Change we need?

Feelings of disappointment with Obama are due to unrealistic expectations

As a progressive American internationalist it is always instructive and helpful to learn and understand how the United States and its leadership are perceived around the world. The contrast could not be sharper between what has landed on my desk in the last two mornings. On Thursday I read Mehdi Hasan’s ‘Change we can’t believe in’ piece for the New Statesman declaring President Barack Obama a failure, a political coward, and equating him with his predecessor in word and deed. On Friday I awoke to news that this same President Obama had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in large measure because he is not President George W. Bush.

The remarkable disparity between these two assessments of President Obama can best be explained by expectations. Disappointment on the part of Mr. Hasan that Obama has not lived up to his unrealistic expectations. And the expectation on the part of the Nobel committee that Obama will be able to fulfill the promise of his new approach to the world and deliver on nuclear disarmament, climate change, and the Middle East peace process. While the Nobel committee may be just as guilty as Mr. Hasan of pushing the boundary of what is achievable, its verdict on the first nine months of the Obama presidency is far closer to the mark.

President Obama is not perfect. There is room to criticize his actions in some areas, but there is so much wrong with Mr. Hasan’s analysis it’s difficult to know where to begin. It is in some ways refreshing, if still bewildering, to realize that some outside the United States could believe, as Mr. Hasan apparently does, that President Obama’s domestic and economic policy agenda was a continuation of the Bush administration. Locked as I am in the Washington bubble, I’m forced to listen to Republican elected officials, conservative media personalities, and right-wing activists castigate the president as (often at the same time) a socialist-Marxist-Communist-fascist-Nazi-enemy of humanity. Perhaps Mr. Hasan should ask these folks if they believe Obama is just like Bush.

Of course he is nothing like his predecessor, and Obama has earned this ire precisely because he has begun a process to deliver significant progressive change. He enacted a massive economic stimulus plan in the midst of a huge economic downturn that delivered the largest middle class tax cut in American history (while receiving only three Republican votes in all of Congress). His budget proposal would reverse the Bush tax cuts for the rich, raising the top tax rate back to the level it was during the Clinton administration.

But that’s not enough difference for Mr. Hasan, who apparently wanted the new president to take the American and global economy that was on the precipice and throw it over into the abyss. Of course Wall Street bailouts are unpopular, but ditching them would have caused even more pain to the very working men and women in America and around the world that Mr. Hasan claims to support.

Hasan puts in quotes Obama’s “‘firm pledge’ not to raise ‘any form’ of taxes” on middle class Americans. Its puzzling why he puts those in quotes because Obama hasn’t raised their taxes, he’s cut them, and I don’t know what the ‘modest social-democratic goals’ Obama has failed to deliver are. Obama will raise taxes on the wealthy and lower taxes on middle and lower income Americans, maybe social democratic tax policy doesn’t mean what I think it means.

On health care, far from ‘retreat[ing] at the first sign of trouble,’ as Mr. Hasan claims, President Obama has devoted months and enormous political capital to extend health insurance coverage to those who don’t have it and improve the coverage of those who do. The public option is not dead - the new proposal of allowing states to opt-out of a public plan could seal its passage - but neither should it be thought of as the embodiment of reform. Even if it doesn’t survive, President Obama will have won meaningful change in our health care system. 

It is amazing that in a piece that’s main argument is that Obama is just like Bush, there are instances when Mr. Hasan says ‘Obama, unlike Bush.’ Climate change is one of them. Its not good enough for Mr. Hasan, though, that Obama has: repeatedly recognized the danger of climate change; appointed as the top U.S. climate change envoy one of the original negotiators of the Kyoto Protocol; pushed Congress to enact binding limits on carbon emissions which has passed the House and has now been introduced in the Senate; and made numerous rule changes and issued Executive Orders to reduce emissions in the United States.

Iraq and torture are other differences which may be important to most of the rest of the world, but not Mr. Hasan. He launches into an attack on Obama’s Afghanistan policy apparently oblivious to the fact that Obama is doing exactly what he said he would do throughout the campaign: put in more troops in an effort to defeat the Taliban. Hasan calls the Afghan war a ‘debacle,’ but it is unclear what he means by that. Is it that we diverted attention and resources from Afghanistan to Iraq, or is the whole invasion illegitimate?

What has transpired in Afghanistan over the last eight years has been a tragedy, but no one can credibly argue that the original mission to overthrow the Taliban and root out al-Qaida lacked legitimacy. What to do now is an enormously difficult dilemma that the highest levels of the Obama administration are grappling with daily. If it was as simple as pulling out US troops and everyone in the region would just get along, I think we’d have done that already.

The technical national security law issues that Mr. Hasan raises are legitimate areas of criticism. I am disappointed that the Obama administration has not done more to change the application of the state secrets privilege. I would like to see them do more to get the facts out on the horrific torture and abuse authorized and implemented by the Bush administration. I am concerned that there hasn’t been enough change to the overall detention system. Obama promised a paradigm shift and we may only get some reform and that’s not good enough. My own personal disappointment in this area is intense because my expertise is on Guantanamo and I have been an adviser to the campaign, transition, and administration on detention issues.

But that specific frustration does not extend to the entire Obama presidency. Perhaps no other modern world leader took office with higher expectations than Obama. He faced two wars, a national and global economic emergency, an unsustainable health care system, a planet on the verge of environment catastrophe, and a fractured country that had lost the respect of much of the world. We want him to succeed in solving all of these problems, but Mr. Hasan seems to want to start at the end of the story rather than the beginning. The Nobel committee has recognized that Obama’s election and his first nine months in office have started the world on a path that may lead to positive change on some of the world’s most intractable issues. But it’s not just up to Obama; we all have a stake in solving these problems, Mr. Hasan, me, you. I’m not ready to give up and I hope you aren’t either.

Ken Gude is the associate director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress

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