If President Obama wished to adapt one of his favorite lines from Martin Luther King, he might say that “the arc of historical assessment is long, but it bends toward vindication of my presidency.” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait believes that “history will be very generous” with the Obama administration, but also thinks there’s a chance it won’t happen that way after all because historians are so darn shallow.
In the January 12 issue of the magazine, Chait asserted that Obama “has incontrovertibly made major progress on, or fulfilled, every one of” the goals with which he started his presidency, and that “the horrifying consequences conservatives insisted would follow have all failed to materialize.”
Chait opined that Obama’s administration “has made the United States dramatically more prosperous, more egalitarian, and more sustainable. In a remarkable reversal from his predecessor, he has made the government functional and placed it on the side of those who most need its help.”
From Chait’s piece (emphasis added):
[Obama has] survived a dismal, and frequently terrifying, 72 months when at every moment, to go by the day-to-day media, a crisis has threatened to rock his presidency to its core…Depending on how you count, upwards of 19 events have been described as “Obama’s Katrina.”
Obama’s response to these crises—or, you could say, his method of leadership — has been surprisingly consistent. He has a legendarily, almost fanatically placid temperament…
The president’s infuriating serenity…makes him an unusual kind of leader. But it is obvious why Obama behaves this way: He is very confident in his idea of how history works and how, once the dust settles, he will be judged…
It is my view that history will be very generous with Barack Obama, who has compiled a broad record of accomplishment through three-quarters of his presidency...
At first, conservatives denounced [Obama’s] agenda as a virtual revolution…[They] have since changed their line, and now portray the president as a Carter-esque mediocrity…But this is not because Obama failed to accomplish the goals he set out. On the contrary, he has incontrovertibly made major progress on, or fulfilled, every one of them. The horrifying consequences conservatives insisted would follow have all failed to materialize…
…Obama’s federal government powerfully reordered the most irrational and damaging aspects of the untrammeled marketplace without impairing its entrepreneurial vigor. He is neither the socialist his conservative enemies have called him nor the weakling his critics on the left have painted him to be...
The Affordable Care Act…set out to reverse the two unique features of the American health care system: it is the most expensive in the world by far, and the only advanced health care system without a universal right of access. By every important measure, it is succeeding at both goals…
…[M]any things were handled poorly, from [Obama’s] allowing Republicans to blackmail him with a debt-ceiling threat in 2011 to the botched launch of healthcare.gov. What cannot be questioned is the administration’s effectiveness, to date, at carrying out the tasks Obama identified at the outset. His administration has made the United States dramatically more prosperous, more egalitarian, and more sustainable. In a remarkable reversal from his predecessor, he has made the government functional and placed it on the side of those who most need its help…
In an April speech at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library…Obama turned to the theme of vindication in an explicit way. His choice of Johnson was a telling one. No American president left such a gap between the scale of his lasting accomplishments and the indignities he suffered in his own time…At times in the speech, Obama linked Johnson’s travails to his own. The triumphs of history that seem clear and simple in retrospect, he noted, felt contemporaneously grueling and ugly…
…American historical memory is heavily inflected with sentiment. John F. Kennedy remains an iconic figure despite his negligible record. Ronald Reagan has won a legacy as the restorer of American hope and the winner of the Cold War, as if communism fell not as a result of its own dysfunction and four decades of Western containment but because no U.S. politician ever previously thought to tell the Soviets to tear down that wall. Partisan folklore does not inevitably give way to calm appraisal…
Economists and political scientists will appreciate the scale of Obama’s successes over the long run, as many of them do already. But historians are storytellers, and the moody presentism that has rendered Obama an enigmatic failure will not automatically give way to quantifiable assessment. The president’s most irrational trait may be his inordinate faith in the power of reason itself.
FYI: In the same issue, New York also published a negative take on Obama’s administration by moderate conservative Christopher Caldwell.
