One Cheer For Obama

In the midst of international news that’s looking more and more like lurid local news—vide the shootings in Missouri, New York City, and the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket massacres in Paris—can we raise one small cheer for President Barack Obama, who in the last few months seems to have discovered a new side of himself, and metamorphosed from a cautious Intellectual into a gutsy Politician who is enjoying his power? In his State of the Union speech a couple of days ago, he came out fighting, insisting on changes in the tax code that would move millions of dollars out of the pockets of the wealthy and into tax credits for the middle class. At one point, the newly- assertive Obama even took a bow to posterity: “I have no more campaigns to run,’ he said. And added: “I know, ‘cause I won both of them.’ Actually, the new Obama started emerging months ago. November and December of 2014 were good months for the President. By all rights, they shouldn’t have been. For much of that time, the country was wracked by racial tension. Questions about Guantanamo, drones and government surveillance were in the air. The Democrats did even worse than expected in the elections, losing not only control of the House and the Senate but every governorship in the Southern States, so that by now the map of the country looks something like the early days of the Civil War, a two-tiered cake with a new Mason-Dixon Line down the middle. But something happened to the President--something internal, revelatory, that probably only happens to people at home with power. He relaxed. The worst was over, at least for the moment. He still had his cojones. Rather than identifying with the election losers, he took their defeat as a cue for action. His rhetoric changed. You could hear the decibel level of his speeches rise. “Then pass a bill!’ he exclaimed when members of Congress complained that he’d exceeded his authority in changing rules for illegal immigrants. Sleeves rolled-up, ready for battle, he was photographed running rather than walking to the podium to deliver a speech; some photos even caught him smiling. In fairly quick succession, these are some of the things he did, plans that he initiated: negotiate a major climate agreement with China and initiate plans to limit commercial emissions of ozone, carbon dioxide and methane; order changes in the enforcement of immigration laws that could affect the status of 3.3 million illegal immigrants; make progress toward a trade agreement with Pacific Rim nations; move toward restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, and defang the 54 year old Cuban trade embargo; issue orders to protect Alaskan salmon fisheries and investigate gender-pay disparities; establish a federal commission to look into more humane local police practices; and propose a sweeping plan that could make available to 9 million students two years of free higher education in a country in which a B.A. degree can cost a student over $200,000. Not bad for what the media likes to call a “lame duck President’—a second-term executive whose power, and time in office, are running out. There are plenty of caveats to this dazzling list. For one thing, many of the initiatives were in the works for years, but through a combination of serendipity—Obama’s timing has always been uncannily good-- and clever public relations they made it into public view at a time when Obama’s popularity was particularly low. Improving relations with Cuba, for instance, was a stated priority from the beginning of Obama’s first term, and secret negotiations about a …