Obama: The last lap

MIAMI – What grade does the Obama administration deserve from progressives as it enters the home stretch?

One way to gauge that is to revisit the hopes and expectations the improbable victory of an African American president with a strong progressive track record raised at home and abroad.

Rewind the tape to the beginning. In early February 2009, in the wake of Obama’s win and amidst the worst financial/economic disaster in eighty years, Jonathan Schell wrote a seminal article in The Nation (“Obama and the Return of the Real“). It discussed what Schell described as the multiple and interwoven “Himalayan” crises facing the new president.

These crises included first and foremost the economic fallout from the financial debacle of 2008. Also on Schell’s list were: the growing scarcity of natural resources, especially oil; the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction; and the ecological crises, ranging from climate change to species extinction.

Crosscutting these crises were the political vacuum created by the decline in the American empire as evidenced by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and China’s apparent plan to develop, at a breakneck pace, along a carbon-based path. Should the Chinese continue along this road and reach a per-capita level of consumption similar to that of the West today, the result would be global warming of such a magnitude that “the planet will be burned to a cinder.”

All these crises have, according to Schell, a number of things in common. First, all are self-created. For instance, global warming is not the result of a normal cycle in the Earth’s climate but of human activity, mainly burning of fossil fuels as well as massive deforestation. Species are not becoming extinct because of new diseases or a meteor strike. They are dying off among other things because of loss of habitat caused by urban sprawl and pesticide-intensive agro-industry.

Second, each crisis is mainly the product of excess rather than scarcity. For example, the Earth has an abundant supply of energy in the form of solar, wind, and other renewable sources. But instead of exploiting these we rely mostly in finite non-renewable energy sources like oil and coal, which has devastating environmental effects.

Third, all the crises involve a theft from future generations by current generations. To mention a poignant though not the most significant example, will there be any polar bears left for the great-grandchildren of today’s owners of gas-guzzling cars to see in their natural habitat?

Fourth, all the crises we face involve double standards. Equity is a necessary condition to the resolution of all the crises, but it’s a quality that is sorely absent in the relations between contemporary states. A few countries claim the right to certain key privileges, such as consuming the lion’s share of the world’s resources, holding a veto at the UN Security Council, and possessing nuclear weapons. This makes the vast majority of nations de facto second-class citizens in the global community or, if they rebel against the inequality of the status quo, risking being stuck with the label of “rogue state” and subjected to sanctions and reprisals.

Obama’s challenge, Schell wrote, is no less than “figuring out what is wrong with America and the world” and addressing these national and global ailments through actions that are “light years away from anything that has been tried in the United States for a very long time.”

The threat to Obama’s opportunity to be a transformative chief executive was that entering the American political “mainstream” as presently constituted would mean “adjusting to a center that is out of touch” and thus failing to adequately tackle the crises in the real world outside the Beltway bubble. Should this happen, there would be no return of the real and Obama would lose his effectiveness as president.

Three-fourths of the way through his presidency, how well have these challenges been met and the pitfalls avoided during the first 75 percent of Obama’s tenure in the White House?

I wish I could have reached a different conclusion, for I like Obama and think he is as honest, engaging, informed and well-intentioned a politician as could ever be elected to head the faltering, fractious American empire: Obama has failed to be a transformative president.

The conditions Schell identified in his 2009 opening salvo have at best only been marginally improved. The economy, perhaps the area where the most progress has been made, has indeed improved from the nadir of 2008, but poverty and inequality remain at record highs and long-term unemployment continues at an alarming rate. Happy times are not here again, nor is morning in America. Other problems, such as global warming, continue to get worse as data about melting glaciers and polar keep reminding us.

Certainly, Obama has been hindered every step of the way by Republican obstructionism and extremism. But this should have come as no surprise given the GOP track record over more than three decades. Obama should have been ready for combat. Instead, he named such advisors as Larry Summers, one of the key architects of the disastrous decision to deregulate the financial sector.

Naturally, when the financial crunch came, such aides counseled Obama to bail out the big banks that had caused the implosion in the first place. Otherwise, the sky would fall. So the banks were made whole but nobody bailed out the people losing their jobs and houses. The administration had raised the white flag before firing the first shot.

This was a defining moment. It would have been the time to take advantage of the weakness of the 1 percent and begin to crush or at least roll back decidedly the monstrous power that money has assumed in American politics and policy.

Instead, that power has increased, with corporations now able to freely pour money into the coffers of politicians who do their bidding. An unelected citizen, right-wing billionaire like Art Pope has virtually taken the reins of power by dint of dollars in an entire state of the Union (North Carolina).

At the international level, there has been more continuity than change. Travel to Cuba has been substantially liberalized (for Cuban Americans), but the basic assumptions and policy parameters remain the same. Secretary of State John Kerry’s dogged efforts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are foundering on the shoals of Israeli intransigence, which the Obama administration is afraid to even acknowledge much less denounce or punish. And so on.

Sadly, the unavoidable conclusion is that during the last six years there has not been even a serious effort to scale the Himalayan heights. Agendas that are “light years from anything that has been tried in the United States for a very long time” have not even been on the table. And the real has not returned.