on healthcare at any point, including at that last minute, as Jonathan reports, when he went against Rahm Emanuel, when he went against his advisors and said, “We’re going to go and do this,” had he done that at any point, he would have lost the Left in a way that would make this look like a day at the beach.

There was no way. He had to do this.

The idea that there was a kind of binary choice – is he going to do healthcare or is he going to do the economy – I think that’s false.

JONATHAN ALTER:  A couple of things. First is, he tried to lower expectations during the campaign. He’s very conscious of what you rightly call this revolution of rising expectations program. So the actual promise in 2008 is, “By the end of my term, we will pass healthcare and finally deal with this problem.” So he actually got it past after his first year, so he’s three years early on fulfilling that promise.  Neither he nor anybody else used the phase or raised the idea of a public option. No candidate, not a single time in the 2008 campaign discussed a public option.

It was something that came up in 2009. So it was all in sort of these gauzy terms.

For the reasons that you say, he simply couldn’t have done it in a different order. They did the stimulus first, so they really did do the economy first. Financial reform, I would argue they should have moved up and pushed to use their leverage when they had it. One of my big criticisms of them is that they didn’t do it in early 2009 when they had the chance. But it should have been done on a parallel.  The issue was not sort of either/or, but could they have tried to do both at the same time and pushed Barney Frank and Chris Dodd to move faster, get this thing through, let’s try to use our leverage while we have it.

I think that’s a legitimate argument. But if they had put off healthcare, like when I asked him … Rahm Emanuel had told me, “I begged the President not to do healthcare.” His other advisors, Joe Biden said do the economy first. And so I asked him, “Why did you do it in year one?” And he said, “Well, I told Nancy Pelosi I’d probably go down 15 points in the polls,” which he did,

“and that I might jeopardize my reelection if I did this.” 

So I asked, “Okay, Mr. President, why’d you do it?” And he said, “Because if we didn’t do it then, it would not have happened for another generation. It was now or never.”

So in that sense, he understood the historical moment. Where he didn’t understand the historical moment was on this financial reform business. To me, one of the least covered and most important votes of the last few years was the vote on something called cramdown legislation — which is a terrible name for a bill that was sponsored by his friend and former colleague, Senator Durbin of Illinois — that would allow banks to renegotiate mortgages and the terms of mortgages in the private housing market the way they do in the commercial real estate market. The Administration was for it, but didn’t really fight for it because Geithner and Summers thought the banks were still too fragile in early 2009. If they had done it, it would have incentivized the banks to renegotiate a lot of these mortgages and the economy and the housing market would be in much better shape today.

The banking industry, as Durbin explained it to me, “owns the Senate.” So they prevented this bill from getting through; it didn’t even come all that close. But if they had tackled housing and raised that to a point where everybody in this room knew about it, maybe they could have built the public pressure to do it and we would be in a different place. But housing is the great failure, to my mind, of the Administration.

RENEE LOTH:  You mentioned the evil twins, Summers and Geithner. [laughter] Do either of you have some insight about why they were appointed to run the economy at that moment, the beginning of the Administration?

JONATHAN ALTER:  First of all, I think that there’s been too much venom directed at them because they did some things wrong, but they also did some things that were hugely right and saved the country from another Great Depression. Geithner had a kind of mind-meld with Obama when they met at the W Hotel in the fall of 2008 for the first time. They were born just a few days apart. Geithner’s father was at the Ford Foundation and actually knew Obama’s mother. I mean, that can be overestimated in its importance but it’s a small indication of a bond that they developed. They’re both younger. Geithner, contrary to his reputation, did not come from Wall Street. He had been in government and was of a more academic frame of mind. They saw the world in a lot of the same ways.  Geithner was at the center of the rescue as president of the New York Fed, and Obama didn’t feel like, given his lack of experience, that he could bring in somebody from St. Louis who had not been deeply enmeshed in the crisis, that there were too many decisions that had to be made too quickly to not get somebody who really knew what he was doing. That’s the way Obama felt.

Summers had been, in his columns in the Financial Times, moving significantly left from where he had been in the Clinton Administration and is often the brightest guy in the room. People might resent him personally for one thing or another, but it’s hard to take anything away from his intellect. So in these meetings they would have in the summer and fall of 2008, he was completely on top of all the nuances of this historic crisis that the country was facing.  And Summers had been Treasury Secretary, so when Obama decided not to make him Treasury Secretary again because it would have been too many Clinton retreads – he already had Hillary and others – then Summers could write his own ticket. So the great mistake was putting him – arguably, Summers did something kind of patriotic; he took a staff job, head of the National Economic Council in the White House, after he’d been Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard.  But having done that, he got to be both the gatekeeper and the chief economic advisor, and he put his own spin on the ball. That is not what that job is supposed to be. That person is supposed to be an honest broker so the President gets a wide array of economic advice. Summers short-circuited that process and he really ultimately hurt Obama in not opening him up to enough ideas. 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  I’d agree with that.

RENEE LOTH:  Shutting out Volcker in all of this.

JONATHAN ALTER:  Yeah, shutting out Volcker, which for anybody who’s interested in that, I talked to Volcker about and have details on. 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Yeah, and people like me – or certainly me, anyway – would have liked to have seen Volcker be Secretary of the Treasury. But I think you’re absolutely right about this sort of mind-meld. This is an instant friendship between them. Making all those decisions, these cascading horrors that are caving in on everyone, to have this sort of great stone statue of Paul Volcker at the other end of the phone when you were doing this, it’s a very different thing from having this guy who shares all the sort of cultural affinity with you and this vibe.

JONATHAN ALTER:  They just thought that Volcker was too old; it wasn’t any more complicated that that. I think he was 81, and it’s a 24/7 job in the middle of a crisis.

