Barack Hussein Obama II was the 44th president of the United States. Having left office with a 58% approval rating, he continues to enjoy the strong support of the Democratic voting base. (Pew)  His former associates, vice president Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, achieved considerable success in the Democratic primary, mainly because of their image as Obama’s heir. People across the political spectrum have tremendous nostalgia for the Obama administration (David Brooks). Yet, his literal legacy is considered by some to be “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black muppet of corporate plutocrats.”(T.J. Ortenzi), of drone-striking brown children and enabling authoritarianism abroad.

On policy, it is possible to write an entire book on Obama’s failure with immigration(Miroff), climate(Obama on Oil Production), regulation(Wortham), labor(Swan), and weapons control(Newman). 

The Republican Party eschewed bipartisanship for obstruction. Infamously, Mitch McConnell, minority senate Republican leader, claimed their  “number one priority is making sure president Obama’s a one-term president.”(McConnell) . 

This complicates a fair criticism of Obama’s domestic record, where analyzing Obama’s numerous foreign policy accomplishments can reveal his nature better. Unsurprisingly, unrestrained by congressional control, Obama’s most damning failures have come internationally. 

Obama’s foreign policy was marred by an expansion of governmental power through illegal drone strikes. He proclaimed to have put the “ fight against terrorism on a firmer legal footing” when instead, he used drone strikes to kill American citizens illegally. (Miller) Instead of targeting terrorists, he initiated a “double tap” drone policy, meaning he struck twice at high terrorist activity regions(McKelvey). This often targeted innocent civilians and humanitarian workers(Purkiss), infamously hitting civilians 90% of the time in a 5-month. (Scahill)  He pursued a similar “signature strike” policy that pursued targets based on suspicious behavior without identity verification. (Woodward and Miller) According to a senior official, a running joke in the CIA was how a group of men loading a truck with fertilizers could be bombmakers. Skeptics argue that they could simply be farmers.

For his reckless and impulsive policy, Obama has the blood of American hostages on his hands. (Jackson and Corte) The administration could back up official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths by counting military-age males in strike zones as combatants paired with sheer CIA confidence. (Friedersdorf) Infamously, they bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital. (Rosenberg) Reflecting to an aide once, he said, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”(Crowley)

To his credit, Obama tried to restrain his program after much public backlash, but the precedent has been set. (Gerstein) His charisma normalized an mainexpansion of executive power that could wreck even greater danger in the hands of demagogues. Obama did scale down the strikes post-2012 (Zenko), but the infrastructure left behind has quickly become perverse by Trump(Savage). In layman’s terms, he made bombing brown people look cool.

On democracy abroad, he stated, “These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. 

And that is why we will support them everywhere.” (A New Beginning) There was an apparent disconnect between his rhetoric and his policy on Yemen(Human Rights Watch), Israel(Shlaim), Egypt(Crowley), Turkey(Toosi), Bahrain(Abrams), and Saudi Arabia(Keating) Maintaining democracy while simultaneously upholding human rights poses significant challenges. Noam Chomsky notes this contradiction, “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. By violation of the Nuremberg laws, I mean the same kind of crimes for which people were hanged in Nuremberg.”(If the Nuremberg Laws were Applied). 

Another problematic legacy as a Black president was his stance on race. Addressing the black congregation of the Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama stated, “we need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception”; while not contextualizing a criminal justice system that disproportionately targets black males. (Bosman) 

Refusing to use the bully pulpit, he stood silently as the justice system lynched Troy Davis. (Lee) Obama’s silence reflects a president willing to “straddle the fence on issues important to African Americans.”(Coulbary) When Baltimore protestors violently reacted to the death of Freddie Grey, another black man killed by the police, he called them “thugs”. (Jackson)When Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police brutality, Obama cautioned Colin Kaepernick against the action, asking him to “ think about the pain he’s causing military families.” (Toosi)Kaepernick knelt on the advice of Nate Boyer, a former green beret, to respect the military while protesting for black lives (Brinson).

When the Flint water crisis was at its zenith, Obama pretended to drink polluted water while reassuring the residents that it was safe. (Obama drinks Flint Water) When Henry Gates was racially profiled for trying to enter his house(Pilkington), Obama merely noted,  “I also continue to believe, based on what I heard, that Professor Gates probably overreacted as well”(Obama’s Remarks on Gates’s Arrest).Throughout his presidency, Obama displayed a lack of urgency in confronting institutional racism and addressing issues from a systemic perspective. 

My criticism stems from Obama's moderate record, which has garnered substantial criticism from both the right and the left, exacerbating divisions and polarization. Noah Chomsky calls this effect “the manufacture of consent”:  the systemic polarization of society to render collective action impossible, making voters uncritical of the elite. The unwillingness of the democratic party to recognize the ideological radicalism of the Republican Party will not only hurt electoral politics but also normalize extremist ideology.  

But another interpretation of Obama is to understand him through the lens of the black community as someone who was the first to penetrate the white power structure without giving up his blackness. Obama is deified for what he symbolized - black success without the constraints of whiteness - not what he executed. The fact that someone who looked like them had the same hair, and talked like them could hold the highest office in the land is incredibly inspirational for a community whose history has been marginalized and persecuted. Symbolically, he successfully navigated the powerful chambers of politics - a world dominated by white men - while retaining his Black identity. By embracing the complexities of these facets, a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the nation and its history can be attained.

Citations 

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