Obama at Low Tide

The clock is ticking toward the end of Obama’s presidency. Next November Congress will turn over and the Republicans, who already control the House, will attempt to take the Senate. The window of opportunity for achieving big political objectives will close in the fall and the president, with two years remaining in the White House, will become a lame duck. The focus will shift to Hillary Clinton and her possible run for the presidency in 2016. At this point, the expectations that Obama raised, the romantic idea of launching a non-partisan era that could achieve national reconciliation, have been dashed by reality.

Presidents become aware of how difficult it will be to finish what they have yet to accomplish. They start asking themselves how history will treat them and how they will be remembered. Kennedy quickly realized that presidents can make proposals but it is Congress that makes the laws. It was his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who completed the civil rights agenda and moved forward on health care for the poor and the elderly—the Great Society, which is now 50 years old.

Obama asserts that the United States is a country of laws and that there are no shortcuts in the war on terror or the pandemonium in the Middle East. Guantanamo is still open and the U.S. spies on its allies and its drones perpetrate extrajudicial killings. The president has resolved to use presidential decrees to jump over Congress, which pathologically rejects all of his proposals.

Obama has chosen his biographer, the journalist David Remnick, to help him reflect on the limits of power, his ideas about the world and the U.S., and his already reduced ambitions. In a 32-page long chronicle, “Going the Distance,” written by Remnick and published by the New Yorker, Obama equates being in the White House to being in a bubble. He likens his political role to someone swimming a relay race in a river full of rapids. His story shrinks and his aspirations are reduced to a paragraph about his turn in history.

The president admits that he is unlikely to achieve great success in legislation, with the possible exception of immigration. Obama believes there is less than a 50 percent chance of success in achieving a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine or resolving the nuclear issue in Iran or the Syrian civil war. He feels the most he can achieve would be a new geopolitical equilibrium that is less turbulent than the current one. He admits that the old order is no longer sustainable, but he is silent about what will replace it. Obama will measure his presidency by the degree of success in the process of reconstructing the middle class and reversing the tendency toward a dual economy in society.

However, Obama is not a social engineer. He said, “The president of the United States cannot remake our society, and that’s probably a good thing … Not ‘probably.’ It’s definitely a good thing.”