RENEE LOTH:  Rick, you mentioned foreign policy at the beginning and some of the achievements that President Obama has made there. He got us out of Iraq. He managed to capture and kill Osama bin Laden. He’s riding herd over an unbelievably fractious world. I have two questions about foreign policy. One is does he not get the credit he deserves in this arena? And two, will it be enough of a campaign issue? We might as well segue right into some campaign talk. At a time when the economy so dominates, is there room or an in for foreign policy discussion?

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Basically, it’s either neutral or it’s a loser. The last president or candidate who got anything positive out of foreign policy was probably Eisenhower, and he didn’t get it for anything he did when he was President; he got it for winning the war in Europe. It’s just not at the center of things. It’s a place where disaster lurks, but there aren’t a whole lot of rewards. 

The decision he made, that incredible gutsy move that he made in the commando raid on bin Laden, that took me back to Jimmy Carter and the very, almost identical decision that he made, and what Obama was risking there was what Carter risked. Can you imagine if that mission had ended up a failure and a fiasco, which if you read the account of it, it came quite close to happening all through.  So that was decisiveness. I think he actually has gotten a lot out of it in a sort of negative way. You can point to it, as so many people can understand.  They can understand that it was gutsy and that it was decisiveness, and that it was in our national interest, and it accomplished a large part of what the wars that Bush launched did not accomplish. So it kind of brings him up to a level where he has a fighting chance. 

JONATHAN ALTER:  I defer to Rick on almost everything because I’m, at best, Rico Petrocelli to his Carl Yastrzemski [laughter] as a political analyst. But I actually think it’s more important than that — not in a direct way, something to brag about necessarily, but at the more subtextual level of presidential politics. Not only does it make it easier to defend against the charge that he’s another Jimmy Carter — which is what the Republicans would like to use — but it kind of checkmates them on what traditionally has been one of their great issues on the Right. So you see Romney is trying it; he’s calling him an appeaser. It’s not working. And he’ll try that all year long, but it’s not really drawing blood. I think if he hadn’t gotten bin Laden, it would have been much easier for them to open up a whole new front in their campaign.  So foreign policy’s great defense for Obama this year. 

RENEE LOTH:  To me, there was nothing more Obama-esque than when after getting bin Laden, he said, “We don’t want to spike the football,” just to continue the sports metaphor.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Yeah and in that interview where he said, “Mr. President, when you saw the pictures of bin Laden, what were your feelings?” and his answer was, “It was him.”

RENEE LOTH:  “It was him,” right.

JONATHAN ALTER:  You know where part of that … This is pure speculation, but Obama likes George H. W. Bush; he doesn’t have much use for his son, but he likes the father. And going back to the campaign, he has said nice things about his foreign policy and one of the best things that George H. W. Bush did is, during the reunification of Germany — which could have gone very badly — he passed up several efforts to spike the football on winning the Cold War. It made that whole period in 1989/’90 go much more smoothly than it might have otherwise. There was not a triumphalist note that he played that whole time. 

RENEE LOTH:  I’m speculating here, but I suspect that if bin Laden’s capture and murder had occurred during George Bush’s Presidency, he would have spiked the football.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Oh, yeah. Just a guess. [laughter]

RENEE LOTH:  And then you were speaking of how it hasn’t really helped presidents, except for going back to Eisenhower, I actually think that President Bush was helped in his reelection campaign by the fact that we were enmeshed in this incredible war and don’t change generals in the middle of a stream, and so on.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  I meant foreign policy successes. 

RENEE LOTH:  Oh, I see! [laughter]

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  I guess sometimes foreign policy failures can help you.

RENEE LOTH:  In a few minutes, maybe about five minutes, we’re going to take some questions from the audience. I just want everybody to get prepared. 

JONATHAN ALTER:  Are they supposed to go to the microphones?

RENEE LOTH:  Are there microphones out there? Somebody will be able to identify. 

This is sort of going back to the beginning of the discussion, about Obama’s urge for compromise that is in his DNA. I’m reminded of something that President Clinton said to me.  Bill Clinton said to me when he was trying to get the Globe editorial page to endorse Hillary in the primary against Obama in 2008 — we did not; we endorsed Barack Obama — but he was saying that Hillary would have been a stronger candidate against Republican attacks because she understood that the Republicans will use your greatest strength against you, not your weaknesses, not go after your weaknesses. And he was thinking of John Kerry and how his heroism in Vietnam was used against him during the Swift boating. He was saying Hillary understands they’ll use your greatest strength against you. 

It sort of feels like that‟s what’s happening because you said that Obama thinks his greatest gift is his ability to compromise; that was his greatest political gift. In a way the Republicans are using his greatest strength against him. 

JONATHAN ALTER:  It’s an approach to politics that was pioneered by Karl Rove. He believes, and all of his campaigns are characterized by going against his opponents’ greatest strength, rather than exploiting their weakness. I don’t think that’s what happened this time, because these obstructionists and Tea Party folks who got elected in the pivotally important 2010 midterms, which are as important as many presidential elections in American history, I don’t think they were taking tactical advice from Karl Rove. They just came out of a place where it got to the point where John Boehner said on 60 Minutes after the election that he didn’t believe in the word compromise, didn’t like to even use the word compromise. And so that was reflecting what those freshmen were thinking.

Interestingly, the tactic is now being used by the Democrats most conspicuously. So Mitt Romney’s calling card is that he knows from the private sector how to create jobs because of his experience at Bain. He’s not running on his experience as governor of Massachusetts; it’s his experience at Bain. So the Democrats, even before Newt Gingrich picked up on it, had been planning for months to go right at that strength, that perceived strength.  So they got going on it this past week, earlier than they anticipated, but they’re taking a leaf from the Rove playbook. 

