Let us now praise Barack Obama. For if he loses on Nov. 6, he will lose for the same reason he would have won — because of his very real, very substantial, and very consequential achievements.
Mitt Romney has based his bid to replace the president on the very simple argument that Obama is a failure — the economy is mired in the doldrums, fewer Americans are working today than in 2009, and job growth has lagged. Obama, Romney says, doesn’t know how to fix what is broken, but Romney does.
It’s a powerful argument, and it may win Romney the presidency, but it’s actually beside the point. If you look at Obama’s presidency not as a denizen of Twitter, focused on the minute-by-minute, but rather with a historian’s eye, you can see it wasn’t about those things at all.
Obama’s presidency hasn’t been dedicated to achieving economic growth in the short term, or about creating jobs.
Those would have been desirable for political reasons, of course. But he was after bigger game. His presidency has been about something larger and grander — and far more disturbing to those who don’t share his implicit sense of what America ought to be.
In his first 16 months as president, from his inauguration through the signing into law of ObamaCare, Obama arguably altered the trajectory of the United States in a manner that neither Mitt Romney (should he become president) or the president who succeeds Obama after his second term concludes in 2017 will find easy to redirect — if he or she even wishes to.
In the first place, there was Obama’s liberation from certain practical limits that would have stymied a less ambitious new leader.
By the time Obama came into office, Washington had already agreed over a period of a few weeks to a $700 billion government infusion into the world banking system. Nothing of the sort had ever been done before, and it was done spit spot with very little national debate.
That TARP program utterly changed the terms of the Washington debate about the economic crisis and the nature of the government’s role, especially since its colossal size barely slowed its rapid adoption into law. The voices raised against it were basically dismissed as being on the fringe. The system needed an expression of confidence and an explosion of liquidity.
When Obama was inaugurated, he and his team had an insight — though whether the insight was conscious or not I don’t know. But it was this: The TARP $700 billion price tag was a new kind of model. Because it got through Congress with so little controversy and was signed into law by a Republican president, TARP gave this new Democratic president who spoke forthrightly about his liberalism and his belief in the curative powers of government serious running room.
First up was the stimulus package, which Obama signed into law on Feb. 17, 2009. For some on the left, it has become axiomatic that the reason the Obama stimulus didn’t work is that it was too small — the hole was too deep and it needed twice as many dollars to fill it to do the trick.
It’s impossible to argue about the validity of such a counterhistory, but here’s the thing: The Obama stimulus was originally priced out at $860 billion, making it the largest single piece of domestic spending legislation ever conceived by a country mile.
Remember that it passed without a single Republican vote in the House and only a handful in the Senate. Any resistance to growing it in size came from within Obama’s own party.
Economically, the stimulus was a disappointment, which is why the left can only sigh as it looks back and wishes it had been larger. Politically, it was worse than a disappointment, as its hurried passage was the key element to the resuscitation of the Republican Party — leading to the rise of the Tea Party and eventually to the crushing defeat of Democrats in the midterm elections of 2010.
But for a president who believes in Big Government and expanding its role in American life, the stimulus was a piece of conceptual genius. It built on TARP to create a potential new universe for government spending. It was suddenly thinkable that the federal government could create a single piece of legislation that could increase discretionary federal spending by 12% — because it just had.
With that achievement under its belt, the Obama administration then turned to the crisis in the automobile industry. Having just gotten the federal government to write an $860 billion check, the decision to seek a mere $63 billion to bail out a single industry seemed like small beer — especially since George W. Bush had written the first check for $17 billion just before Obama took office.
For the first time in American history, the federal government was using the federal treasury to buy stock in private companies and become their dominant stockholders. Thus was another potential model for future big-government action created. Socialist governments nationalize industries by seizing them. Obama’s innovation was to have government simply buy directly into an industry and control it through the sheer size of its investment, while leaving its management structure private.
The innovation was a one-off — so far. But the idea that the auto bailout was such a great success (even with General Motors still largely owned by the federal government) will surely harden in the minds of liberal economists and political scientists. And they will turn to it as a model in the future when an industry they favor or a company they love is in danger of going belly up.
The achievements of the stimulus and the auto bailout were both crucial to the crowning glory of Obama’s first term — ObamaCare.
First, consider the price tag: $930 billion (a phony number, the true one more likely double that, but through trickery that’s how it was “scored”). A piece of legislation as unpopular and controversial as his health-care takeover would surely have collapsed simply due to that number had it not been preceded by the stimulus. But we were in a new world, a new spending world, for Washington as a result of Obama’s action.
Second, consider the fact that it represented an unprecedented government intervention into the private sector — which was surely made more palatable and thinkable by the auto bailout the year before.
It’s safe to say that these three massive legislative and political achievements — the stimulus, the auto bailout and ObamaCare — are what will mark the president’s tenure. For the left, they didn’t go far enough. For people on the right, like me, they provide a glimpse into a new American political arrangement between the private economy, the public sector and the taxpayer that is nothing less than terrifying.
Obama has been a very consequential president — or at least he was until the midterm elections made his continuing innovations impossible by giving Republicans a check against his untrammeled use of government.
In so doing, they may have made his reelection possible, because had he gotten a few more unpopular bills stuffed down the throats of the American people, he couldn’t have been elected dog catcher a week from Tuesday.
But give the man his due. He wanted to change America. He has. Changing America back, or moving beyond the horrors he has inflicted on America, is going to be very difficult.