© Daniel Borman / FlickrBarack Obama in 2012.
From his earliest days in office to his last, Obama as president was light years away from Obama on the campaign stump. This is the reality of governance, of course. And the obstructionism he faced from Republicans and the Right was historically unprecedented. But Obama's presidency will be remembered for the tremendous opportunities he squandered and the progressive national moods he refused, or was incapable of, capitalizing on.
At the moments when Americans were ready for bold action, he insisted on remaining "reasonable"; in response to ever-expanding inequality and deepening misery, Obama offered small-bore technocratic fixes.
The progress he was able to achieve should not be ignored. But it's impossible to look at Obama's list of achievements without being struck by how few and how small they are compared to what might have been.
On the final day of Obama's presidency, Jacobin contributors assess his legacy on a range of issues.
Health Care
In the fight against the GOP's assault on health care, we will need a more powerful weapon than Obamacare.
Over his two terms, Barack Obama signed a number of major health-care bills into law, most significantly the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), though also more recently the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016. Though the GOP's coming assault on health care is likely to be heartless — and though resistance to it must be resolute — we would be better served by a sober assessment of Obama's health-care legacy than by triumphalist acclaim of such laws.
The ACA, passed without any Republican votes, has had a significant impact on health-care access: mainly through the expansion of Medicaid together with the subsidization of private health insurance, it achieved a partial reduction in the number of the uninsured, from 48.6 million in 2010 to 28.4 million in early 2016 (still an enormous number!), according to National Health Interview Survey estimates. Other provisions of the law, like those eliminating co-payments for some preventive care or banning preexisting condition discrimination, benefited many more.
Yet those who trumpet such gains while scratching their heads at the law's relative unpopularity are missing the crux of the problem: despite President Obama's reforms, the health-care system continues to fail much of the nation.
One example: in Canada, physicians and hospitals are free when you use them. In the United States, co-payments and deductibles for such care (which average $7,474 for a family marketplace silver plan) often rations medical care by economic status. Studies have shown that those with inadequate insurance avoid going to the ER even when they need it, delay care when in the throes of a heart attack, and face financial strain and sometimes bankruptcy when sickness strikes. Such injustices preceded the ACA, but because the law failed to fix them, it is blamed — fairly or unfairly — for their persistence.
More recently, Obama signed the 21st Century Cures Act into law, which among other things incrementally reduced the rigor of the Food and Drug Administration's drug approval process. These provisions were tantamount to a generous handout to the pharmaceutical industry, which had lobbied heavily for the bill. Not surprisingly, it also did precisely nothing about sky-high drug costs.
This is a decidedly mixed legacy. The gains of the ACA are evident: indeed, for some of those who gained coverage, it was lifesaving. Its shortcomings, however, are equally evident: some twenty-eight million uninsured, persistently high cost-sharing, inequalities in access, uncontrolled drug prices, and so forth.
Of course, Republican designs, whether repeal and/or modification, will only make things worse. When that happens, we should dub the resultant fiasco GOP-Care, and blast it for all its injustices. However, it should also be clear that "Let's go back to 2016" will not be a winning campaign slogan for Democrats in coming elections: people want — and deserve — real change.
To defeat GOP-Care, we will need a more powerful weapon than Obamacare. For this reason, the time to push for universal single-payer health care is right now.
—Adam Gaffney
LGBT Rights
President Obama used executive action to make unprecedented progress on LGBT rights — which is why these rights are so vulnerable in Trump's hands.
President Obama was remarkably successful in implementing his LGBT agenda. Some of his cornerstone achievements reflect a liberal multicultural agenda, emphasizing queer and trans inclusion in institutions which may not be the best vehicles for liberation.
During his first two years in office, when congressional cooperation was possible, the president supported and signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act and repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell. The former added sexual orientation and gender identity to existing hate crimes law, imposing additional criminal penalties in crimes motivated by anti-LGBT animus; the latter allowed gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.