RENEE LOTH:  Will that continue to help the Democrats in the general election, that attack on Bain and Romney’s … 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  I don’t see why it shouldn’t. I’m not sure how they would have gone if Obama’s greatest strength was a sort of tropism for compromise.  How would they exactly go about going after that? Would they say, “He’s compromising with us too much.” [laughter] They’re saying he’s a radical who must be stopped at all costs — which if the Left starts believing, then he’s going to get reelected.

JONATHAN ALTER:  An example of a dopey way in which they tried to go after his strength, which I would argue is even a racially tinged way, is supposedly he has this great strength as a speechmaker, giving great speeches. I personally think that’s overrated and that it’s one of the big myths about him. He doesn’t use enough sound bites and memorable phrases to frame arguments, so his speeches are like Chinese food; they wear off after a couple hours. [laughter]

But he’s perceived to have this great strength as a speaker. So in order to go after his strength, very early in 2009 they start attacking him for using a teleprompter. When you think about it, what was that about? I mean, the guy has held more interviews than any recent President. He speaks extemporaneously all the time. The idea that he has to rely on a teleprompter, what are they trying to say? On one level, they’re going after his strength; on another level, they’re saying, what?  He’s not smart enough to be unscripted? I don’t know. I guess that’s what they’re trying to say. And could the reason he’s not smart enough have anything to do with his race? Well, maybe.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Maybe he’s an affirmative action guy.

JONATHAN ALTER:  Right, you hear that all the time. He hasn’t released his grades. The mail I get, “Why won’t he release his grades?” [laughter] “He didn’t actually have the grades to be the president of the Harvard Law Review.” It’s part of an ancient trope like Michelle Obama is facing — an angry, black woman — that ancient trope that they’re using against him. In that case, she overreacted to a book that was mostly very positive, and I don’t think she should have taken it on. But I can understand her sensitivity to these enduring racial stereotypes that his enemies will try to play with. 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  They certainly backed themselves into a corner on this whole teleprompter thing with Romney’s recent performances without a teleprompter. [laughter] One of the high points, kind of stylistically, of Obama’s first three years was that meeting he had, that healthcare meeting with all the Congressional types, hour after hour, where he just hit one fastball out of the park after another. I think that he will be a better debater in this upcoming campaign than he was in the last one. I’m very much looking forward to those debates.

RENEE LOTH:  Me, too. We’re going to be going to questions any second now, but I do want to ask — you mentioned the Tea Party, and I don’t want to give the impression that there isn’t some legitimate anger, frustration on the part of folks who joined the Tea Party as there is with the people who created Occupy Boston. I think there may be more areas of common ground there than we imagine. The differences seem to me to be mostly cultural – one’s a sort of older, whiter, more — I don’t know — rural, ted state movement, and the other is shavings and piercings, and so on.  But they’re united really in a sense that there has been a concentration of power and wealth that’s wrong, somehow wrong. I guess my question, and this is a big question, but how can the legitimate anger and frustration of folks in the Tea Party — and I don’t want to delegitimize it — but can it be channeled into progressive solutions?

JONATHAN ALTER:  I just have a different read on the Tea Party. I actually don’t think they have that much in common with Occupy Wall Street. The Tea Party folks are, to my mind, old wine in new bottles. These are older, very conservative Republicans who see the government as the source of all evil. There were a few stories — “Oh, yeah, we don’t like some people on Wall Street” — but really very little of that.  There’s very little in a Tea Party analysis that was directed at Wall Street. None of those guys voted for even the most watered down financial reform. All of those guys are trying to prevent Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Protection Bureau from coming into existence. They’re responding to their Tea Party voters.

RENEE LOTH:  Well, that’s the matter, I’m not sure they are responding to the Tea Party voters.

JONATHAN ALTER:  Those freshmen are pretty in touch with their Tea Party constituents. It’s one of the reasons that they’re very obstructionist because what unifies them mostly is they despise Obama. So that’s their main thing. 

I actually think the area where they’ve misread their Tea Party voters the most is in the balance of deficits and tax increases, because the Tea Party seems pretty animated by fiscal responsibility and not laying a lot of debt on our children. I’m not sure that your average Tea Party member, if on the stage in one of those debates asked, “Would you take a ten-to-one ratio of spending cuts to tax increases,” I’m not sure they would have raised their hand and said no. I think an awful lot of those Tea Party folks would have said, “Yeah, we’ll take that.” Because that would really shrink government.  But because of Grover Norquist, the politicians were locked into something that the average Tea Party person would not be. 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  And the 2010 electorate, I think, was it 40 million fewer people voted in that midterm election?

JONATHAN ALTER:  Fifty. 130 million in 2008, 80 million in 2010. 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  And that electorate, the group that voted in 2010, if that had been the electorate for 2008, then McCain would have won by a landslide. So this kind of goes to what Jonathan was saying about the failure to keep that Obama for America organization energized and in there. The Tea Party, I agree, it’s essentially old wine in new bottles, but it’s fortified wine. [laughter] Alcohol has been added by years of being pickled in the talk radio/Fox News universe. The effect of that, which has been building up for 10, 15 years, it was kind of obscured by George W. Bush and it’s now fully in flower. It’s got hold of the Republican Party, and the ones that don’t agree with it are scared of it.

JONATHAN ALTER:  Howie Carr is a flaming moderate compared to a lot of these guys, Savage and Limbaugh and these other guys. They have three-hour ads every day across broad swaths of the United States for this kind of poisonous thinking. It’s not surprising that people in rural areas … it’s very hard to find a Democrat in those places.  A lot of their grandparents were Democrats, but they just have come up in a different media culture than their grandparents did.

