AP Photo/Susan Walsh
Barack Obama took office convinced that he could bridge differences. As he begins his final six months, we are a nation of groups more divided than ever by separate worlds of pain and grievance.
How much of this is Obama's fault? What might he have done differently? What sort of legacy will he pass along to Hillary Clinton, assuming that she can defeat Donald Trump? And can she defeat him?
I've been watching what has to be the best documentary on the Obama years, Norma Percy's four-part Inside Obama's White House, which was produced for the BBC and ran on British TV in March and April.
In a calamity of errors, the documentary ran on Al-Jazeera America four days before the channel closed down, got no publicity, and is almost unknown in the U.S.
It may yet run elsewhere on American TV, but that is being negotiated. You can watch one of the installments here-and you should. One of the bigger networks should acquire the rights and broadcast the entire series, which was made in collaboration with producer Brian Lapping and film artist Paul Mitchell.
The American-born Percy, probably Britain's most honored documentary filmmaker, has a signature technique. She assembles all of the important participants to key events, and persuades them to describe, on camera, just what occurred. For this documentary, everyone from Obama on down was interviewed, and the film provides riveting new detail and insight on major episodes in his presidency, from the fight over the stimulus to the Affordable Care Act, the Iraq withdrawal, and the Iran nuclear deal. (Disclosure: Percy is also a former classmate.)
Four big things come across: First, Obama's character-his intelligence, decency, persistence, idealism, good humor, and legislative acumen; second, the absolutely nihilistic obstructionism of the Republicans, poisoning the political climate, and vindicated in the 2010 takeover of Congress; third, the staggering contrast with the impulsivity and incompetence of Donald Trump; and fourth, Obama's determination that differences might yet, somehow, be bridged.
It is this last trait, a strength in ordinary circumstances, that weakened Obama's presidency and his legacy.
The documentary underscores and vividly illustrates the wall-to-wall obstructionism that Obama faced. By late January 2009, when we see House Republican leader John Boehner resolving to kill the stimulus package, most presidents would have realized that nothing that they did, no gesture or concession that they made, would win Republicans over.
The same story was repeated in the fight to enact the Affordable Care Act. Boehner declared that Obamacare would wreck the economy. Even after it passed, Republicans kept trying to destroy it.
With the exception of the two Maine senators and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter (who soon became a Democrat), who supported the stimulus, these landmark bills passed with the support of Democrats alone. As the film demonstrates, Obama played an astute inside game, working with Democratic legislators to find compromises to get the legislation passed.
What he did not do was discover his inner FDR. He did not go to the country to call out the Republicans on their toxic nihilism. And in the 2010 midterm elections, they rolled over him. Obama continued to believe in the possibility of bridging differences, even when his opposition was determined to do nothing less than annihilate him.
As then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi points out to an interviewer in the BBC film, under George W. Bush, Democrats and Republicans had deep differences. But that did not prevent Democrats from often supporting Bush legislation for the good of the country, the most important case being the TARP bill enacted in the wake of the financial collapse.
Obama, for all his utter decency and high purpose, made a second basic mistake. This is my own view, not that of the documentary, but the film illustrates it well:
He got into bed with Wall Street.
First, he appointed a team of utterly orthodox economic advisers. Paul Volcker was rejected as too left wing. With the exception of Christy Romer and Jared Bernstein, the team was mainly comprised of people like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, who had been central to the deregulation of Wall Street that had caused the collapse.
This same team prematurely projected that the economy was on the road to recovery by early 2010, and rejected Nancy Pelosi's call for a second economic stimulus. Instead, they embraced the false gospel of deficit reduction.
Obama was a terrific legislative fighter. But he was reluctant to take his fight with the Republicans public.
That and his pivot to deficit reduction helped set up the epic congressional reversals in 2010. His administration was never able to pass major legislation again.
How does all this spill over onto Hillary Clinton? It puts major pressure on her to break with the Bill Clinton/Barack Obama tradition of appointing a senior economic team from Wall Street.
This will be a double challenge, both because of the money raised by her campaign by Wall Streeters, and because both her husband and President Obama are so reliant on Wall Street for their economic experts.
Obama announced his economic team in June 2008. It's already July of an election year, and Hillary Clinton has yet to name hers. The top advisers whom she names will signal whether her commitment to a more progressive economic agenda is just window dressing-or real.
If the team includes Wall Streeters, such as Larry Fink of Black Rock who has made no secret of his wish to be treasury secretary, or her former State Department colleague Tom Nides, now at Morgan Stanley, then we will know that it is business as usual.
Elizabeth Warren put it well, in a speech to Netroots Nation just a year ago:
Three of the last four Treasury secretaries under Democratic presidents have had close Citigroup ties. The fourth was offered the CEO position at Citigroup, but turned it down.
The vice chair of the Federal Reserve System is a Citigroup alum.
The undersecretary for international affairs at Treasury is a Citigroup alum.
The U.S. trade representative is a Citigroup alum.
The person nominated to be deputy U.S. trade representative-who is currently an assistant secretary at Treasury-is a Citigroup alum.
A recent chairman of the National Economic Council at the White House is a Citigroup alum.
A recent chairman of the Office of Management and Budget went to Citigroup immediately after leaving the White House.
