by
Jacob Bacharach
On Oct.
14, 2011, an order by Barack Obama resulted in the murder of
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American boy. Obama had ordered
the execution of the boy’s father, also an American citizen,
allegedly a member of the al-Qaeda network, two weeks before.
Abdulrahman hadn’t seen his father in more than two years; he’d
traveled abroad to search for him. We blew the kid up in a
restaurant. When confronted by reporters, Obama’s press secretary,
Robert Gibbs, glibly justified the extrajudicial killing of an
American child: He should have had “a more responsible father.”
Today, Donald Trump and his sycophants contend that the children of
undocumented immigrants are the victims of their parents’
irresponsible law-breaking.
Like
most ex-presidents in the last half century, Obama slid out of the
White House and into a well-paid semi-retirement of remunerative
speaking engagements and ineffectual good works. His and Hillary
Clinton’s mutual antipathy was evident throughout the 2016
campaign. After her humiliation at the hands of Trump, a vulgar,
racist dummy who continually questioned Obama’s citizenship and who
ran in no small part because of his own public humiliation by the
then-president at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association
Dinner, Obama made a few desultory efforts to make nice with the new
president-elect and then embraced the silence on current political
affairs that is the decorous mark of modern post-presidencies. He
emerged only last week, as word of the Trump administration’s
vicious campaign to separate and imprison the children of migrants
and asylum seekers in detention camps came to dominate national media
coverage and caused real and widespread popular outrage.
“[T]o
watch those families broken apart in real time puts to us a very
simple question,” Obama wrote on his Facebook page. “Are
we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their
parents’ arms, or are we a nation that values families, and works
to keep them together? Do we look away, or do we choose to see
something of ourselves and our children?”
There is
some irony in hearing this from the same man who bragged, during the
2012 campaign, that he was “really good at killing people.”
The claim was in reference to drone warfare, but Obama’s militarism
was not confined to the occasional Hellfire missile, which the
national security establishment and its media interlocutors treat as
an antiseptic alternative to the messiness of conventional war. In
2011, in part due to the heavy lobbying of then-Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, the United States participated in a disastrous
Euro-American campaign in Libya, destroying the government of Muammar
Gaddafi, a leader who only a few years earlier had been feted for his
active cooperation in national disarmament, and plunging Libya into
the chaos of failed statehood, from which it has not recovered.
Gaddafi was killed and possibly tortured to death. African migrants
captured in Libya as they attempt to reach the Mediterranean and
Europe have allegedly been sold—in open markets—as slaves.
In
Syria, under Obama, the United States managed to support nearly every
side in a multi-party civil war. By 2016, it was widely reported that
militias armed by the Pentagon were openly battling militias armed by
the CIA. The conflict has created one of the greatest refugee crises
in modern history, as millions of people seek to escape a wrecked
country and reach relative safety in Europe: men leaving wives and
children; child siblings making deadly sea crossings without parents;
a maze of fences, camps and varying levels of open hostility awaiting
them no matter what routes they take. And we should not forget Yemen,
where since 2015 the United States has supported and armed a Saudi
campaign of terror bombing that has created a man-made famine and
cholera epidemic, the scale of which could come to rival the Great
Famine in Ukraine.
Compared
to the actual madman that is Trump, Obama was a humanist, but then
again, so was Thomas More, and look at how many heretics he burned at
the stake. Throughout his career, Obama made use of rhetorical
appeals to a broad, shared humanity, to the values of empathy,
fellow-feeling and tolerance. In practice, his presidency was less
liberal rebirth than liberal retrenchment, and he worked to formalize
the very systems of brutality that Donald Trump and his evil coterie
wield to such terrifying effect.
I was at
Kelly’s Bar & Lounge in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty
neighborhood when Obama was elected to his first term. The
neighborhood had already begun to gentrify, although it would still
be years before the $2,000-a-month apartments, restaurant valet
signs, Pure Barre exercise studio and the Google flag flying over the
old National Biscuit Co., where, during the St. Patrick’s Day Flood
in 1936, my great-grandfather had worked for three straight days
baking bread for the city. In the 1960s, an ill-conceived urban
development plan hollowed out the neighborhood’s commercial core,
and the city built a set of high-rise public housing complexes; the
neighborhood developed a reputation for blight, which is to say that
it became largely black.
The
clientele at Kelly’s in 2008 was mostly white, comparatively
well-to-do, liberal-ish. We could hear a dull roar from the
neighborhood as the networks began to call the election, and then
everyone went out into the street, residents and interlopers, and we
all congratulated ourselves and each other, even those of us, like
me, who stood far to the left of mainstream Democratic politics and
viewed Obama’s occasionally high-flown rhetoric as decoration on an
otherwise plain and tepid program of decidedly “centrist”
reforms. America had soundly elected its first black president, and
you can go to hell if that didn’t at least give you one night to
smile and hope for the future.