RENEE LOTH:  What do you think his chances are for winning in the next election?

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  I would bet that he’d be reelected, especially if you give me a little bit of odds. [laughter] I bet on the last one a couple of times and I gave odds even before he got the nomination because I was so sure that he would win the nomination and the election. I don’t have anything like that sense of sureness now. But I still somehow believe in my heart and soul that somehow he’s going to be reelected. I love my country, I guess, too much to contemplate the alternative too long and hard.

JONATHAN ALTER:  I would not be able to bet on it. There are just too many unknown factors and too much can happen. I guess right now it’s 50/50. If unemployment goes up, he’s going to have a very hard time getting reelected.

RENEE LOTH:  Well, we really don’t know the nominee yet on the Republican side as well.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  That we can bet on.

JONATHAN ALTER:  Yeah, that I would bet on.

RENEE LOTH:  I think Barney Frank said it’s not possible that I’ve been so good that God would give me Newt Gingrich as the candidate. [laughter] Isn’t that great, you can use Barney Frank’s line and get a big laugh. 

JONATHAN ALTER:  My wife works for Stephen Colbert. Maybe he’ll get the nomination. [laughter]

RENEE LOTH:  It’s possible. All right, here we go, sir?

QUESTION:  In essence, I think we’ve heard an extremely eloquent defense of the Obama Administration. I’m curious, in addition to his failure to handle the housing crisis, what in fact are the most serious failures of Obama on the assumption that we put aside the obstruction by the Republican Congress and what he inherited initially in taking office.

JONATHAN ALTER:  Well, I identified housing. I do think that they should have used their leverage over the banks more when they had it. However, I don’t agree with those who believe that they should have nationalized the banks. Roosevelt also declined under pressure from New Deal liberals to nationalize the banks in 1933. I think both Roosevelt and Obama were correct to resist that pressure, because it would have caused terrifying runs on whatever banks were taken over. The best estimates were we would have been another trillion dollars in the hole.

So the stress tests worked, and I’m not as critical as some of the way they handled that period. But I am critical of them not using … When Obama had his foot on the auto companies’ neck, he pushed through – it got very little attention – very aggressive fuel economy standards beyond what he promised during the campaign — historic fuel economy standards — because they were in no position to resist him in 2009. He should have done the same with the banks on certain lending requirements, capital requirements, whatever. He could have dictated some terms to them at a certain moment if he had moved more aggressively without taking them over.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  I’d agree with that. I guess the biggest failure that I personally would identify is there’s been no inquest into the use of torture, especially in the previous administration. It’s been a matter of looking forward, not looking back. So there’s a kind of Latin American impunity that was allowed to happen. Somehow there should have been – I don’t know enough; I could be persuaded that I’m wrong to think this because I don’t know exactly what the political costs would have been — but some kind of independent commission, some kind of truth commission to at least kind of officially certify the facts about those abuses, especially the use of torture and how it was authorized. 

JONATHAN ALTER:  I agree. Obama has this thing, don’t relitigate the past. You can actually hear his people — the toadies will always mirror what the President’s saying — you can almost walk down the halls of the EOB and hear people saying “don’t relitigate that.” But sometimes you have to in order to have accountability and a sense of coming to terms with an important part of our history, you need to relitigate some. He should have at least encouraged them to do it on the Hill. I would apply that to the financial shenanigans as well. It would have involved going back to the Clinton Administration and explaining some of how we got here. But they should have done that. 

And the other big failure, I would say, is on what we started out talking about, campaign finance reform. I had written in a Newsweek column in 1992, late ’92, that Clinton should start out with campaign finance reform before he did healthcare, and he had the luxury to do that. Obama didn’t have the luxury to lead with campaign finance reform, but he’s really dropped the ball on it and has not done nearly enough to champion it.

RENEE LOTH:  Well, it worked for him when he ran for President the first time, not playing by the rules of the public financing, and so on.

JONATHAN ALTER:  Yeah, and I would add a third thing. I see Alan Khazei, the great Alan Khazei is in the audience, the co-founder of City Year, which was the prototype for AmeriCorps. I think Obama felt like AmeriCorps was Clinton’s deal, so they did have a dramatic expansion of it in June of 2009, the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. But they created these 250,000 slots and then he dropped the ball on that; he just did not push hard to really identify with service in the way that he could have. Also it’s a good way to create jobs and there were a lot of up sides to it, and I don’t honestly understand why he didn’t exploit that more. 

RENEE LOTH:  Sir?

QUESTION:  Thank you for the presentation today. What about Immelt of GE as jobs czar?

Was that compromise, or was that the President’s idea of how to stimulate jobs?

JONATHAN ALTER:  Well, I mean, it was ridiculous appointing Jeff Immelt because he exports jobs, not to mention the fact that GE doesn’t pay any taxes. But the Jobs Council, it’s an advisory thing. It’s not really particularly powerful. My complaint with them on jobs is a political complaint. Nixon had his 18-and-a-half-minute gap. Obama had his 18-month gap, from March of 2010 when the healthcare bill was signed, until September of 2011 when he launched his jobs program. I do not understand and probably never will understand why they didn’t pivot to a jobs agenda much, much sooner than that. 

Now, if you actually look at what happened, the BP oil spill took place in the spring of 2010, and any time he did anything except BP he got hammered by everybody. So he had to devote all of his attention to that for a three-month period. But still in the summer of 2010, to the extent that Obama has problems and if he doesn’t get reelected, I think that will be the period when he blew it because they did not tee up the 2010 midterms properly, partly because Democrats on Capitol Hill would not let him pledge to let the Bush tax cuts expire. They were running for cover and they didn’t want him to come out with a new jobs plan that would have been dubbed as second stimulus, which nobody at that time wanted. 

