How Obama killed liberalism
He did nothing and now his party’s all out of ideas
Surprise! Yes, Contention still technically exists -- we hope you enjoy the five minutes it will take to read this. Please post it in places where it might change some minds.
Democrats reeling in the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive return to power last week have predictably turned to infighting and counterfactual speculation. If only the party had been further to the left or -- more commonly argued -- further to the right, Kamala Harris would have won.
A much more painful yet fruitful exercise might be to admit what tens of millions of voters already know: Barack Obama’s total betrayal of U.S. working families, his failure to stem any of the major consequences of the Great Recession, and the immediate abdication of his “Change” mandate have all made the Democratic Party anathema for such a large proportion of the country’s electorate that any restoration of the liberal order he represented seems doomed.
The scale of Obama’s mandate dwarfs anything Trump could ever hope for. Obama won 365 electoral votes, including from states then seen as swing states but now fully abandoned to the GOP -- Ohio, and Florida -- and states considered Republican strongholds even at that time, such as Iowa and Indiana. Voters also handed Obama Congress to use as he wished -- Democrats, already in the majority, gained 21 House seats for a majority of 257. In the Senate, they gained eight seats for a majority of 57, three short of a filibuster-proof majority.
A collapsing U.S. economy and Obama’s single-word slogans of “Hope” and “Change” made such a victory possible. What seems incredible in retrospect is the pathetic response his administration put forward in its aftermath.
Obama used those large congressional majorities, his undeniable electoral mandate, and emergency conditions which might have opened the door for moves like suspending the filibuster to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Costing about $800 billion over several years, the initial assistance delivered to families reeling from skyrocketing unemployment and collapsing economic activity included:
A temporary increase of unemployment benefits by $25 a week
A one-time bonus of $250 for Social Security and VA beneficiaries
A host of tax credits which delivered potentially several hundred dollars a month to families… who were still employed.
The bulk of the money went to “shovel-ready” public works projects which ultimately flowed into the hands of contractors and other businesses who could profit off of the largesse.
The Administration’s attempts to solve the foreclosure crisis were even more pitiful. As 3.8 million families were losing their homes, Obama enacted a series of failed programs. Largest among them was his “Making Home Affordable” program, intended to spend $50 billion on helping “3-4 million” homeowners -- i.e. roughly the number that ended up foreclosed. Instead, the program spent only $22 billion on just about 800,000 recipients, while three-quarters of applicants got rejected.
It’s easy to imagine millions of families who hopefully applied for this help being told they were rejected and foreclosed upon anyways hating the Democratic Party ever since. This isn’t counterfactual, we can look at hard numbers: hundreds of “pivot counties” voted for Obama twice and now Trump three times. Largely rural, employment opportunities have never recovered in these communities following the 2008 recession, their hope in Obama’s change totally betrayed.
These voters also believe something the historical record also validates: that Obama’s inaction was intentional, not accidental. He was advised by Wall Street goons and top economic advisors like Larry Summers and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to not allow the Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA) to simply write down federally-backed mortgages, a move that would have relieved millions of underwater homeowners or those facing foreclosure with the stroke of a pen -- no appropriations or Congressional approval needed. In a moment when even mainstream sources saw an opening for “socialism,” Obama prioritized deficit reduction in his first 100 days while the crisis was still accelerating. He was more interested in conciliation with right wing Republicans -- something he never got -- than he was delivering actual, qualitative change for American workers.
We don’t need counterfactual speculation to know that voters switching to Trump’s sincere corruption from Obama’s disingenuous fraud are acting rationally, at least on an economic basis. We can compare Obama’s tepid 2009 response to what Donald Trump did in 2020. Instead of $25 a week from Obama, unemployed workers received an additional $600 a week from Trump (and a mostly Democratic congress), reduced to $300 as he was leaving office.
The Act also did what Obama refused to do: put a moratorium on foreclosures on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae-backed mortgages. It even forbade landlords from evicting tenants in rental units backed by the programs -- about 28% of all rental units in the country (the Act had no means of enforcing this provision, however).
Most famously, the stimulus delivered not a one-time $250 boost just to Social Security and VA beneficiaries, but $1,200 to every individual in the United States, plus an additional $500 per child. Just after his election defeat, Trump further signed an additional stimulus which sent another $600 to everybody. Biden promised a $1,200 check during the campaign, but notoriously dropped this to $600 immediately after winning since Trump had already delivered the first $600. Voters seem to have gotten the message.
We obviously can’t precisely compare conditions between the 2008 crash and 2020’s COVID crisis, but we do know that while it took nine years to return to pre-crisis unemployment levels following 2008’s crash, it took less than three in 2020. Other measures show that Obama’s policies either failed to spur a recovery or took many years to do so. The total number of jobs took six and a half years to recover, while labor force participation has never recovered, a full 3.5% of the population remains permanently unemployed.
Average working voters got the message and gave Donald Trump the first GOP popular vote victory in 20 years. Activist-minded progressives, however, still have a tough truth to face: that even when the Democratic Party wins big, no real change comes out of it. In fact, the Democrats seem to actually prefer the world in which they barely win or lose as it gives them all the perks of occasional office with none of the expectations that they actually deliver something that might threaten their wealthy donor base. How this is a “lesser” evil these activists have yet to explain.
Make no mistake: Donald Trump is a loathsome fascist sex predator backed up by a 4Chan-style weird Catholic extremist creep. But Obama’s failure wasn’t incompetence, it was a philosophical choice, which in a basic sense puts him to the right of Donald Trump, a conservative closer to George W. Bush than Trump has been, at least on the issues most immediately important to working families.
Until the Democratic Party repudiates that record and stands for something truly different, their performance is unlikely to change, but that’s a counterfactual we should not expect to see any time soon.
Disclaimer
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