Another recent chairman of the Office of Management and Budget is also a Citi alum-but I'd be double counting here because now he's the secretary of the Treasury.
Warren, now campaigning for Clinton and on the short list as a possible running mate, has made it her business to persuade Clinton to break with both of her two Democratic predecessors and keep Wall Street far away from the levers of power.
There are plenty of potential economic advisers, such as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, or Rob Johnson who heads the Institute for New Economic Thinking, who would help steer a Clinton administration in a different direction. One repentant ex-Wall Streeter, Gary Gensler, serves as a senior aide in the Clinton campaign. He was a reform chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and he might bridge Wall Street and anti-Wall Street.
On the issue of race and racial division, it is hard to fault Obama. The mere fact that an African American progressive was elected president was taken as an affront to the haters. The fact that one of those haters is now the Republican nominee suggests how much unfinished racial business this republic still has.
Yet race and the economy are linked. The same white guys who are attracted to Donald Trump have been taking it on the chin economically. The era in which good blue-collar jobs disappeared was the same time period when blacks and women belatedly made some economic gains, at the expense of white male privilege. Provide greater economic hope for people of all races, and some of the racial animosity might subside. To do that will take a radical break with a Wall Street dominated economic team.
The BBC documentary suggests that Obama will be remembered as a great president and also a tragic one.
He inherited a financial crisis not of his making. He inherited racial animosity that was deepened by the crisis, and he approached the fraught subject of race in a big-hearted way. The fact that he made major legislative achievements was nothing short of miraculous.
What he did not do was to think quite big enough, or make a sufficiently radical break with old economic order, or rally the people to resist it. The right ended up articulating many of the frustrations, crowned by Donald Trump. It now falls to Hillary Clinton to learn those lessons, or she will find herself broken by the same reactionary forces.
The third installment of the BBC documentary is devoted to Obama and the Middle East. Reviewing these events, with the addition of interview material that breaks new ground, one appreciates the sheer complexity of these agonizing foreign policy decisions, and the modesty and competence with which Obama sorted out conflicting advice from senior officials who openly disagreed with each other.
When the Arab Spring broke out on the streets of Cairo, Obama had to decide: Should America join with pro-democracy forces or try to keep the lid on? The national security staff was pro-democracy. Defense Secretary Robert Gates explains on camera how he implored Obama to stick with dictator Hosni Mubarak. Eventually, Obama decided to use the power of the U.S. to push Mubarak out. Today, with a successor authoritarian regime in power and ISIS on the rise, does that still look like a wise decision? There is no good or simple answer.
In Libya, Obama eventually resorted to military strikes to side with the pro-democracy forces and oust the loathed dictator, Muammar Qadaffi. But in the aftermath, ISIS has filled the vacuum of a failed state. Had Quadffi stayed, there would have been a Syria-style bloodbath. Did Obama get it wrong?
In Syria, the trickiest mess of them all, Obama was inclined towards stronger military action after Bashar al-Assad was caught slaughtering children with poison gas, a red line defined by Obama himself. But British Prime Minister Cameron lost a key vote in the House of Commons. The U.S. could not get British support for military intervention, and Congress wanted no part of it. In the end, Obama had to settle for a mediocre deal in which Russian President Putin persuaded his Syrian ally to stop using poison gas. The Syrian slaughter continues, feeding the refugee crisis, feeding ISIS. Anyone have good alternatives?
Obama's one clear success, over the strenuous objections of Republicans, Democratic hawks, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who did everything possible to kill the deal, was the settlement with Iran. The BBC documentary masterfully shows just what a close call that one was.
Reviewing these stories, one can only imagine Donald Trump in the Oval Office, sorting out the intricate complexity of these agonizing decisions, relying on his own penchant for misinformation and a stable of Cheney-like advisers (and worse) whom he would surely appoint.
History is one part deep structural forces and one part luck-good and bad. The Middle East was ripe for explosive forces. Race relations in America were ripe for another awful period. Europe was ripe for the EU coming apart-and there are Trump equivalents all over the continent. The weakness of democracy left the system vulnerable to a Caesar.
But it was sheer luck, good or bad depending on your views, that propelled Donald Trump to a leadership role in America at this moment. And despite his repeated missteps, you would have to be delusional not to anticipate a close election.
The cop killings will only increase fearful white support for Trump. Likewise free-lance psychotic killers who opportunistically invoke ISIS. And there will be more mass killings throughout the election season. The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has it exactly right when he said, "Daesh (ISIS) provides unbalanced individuals with an ideological kit that gives their acts meaning."
Consider also that the overwhelming majority of mass killers in the U.S. have been deranged white men. The obsession of the NRA with creating an armed society meant that it was only a matter of time before a deranged black man might decide to kill some people. This also plays into the hands of Trump.
The Republican National Convention was going to be a fractious mess. My prediction is that it will be a well-scripted unity fest, the sort of political event that would do Putin or Erdogan or Qaddafi proud.
One British documentary provides a lesson in the complexity of reality, and the sheer perversity of the American right. Barack Obama, at his best, is superb at explaining reality to the American people. His final service to the republic could be explaining Donald Trump.
This is also tricky, because he is better at that than Hillary Clinton is.
But somehow, the team of Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, and Clinton's running mate will need to do a better job of explaining the complexities and the stakes. Or the next president could be Donald Trump.