So he was under pressure from his own party not to do it. But he should have seen through that and even though it wouldn’t have created anymore jobs because the stimulus hadn’t even really started to be implemented, he at least could have been on record and pounding away that he was the jobs President. And better late than never, he did that in September and pushed hard for it all last fall. So he’ll be okay on the jobs issue, but he could have been better if he’d started earlier.

RENEE LOTH:  How about more questions and shorter answers?

JONATHAN ALTER:  Good point. 

RENEE LOTH:  Okay, you’re up.

QUESTION:  Hi, thank you. I watched on the news last night as a South Carolina voter asked Mitt Romney, “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Savior?” I also watched the Patriots last night wondering how much Tebow would pray. I’m still wondering what role is this intense evangelicalism going to play in this election, if any? And what’s caused this change?

RENEE LOTH:  I’m going to let Rick just answer that.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  I’m so far from being an expert on the evangelical mind that maybe I’ll just punt that one and kind of agree with the sentiments behind the question. [laughter] JONATHAN ALTER:  Some of them might stay home because they don’t want to vote for a Mormon.

RENEE LOTH:  Or they’re not enthusiastic about his lack of surety on social issues.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  I hope Jimmy Carter doesn’t get blamed for all of this in the end. [laughter]

QUESTION:  Thank you. Given the continued instability in the world, particularly most recently the political posturing in the Strait of Hormuz, which by some estimates could send oil futures back to the spring of 2008 prices of $150 or even beyond, do you think that if that was to happen, or perhaps even before it happens, would anybody in the Obama Administration have the courage to perhaps take some government action, maybe even along the lines of the Nixon price controls of the 1970s, especially with an election approaching?

RENEE LOTH:  Price controls, I’d say no. 

JONATHAN ALTER:  No price controls. I hope that Obama is as cunning as Nixon was in at least working behind the scenes to make sure that oil stays under $100 a barrel. Because if it goes much over $100 a barrel, he’s going to have a hard time getting reelected.

QUESTION:  Hi, thank you for doing this, first off. Second, Obama had a big speech a couple of days ago about cutting back on government organizations where there’s overlap. I’m just wondering if you think that that sort of push will take a little bit of the pressure off from the Right calling him the big government liberal. I’m just wondering if you think that might weaken that charge a little bit.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Yes, it should weaken it a little bit.

RENEE LOTH:  It does feel he’s sort of calling their bluff on this. It’s like, “I dare you to be against this since this is your thing.” Yes?

QUESTION:  I guess there’s been a lot of discussion about how the President should have addressed Wall Street reform and the like earlier. What I wanted to ask is how he did address that? Congress passed Dodd-Frank and he signed it later on. How much do you feel that sort of increased anger and agitation for moneyed interests against Congressional Democrats in 2010, and what role could it have in damaging the Democrats and President Obama in 2012? 

JONATHAN ALTER:  Interestingly, Obama does have to hold a lot of fundraisers but his average donation is around $100, and he has already a million donors. So he is redefining the way you finance a campaign, and I think he’s less reliant on their money than some other presidents have been. 

There’s a lot of whining. We talked about whining on the Left. There’s also a huge amount of whining from Wall Street. When you ask these folks, “What is it that you really don’t like about Obama? Are you telling me that Elizabeth Warren’s Bureau is somehow going to harm you?” The people who were in those businesses actually like somebody coming in and getting the bad actors out of the business. And what it often comes down to is that their feelings are hurt because he has criticized them. He called them fat cats on 60 Minutes. It’s amazing how often his rhetoric comes up, and you get the sense that people who are often enormously wealthy are very, very thin-skinned about being called out in any fashion.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Where big money is going to play a new kind of role this time is the Citizens United factor, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.

JONATHAN ALTER:  Right. Super PACs.

RENEE LOTH:  Sir, go ahead.

QUESTION:  Hi, my name is Bill Lynch and I’m with the Ward 13 Committee as a ward commitment. I had the pleasure of being on TV for this beautiful Library, so thank God for the Forum. I thank God for you two. But my question is this: Would you two join me in the private or public sector when your book comes out, will you print it at least a quarter to a half inch a line and word it in English? And I’ll say quite frankly, the hell with fine print. And thank you. [laughter]

RENEE LOTH:  He’s looking for a large print edition.

JONATHAN ALTER:  My father is 90, and I was talking to him about this subject today. Kindles are now very affordable, and you can … 

BILL LYNCH:  [1:12:03] the fine print.

RENEE LOTH:  Okay, thank you.

BILL LYNCH:  Thank you.

RENEE LOTH:  Heard loud and clear. Sir?

QUESTION:  Despite the fact that this election seemed very much fiscally, purely fiscal in the beginning, how much has the recent illumination of Rick Santorum’s extremely socially conservative views, how much do you think that’s going to actually come into play when, if ever, a GOP nominee is selected to debate against Obama?

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Well, if Santorum’s the candidate, then it’ll be huge. But we can’t really hope for that much suicidal tendencies. [laughter] And Romney is somewhat inoculated against all this because these very people don’t trust him. His biggest strength is people don’t think he means what he says. [laughter] That’s a huge asset for him in the general election. [laughter]

RENEE LOTH:  Very good. Thank you. Go ahead.

QUESTION:  I’m a bit concerned that the story of the Obama Administration is not being told, the things they’ve accomplished. You mentioned Geithner and you mentioned Summers, you mentioned Plouffe. I’m wondering is there someone – and I’m going back to H. W. Bush – like

James Baker who could come to the fore – or is it necessary? – to tell the story of the Obama Administration’s accomplishments.

