Reviewing Obama's Record

I recently decided to follow up my study of Bill Clinton's record in office as President of the United States with a study of Obama's administration. I approached the matter somewhat differently in his case. Rather than tracking down authoritative listings of major policy actions and systematically working through that, I focused more tightly on what were indisputably the key three areas of policymaking in his administration--Obama's handling of the Great Recession, his energy policy and his health reform.

I was struck by the curious echoes of the Clinton record in Obama's.

Clinton promised economic stimulus, infrastructure spending and health care reform. All of these initiatives fell by the wayside early in the Clinton administration. By contrast Obama realized something of them, but consistently underdelivered, with an undersized, brief, tax cut-reliant stimulus aimed only at avoiding completely "catastrophic failure" rather than getting the country over the crisis; a small portion of the work that the American Society of Civil Engineers has consistently pointed to as needed after decades of neglect; and a health care reform limited to requiring everyone to buy private care (an approach Obama himself earlier compared to eliminating homelessness by requiring everybody to buy a house), with a mix of consumer protections and government subsidies sweetening the deal (but still leaving 30 million uninsured).

Where Clinton proved a deregulator of finance Obama proved a pseudo-regulator, with Dodd-Frank taking the obsequiously business-friendly spirit of Clinton's Reinventing Government initiative to parodic extremes, even after enabling the continuation of the largest financial bailout operation in history.

Clinton, despite much rhetoric about the environment, presided over an extraordinary, heavily government-subsidized expansion of fossil fuel production and consumption as he signed an international agreement regarding the curbing of climate change that, in spite of its mildness, the Senate never ratified, and Obama, while directing a measure of government resources toward renewable energy and energy efficiency, by and large did the same (the U.S. adopting the 2015 Paris agreement by executive order, not Senate ratification).

Yet, if Obama produced more in the way of results than Clinton, the situation also demanded more than it did in Clinton's time. The crash of 2008 was far more severe than the recession of the early 1990s. In 2015 the necessity for action on the climate crisis was far more apparent than in 1997. And the burden of the health care system weighed still more heavily on America's economy and people in 2010 than it did in 1993 (up from 13 to 17 percent of GDP, while thanks to wage stagnation, per capita health expenditures rose from 11 to 17 percent of median household income).1 And needless to say, the goal and means were, on each occasion, consistently, deeply neoliberal.

1. In 1993 it was 13.4 percent of GDP and $3,400 per capita; in 2010, 17.3 percent of GDP and $8,400 per capita. This made for a 29 percent jump in health care's share of GDP, and a still bigger jump in its share of household income. Health spending figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation, household income figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.