It is not easy to sort out the points at which Obama has failed and the points at which a ridiculously venal and disingenuous opposition has succeeded in thwarting all government, all policy and all strategy. The clearest point was the earliest: Obama had a majority in both houses for the first two years of his first term and failed to conclude a number of legislative initiatives, including budget and tax measures, that could have been the foundation for the rest of both terms.
In fairness, not even everyone in his own party would have supported it. The fact that he was only able to squeeze through Obamacare with a bare majority, in spite of the fact that it is essentially the Republican Plan from ten years ago, gives you an indication of just how dysfunctional U.S. national politics is.
Nobody will ever be able to prove, convincingly, that the Republicans had a better strategy for dealing with the 2008 financial crisis than Obama– and, any way, the strategy they did have was same: bail out the banks (and the big contributors to your election campaigns) and string the mortgage holders out to dry, and then cut taxes for the rich. It is easy for Republicans to claim that the economy would have performed better under a McCain or Romney Administration because it is impossible to show that it wouldn’t have. There is no laboratory of economics that can isolate budget policies from all the other factors that go into making up the economic performance of any given country. What evidence we do have suggests that cutting taxes and reducing over-all spending (Republican policies) has a negative effect and that, in fact, we would be worse off today if the Republicans had had their way. Check Wisconsin for comparison.
Obama pressed a little for more help for those hurt the most by the ruthless greed and amoral practices of the big banks, but he didn’t push very hard. Obama’s Justice Department did very, very little in the way of punishing the people responsible for inflicting more peacetime misery on more people all around the world than anyone else before or since. Almost no one was held to account.
Eric Holder was not up to the task. Timothy Geithner was always one of them, as was Ben Bernake.
The Obama administration came to the conclusion that it would be too difficult to prosecute them. That’s a typical “liberal” response to complexity. It was a moment I would have liked a hard-bitten tough-as-nails conservative like Teddy Roosevelt (there’s nobody in the current Republican Party who is anything like that) to come along and just do it. Just let people know that you are going to do it whether they like it or not. Liberals are always trying to get everyone on board and compromise. And usually, that’s a wise strategy. But not when dealing with these Republicans who always ever only had one goal, to prevent Obama from any legislative success whatsoever, no matter what the cost.
So Obama gets elected on the promise of change but the first thing everyone noticed was how many familiar faces there were in his administration, all holdovers from Bush and Clinton and Reagan, all establishment figures, and almost no real outsiders. He tried to get Elizabeth Warren appointed to the Consumer Protection Bureau but caved quickly to hysterical Republican attacks, which is about the highest compliment anyone has recently paid to anyone on either side.
What is it about Elizabeth Warren that they are so frightened of?