JONATHAN ALTER:  I think you make a very good point. Remember the movie Cool Hand Luke? The warden says, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” There’s definitely been some of that.

QUESTION:  Is there anybody that comes to mind? Plouffe? 

JONATHAN ALTER:  Well, I think they should put Paul Begala in the White House, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. 

RENEE LOTH:  I think it’s Obama himself that’s going to be called upon to tell his story.

Thank you. Yes?

QUESTION:  A few days ago, Derrick Jackson came out with a rather alarming column about racism and its codes. You touched on it a little bit, but I just wondered is this going to be a huge issue in this election this year? And two, is there any idea how the Obama Administration or their team deals with something like this? Because it really is a scary thought.

JONATHAN ALTER:  I don’t actually think it will be that big of an issue because the people who want to vote against him because he’s black, they know he’s black. As he said on Letterman, “I was black before I was elected.” [laughter] So I don’t think it’s as easy to kind of run a subterranean campaign on that. 

But the coding is more about “he’s not one of us.” It’s a little different than race as such; it’s,

“He’s still alien.” I think the fact that Romney … There’s a very good piece in this morning’s

New York Times in the “Week in Review” section by a guy named Lee Siegel arguing that Romney is the whitest man who’s ever run for President. [laughter] And he explains that he conjures all of these ’50s ideals about the place in society that various people should be in. He’s not himself a racist; he hasn’t pushed any racial buttons or anything like that, but there’s a contrast that might not be very favorable to Obama because restorationist themes – this was something that I learned in college, of restoring the past – remember how Reagan was a master at that, “We’re going to restore a lost America”?

RENEE LOTH:  The morning.

JONATHAN ALTER:  The morning in America’s almost more the optimism part. This is about restoring the ’50s … 

RENEE LOTH:  The values.

JONATHAN ALTER:  The values of a bygone time. Especially in difficult economic times people often like to think, “Things were better when I was growing up.” Well, things were also whiter when they were growing up. And to the extent they can make a connection between that, that could be harmful to the President.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  It’s sort of an extra overtone to a strategy that’s been around a long time. And it was used against John Kerry. It’s as much a cultural thing or more than it is a racial thing. The stuff that’s used against Obama is not so much or even that he’s black, but that he’s elitist, that he’s Ivy League, that he’s educated, that there might be something going on in a foreign country somewhere that we could learn something from. [laughter] So it is this notion of alien. It’s not just a racist thing; it’s a xenophobic thing.

JONATHAN ALTER:  Well, it’s going to be big because I think China is going to be a big theme. Romney has said that he would declare them a currency manipulator on day one. I think he’s going to try to make Obama soft on China by the time this campaign’s done. 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  The closest to a racist slogan I guess is, “We’re going to take our country back.”

RENEE LOTH:  Yeah, that’s the Tea Party.

QUESTION:  I was wondering about the issue of the national debt. I believe there’s a myth that it’s really a big problem. And I’m wondering whether Obama thinks it’s a problem, or whether he just talks about it for political reasons. Also, I was wondering about the fact that poverty is never, ever mentioned; it’s only about the middle class and whether, if he was to be reelected, does Obama have concerns about the very poor? Or does he not really think about that too much?

RENEE LOTH:  I’d like the second part of that answer, particularly.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  There’s a difference between debt and the deficit. Yes, the national debt is certainly a problem. But I don’t think he’s done enough to educate the public about basic Keynesian notions, about why it’s not a contradiction to have more government spending now and a bigger deficit now as part of a plan to reduce the debt later. 

JONATHAN ALTER:  I think if he’s reelected he will.  He does think that the debt is a problem. It’s becoming just too big. What is it, 14 trillion? It is hanging over the next generation. He came very close to approving four trillion in cuts over ten years in that grand bargain, and I think they’ll return to that or something like that in 2013, if he’s reelected.

I think he absolutely cares about poverty. He could have had a Mitt Romney-style career coming out of Harvard Law School. He was focused both before law school and then after law school on representing poor people. It’s a political loser, so there are just hard, cold reasons not to stress it publicly when you’re trying to get reelected. But I think if he is reelected and it’s his last campaign, then at that point you’ll see him talking a lot more about it.

QUESTION:  Given what’s going on in Wisconsin and Ohio and Citizens United, is it up to labor, and can labor tip the scales with this election?

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  If labor sits on its hands, it can tip the scales in that kind of negative sense. The country really doesn’t understand, I think, just how hard it is, how it’s essentially almost illegal now to join a union and what the Republicans have done over these many years to undermine the guarantee, which is no longer even remotely a guarantee, that you can sign up and say you’re for the union without fear of having your life destroyed. 

I’d like to hear a little more talk about that, but there are a lot of things going against labor and labor organizing. People wonder why public unions are so relatively strong. Well, that’s fairly simple, I think. Even though public employees are often forbidden to strike, it’s against the law for them so why should their unions be so strong? It’s because their employer has a much harder time disobeying openly and arrogantly disobeying the law. That’s why public unions are stronger. It’s because their employer is more transparent and has to obey the law.

JONATHAN ALTER:  I think that labor will be very important in Wisconsin where there’s been a rebirth in reaction to Governor Walker, and maybe in Pennsylvania and Ohio. It’s not nearly as powerful as it used to be. I don’t think labor will sit on its hands.

One thing that people don’t understand:  Obama has the Democratic Party very solidly behind him. Not just the fact that there’s no primary challenger, but he has very high approval ratings among Democrats. Labor’s Democratic. I don’t think Romney’s going to be able to pick off labor. So the key here for the election are Independents. Obama carried Independents by eight points in 2008, and Democrats lost them by eight points in 2010, a 16-point switch. Democrats are going to have to get a lot of those Independents back if they’re going to win the election.