His
election came as a relief. I am not too cynical to say so. It is hard
to recall now in this hypersaturated Trump era just how mad and
untethered the Bush years were. By the time the 2008 race rolled
around, Bush’s popularity was in irrevocable decline, his wars
largely accepted as failures, the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina
still top of mind. But for much of his presidency, a grim, jingoistic
national unity prevailed. There were liberal blogs, and the
ineffectual sarcasm of “The Daily Show,” but that was scant
opposition, and even the vast antiwar marches in the run-up to the
Iraq war swiftly melted away in favor of cable news’ music videos
of “Shock & Awe” bombing.
The
gaudy insanity of Trump’s campaign seems unprecedented until you
look up photos of pasty Midwesterners in the middle of the ’04
Republican National Convention blinged out with patriotic swag and
purple bandages as part of that season’s conspiracy theory—that
John Kerry had faked a war injury to earn a decoration. Dick Cheney
shot a man in the face and faced no consequences; his victim
apologized to him! Guantanamo. Abu Ghraib. Heckuva job, Brownie. The
financial crisis. It was relentless and mad-making.
Obama
felt like a salve, if not a cure. He was reasoned and articulate. His
abilities as a great American speechmaker were overrated, but he was
still a talented orator. He’d prevailed in a primary race infected
by the Clinton campaign’s scurrilous resort to innuendo about his
race and origin, and he whipped John McCain, an aging and seemingly
unbalanced Senator who was and remains bizarrely beloved by American
political journalists. It felt as if it might at least herald a
reversion to the mean, a return to the smaller-bore politics of the
1990s; perhaps, due to the discrediting of market liberalism by the
rapid succession of early-2000s corporate accounting scandals and the
subprime collapse, there might even be a way to claw back some of the
vicious attacks on the social welfare system by the neoliberal
Clintonites of that decade. Perhaps we might successfully agitate for
dismantling the poisonous security and intelligence apparatuses that
metastasized under Bush and Cheney.
Instead,
Obama largely set about organizing them. Obama would later be
criticized, often from the left—I am guilty of it myself—for his
seeming diffidence, and defended, often from the center-right that
composes the majority of the Democratic Party, as having been almost
entirely hamstrung by a Congress controlled by an insane and deeply
racist GOP. Both the criticism and the defense give him too little
credit as one of the great bureaucratic rationalizers of the modern
era, taking the slapdash and ad hoc excesses of the prior decade and
normalizing them. Obama’s infamous “look forward, not
backward” dictum regarding any criminal prosecutions of
Bush-era war criminals and finance-industry crooks was neither the
feckless attitude of a weak leader nor the misguided ecumenicism of a
would-be peacemaker in a partisan age; it was something more akin to
the efficiency-minded corporate fixer who loves the product but wants
to reorganize the back office.
Even
before the 2010 midterms ushered in a powerfully intransigent
Republican legislative majority, it was clear that Obama preferred
executive management. He arrogated to himself all of the powers of
prior presidents, including the even-more-unfettered war-making
authority conferred upon George W. Bush by the machinations of Dick
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the cooperation of a foolish and
supine Congress. He took a special personal interest in drone
warfare, putting himself in sole charge of the so-called disposition
matrix—the infamous kill list—in an unsubtle signal that the
president alone held this literal power of life and death. He made
some conciliatory gestures toward immigrant communities, DACA
(Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) most notably, but these were
firmly undergirded by the guiding post-Third Way principles of the
meritocratic, corporatist Democratic establishment: namely, that only
the deserving are deserving.
He
simultaneously and quietly organized ICE, a fascist reimagining of
the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (along with parts of
the old Customs Service and Federal Protective Service) dreamed up
during the creation of the equally spooky and Big-Brotherish
Department of Homeland Security. He deported more people than any
prior president.
Obama’s
most famous public utterance may have been his declaration at the
2004 Democratic convention that “there is not a liberal America
and a conservative America—there is the United States of America.”
He went on to ding “pundits” for dividing American into “red
states” and “blue states.” In the intervening years, a popular
map shading red-to-blue, demonstrating that the majority of the
country’s land area is “purple,” has become popular among the
sorts of people who believe in common-sense solutions and work for
think tanks and op-ed pages. But the only real purple America is its
imperial presidency, and if we are not simply to survive the present
crisis and pray for another Obama-like figure to calmly restore order
to agencies and policies that should not exist in the first place,
then we must actually engage with his legacy, which despite a few
admirable moments, largely consists of solidifying and centralizing
the vast executive power he promptly handed over to Trump.
Apologists
for the Obama administration will point out that he was in every way
a better man and a better president, which is accidentally damning
with faint praise. He was better and smarter, but he wasn’t wise,
and he wasn’t humble. He believed in the power of the presidency,
and we are living with the consequences.
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