While many LGBT advocates welcomed these developments for their expressive value — finally there were LGBT protections in federal law — critics, myself included, scolded the administration for promoting LGBT inclusion without accounting for the effects that longer prison sentences and easier militarization would have on other marginalized communities. Policies of uplift must not be lost in pursuit of inclusion.
During his tenure, President Obama also famously "evolved" on the question of gay marriage, having stated his opposition during the 2008 campaign but creeping toward overt support in 2012 (with the help of Joe Biden). He directed the Department of Justice to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in 2011, leaving House Republicans to mount a legal defense in United States v. Windsor.
Behind the scenes, President Obama directed the vast armature of the administrative state to support LGBT inclusion in unprecedented ways, including a major effort to provide legal protections for transgender Americans at work and in schools. Through executive orders and administrative guidance, President Obama expanded the definition of sex-based discrimination to include sexual orientation and gender identity at the Department of Justice, Department of Education, Department of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and US Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
This type of regulation made it easier for transgender litigants to vindicate their rights, including trans students seeking access to gender-appropriate facilities and trans people seeking insurance coverage for gender affirming care. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was particularly aggressive in pursuit of LGBT rights, making it a stated priority in its 2013 - 16 Strategic Enforcement Plan, and issuing landmark decisions for queer and trans protections in the workplace.
But because it was conducted through executive action, this progress will be particularly vulnerable come January 20. Of course legal protections for vulnerable LGBT people should be pursued in any way possible, but President Obama did not fight hard enough to enshrine them in federal statutes.
For example, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would protect LGBT workers from employment discrimination, has languished for twenty-three years. Despite this failing, there has been a bright spot in these closing hours of the Obama administration. This week, President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, enabling her to walk out of prison in May of 2017, and cementing his LGBT legacy.
—Kate Redburn
Immigration
Only Trump has the potential to challenge Obama's title as deporter-in-chief.
President Obama's 2014 use of executive power to grant relief from deportation, work permits, and the ability to travel for young immigrants in the United States was characteristic of much of his presidency: he protected and lifted up of some immigrants while criminalizing and dismissing others — often people who were part of the same family.
He granted relief for immigrant children through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), one of the most significant federal actions for immigrant communities in many years. That same day, however, he also announced that the Secure Communities program to be replaced by the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), and that the priorities for deportation were shifting, making people who arrived or were ordered deported after January 2014 priorities for deportation.
Obama's ending of Secure Communities was an acknowledgement that there were significant questions about due process in the program. But PEP has led to continued collusion between local police and immigration enforcement, continued use of immigration detainer orders by local police after arresting immigrants for minor crimes, and more pressure from the administration for localities refusing to participate. Similarly, although the shift in priorities meant that those who arrived to the country before 2014 were not a priority for deportation, that shift also led to the immigration raids on women and children at the start of 2016.
President Obama's emphasis on the concept of deporting "felons not families" has led to the criminalization and deportation of immigrants at the highest rates in US history, without protections or oversight for violations of policy or people's civil rights. Immigration enforcement agencies, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have been allowed to act as rogue agencies, while the Department of Homeland Security's civil rights and civil liberties office has no teeth, leading to violations of immigrants' due process and civil rights that rarely result in more than internal investigations and memoranda that go nowhere.
Even under the reforms in the Department of Justice, immigrants have been sold short. One moment where this contradiction was highlighted was in October 2015, when the president announced the release of six thousand federal prisoners in an effort to reduce prison overcrowding and provide federal relief to drug offenders who have received harsh sentences, and two thousand of those people were deported instead of being reunited with their communities.
This is at the same time that the Department of Justice is the agency that prosecutes the most Latinxs, incarcerating them with charges of "illegal entry" and "illegal re-entry," which literally means being charged for crossing the border or crossing the border after being deported.
This is far from an exhaustive list of Obama's policies that have impacted immigrant communities. There are many immigrants who are thankful for opportunities that he has created. But on immigration, President Obama will be remembered as deporter-in-chief. Today, he hands over a massive, brutal immigration enforcement machinery to a man who promises to challenge Obama for this title.
—Tania Unzueta
Read entire article here.
Comment: See also: Obama's final departure into a wet, foggy California night