RENEE LOTH:  I think if we move quickly, we can get through all the questions, so go ahead.

QUESTION:  Though I have not agreed with everything that the President has done or not done, I’ve always believed that he had the best interests of the country at heart. I think the examples you gave about not spiking the football over Osama bin Laden, starting out with healthcare were two examples of where he put his political career maybe second to the interests of the country.  But I was really disappointed in his decision to run against Congress. He hasn’t done as much lately, but a few months ago in his tour across the United States, “Why isn’t Congress doing their job,” and all of that, when in fact it wasn’t Congress as a whole; it was the Republicans, especially the Right Wing Republicans in the Congress who weren’t doing their jobs. An awful lot of Democrats are working night and day and compromising as much as they possibly could, in fact more than they felt was good for them, to try to get something done and they were getting no cooperation whatsoever. So the President did not support that and to, I think, make it harder for those Democratic Senators to be reelected, and so on. I don’t see any other reason besides self-serving-ness, if that’s a word.

RENEE LOTH:  Okay, I think there’s a question in there.

QUESTION:  The question is do you see another reason that would make me feel better?

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  I’m not sure that he’s running against Congress, per se. I think as the campaign proceeds, it’s going to become clearer and clearer that what he means by Congress is Congressional Republicans. I think that there’ll be no mistaking that by the time the election rolls around.

JONATHAN ALTER:  He does need to be more explicit about it. Democrats on the Hill agree with you; they don’t like it when he just says Congress. They want him to say “the Republican Congress.” And I think, to bring the conversation full circle, it’s that old idea that we were talking about, that he wants to be a consensus guy, doesn’t want to be seen as being baldly partisan. So it’s easier for him to assert one branch of government against another than it is for him to call out Republicans by name.  One thing I’m going to be watching for is will he be willing to risk seeming partisan by saying “Republicans in Congress” and take it directly to them.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  It’s a kind of rhetorical problem, too, because the Senate is nominally Democratic, but actually controlled or hamstrung by the 40-vote rule. So Truman could vote against a Republican Congress that was actually controlled, both Houses, by Republicans. And if this one were, then it would be clear what he means by Congress. But you have to add that little explanation. It may be a bit too long for the bumper sticker.

JONATHAN ALTER:  To say Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. [laughter]

RENEE LOTH:  We’re sort of out of time.

JONATHAN ALTER:  We’ll do speed rounds.

RENEE LOTH:  Okay, do speed dating here.

QUESTION:  You talked about how the kind of liberal whine and the disconnect between the base and the grassroots back in the original campaign. Do you think Barack Obama can reignite that same hope-and-change feeling through positive notions, instead of “look at Romney, look at Santorum, oh God, Gingrich”? Can he reignite the campaign with hope and change?

JONATHAN ALTER:  Tough, really tough the second time around. It’s a little bit like the difference between your honeymoon and … 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Let’s not go too far there. [laughter]

JONATHAN ALTER:  I hope my wife’s not watching. I didn’t mean it, honey!

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  He can’t go with hope and change; he can go with “I’m fighting for you.” 

RENEE LOTH:  Thank you. Go ahead.

QUESTION:  I’ve really enjoyed this Forum, and I thank you all. My concern is about the Bill of Rights. I’m having difficulty understanding the necessity of Obama signing the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act. We already have the Patriot Act.  I think we’ve gone overboard — immigrants, Muslims have been pulled in with no ability to contact their family or legal representation, and now we have this NDAA that has been passed. Are there no other recourses? Yes, I want to defend our country, it’s important. But how about using the legal system we already have? Of course, I’m throwing in my own opinions. Any thoughts? 

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  This is a giant defense authorization bill. It’s not like the Patriot Act. There’s this immense structure and this poison pill in the middle of it, and it’s a dare – vote against funding the troops, why don’t you?  — and I agree with the sentiments you’re expressing, and I think Obama tried to address them with the signing statement. 

JONATHAN ALTER:  Charlie Savage in the Boston Globe, now in the Times, has been tracking this and more journalists should. In the past, during World War I they put the Constitution on the shelf. But then after the war, we got more of our rights back. And during World War II there were some pretty awful things done, also. Again, because the war had an endpoint, we could get our rights back at the end of the conflict. 

One of the things that’s terrifying to me about the War on Terror, although Obama rightly doesn’t call it that anymore, is that it doesn’t seem to have an endpoint for some reasonable reasons. But at a certain point we need – same way we need to build a movement for a constitutional amendment that says money is not speech — we have to build a movement to revive the spirit of the Bill of Rights. 

RENEE LOTH:  Last question.

QUESTION:  You guys talked earlier about how Obama failed to keep the people that he had engaged, engaged post-election. And the core of those people were supposedly young people, that machine that he had on the Internet. Do you think Occupy Wall Street is activating those kids independently of Obama? Will it have any impact on the coming election, to get them out there and vote?

JONATHAN ALTER:  I don’t think Occupy Wall Street will do anything to mobilize voters. The Obama campaign is going to have to do that on its own. I don’t think that they can tap into that organization. But Occupy Wall Street has done two things to really help Obama. The first is … I remember when I went down shortly after it started, I went down to Wall Street, to Zuccotti Park and saw a sign: “We are the 99%.” And I’m wrong about half the stuff I see and I miss stories all the time, but even I could tell, wow, that’s a powerful idea. That’s the legacy, thematic legacy of Occupy Wall Street, even if they never hold another event, is to basically identify that 1%.  That 1% has a poster boy and his name is Mitt Romney. And he just screams 1%. So if that’s the frame on the election, that’s very favorable to Obama.

RENEE LOTH:  Last words.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG:  Yeah, I completely agree with that. I guess that one reason that Obama for America was kept at arm’s length or wasn’t really used is because to make it vibrant, you wouldn’t really be able to control it. So in that sense, yes, in a way, Occupy Wall Street has kind of come in where that vacuum used to be. 

But what an accomplishment, to turn around the nation’s consciousness about the economy from this obsession with the debt, even the deficit, but the debt in years to come, to some basic  questions of fairness and value about inequality, about what it does to the social fabric to have this growing, growing, growing inequality to the point where it’s like Latin America; it’s worse, it’s absolutely awful. And it’s not just about people having less money. It’s certainly not about envy. It’s about what kind of social fabric we have and the legitimacy of our democracy.  So that’s a really wonderful and fantastic and I suppose in a way unintended, but great accomplishment. 

RENEE LOTH:  Well, this was a great accomplishment, too, having this conversation, and wrapping it up in an hour-and-a-half, didn’t think it would be possible. Thank you so much for your help.

Barack Obama: One of America’s Worst Presidents in U.S. History?

May 30, 2024

By: Brent M. Eastwood

The Bad Old Days During the Obama Administration – To Democrats and their allies in the legacy media, former President Barack Obama was calm, cool, and collected during his tenure. Wise beyond his years and highly intelligent, “No drama” Obama refrained from the chaos of the Trump years and led the country with aplomb, his fans would say.

But not everyone agrees. 

Barack Obama: The GOP Are No Fans 

But Republicans saw a much different picture of Barack Obama. Some in the GOP would consider him one of the worst presidents ever – maybe the worst ever. 

He was condescending and arrogant, GOP critics believe.

He splintered the country in two and left many ordinary Americans not part of his elitist coalition out of his plans.

He campaigned as an uniter and moderate but governed as a divider and leftist.

There were also several scandals that bruised the country.

Allow me to remind you of some of the most terrible aspects of the Obama presidency.

Benghazi Attacks

The worst event of the Obama presidency was the Benghazi tragedy. This happened on September 11, 2012, at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Members of the terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia attacked the diplomatic compound in a pre-planned coordinated raid that killed Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and a State Department worker named Sean Smith.

Then in the early morning of September 12, another terrorist attack at a CIA annex nearby featured mortars and heavy gunfire. This action was also premeditated and coordinated. CIA contractors Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty died in the battle.

There are many aspects of the attacks that came out in Congressional investigations that looked at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s purported failures in security lapses that led up to the tragedy. But the worst aspect of Benghazi and Obama’s handling of the event had to be the craven and dishonest actions of Obama sycophant Susan Rice. Rice went on several television news programs and flat out lied about Benghazi and the origins of the attack in an attempt to cover-up the causes and protect the president.

Instead of admitting that the event was pre-planned and premeditated, she said the attacks were spontaneous and sparked by anger over an anti-Muslim video. Rice wanted to make it look like Benghazi was unavoidable and not anyone’s fault in the administration.

This showed that Rice was intentionally misleading the country so Obama could escape blame. The president was likely aware of Rice’s dishonesty and may have even encouraged her to lie to protect him.

IRS Weaponization Against Tea Party Groups

The second most damaging scandal of Obama’s presidency was the IRS effort to deny non-profit tax designation to right-leaning groups who were part of the Tea Party movement against the president. The IRS looked at political themes that were considered anti-Obama in tax exempt applications and purposely delayed or denied them the tax exemption.

money during the lead-up to Obama’s re-election campaign.

A criminal investigation was organized against the IRS official in question, Lois Lerner. Republicans claimed that conservative groups were targeted by the IRS and that the agency had been weaponized by the Obama administration.

While congressional investigators never found a direct tie between the IRS and the White House for this targeting of the Tea Party, it is difficult to believe that Obama knew nothing about the practice. One of the worst things governments can do is to use a powerful agency like the IRS to punish political rivals and that is just what the Obama administration did.

Solyndra Bankruptcy

Next up is the Solyndra scandal. Solyndra was a green energy company in California that made solar panels. Solyndra was a product of an Obama administration effort to promote renewable energy projects. In 2009, Obama’s Department of Energy gave Solyndra $535 million in loan guarantees. The company later went bankrupt in 2011 and the energy department took a huge loss. This cost the U.S. taxpayers over half a billion dollars. The FBI and Department of Treasury investigated the company’s founders for wasteful spending. Solyndra was also probed for mis-stating its finances on its loan application to get favorable terms and the possibility that it may have conducted accounting fraud.

The Solyndra fiasco showed that Obama wasn’t as smart as the media thought he was. The scandal made it appear that the White House’s misguided policies on supporting certain companies over others was poor public policy and that picking winners and losers by the government is never a good idea. Solyndra was also evidence that the Obama administration did not conduct due diligence into the company in a prudent manner before it approved the loan guarantees.

These three case studies are major cautionary tales in American presidential history. They show that the Obama administration could be incompetent, dishonest, corrupt, and willing to punish its political rivals through the weaponization of government. Obama’s allies in the media made excuses for the administration in an effort to keep the president in a positive light, but the scandals are evidence that Obama was not as successful as his proponents made him seem.

Benghazi, the IRS versus Tea Party saga, and Solyndra are evidence that Barack Obama was not the immaculate president his supporters made him out to be.

Obama Postings
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/10/the-obamas-exposed/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/26/was-president-obama-a-disappointment/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/22/the-obama-effect/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/21/president-obama-and-the-auto-industry/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/19/daca-right-or-wrong/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/09/16/why-obama-was-such-a-disappointment/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/12/02/how-bad-was-obama-as-president/