Barack Obama’s First Year: “Yes We Can” or “No He Didn’t”?

A year has passed since the maligned and lame-duck Bush presidency gave way to the hope and change of the Obama administration. For the first couple months last year, criticism of Obama was regarded as premature. Initiatives taken by the Bush administration were already in motion and it was difficult to see where and when the real Obama could take effect. Once that period passed, many still called for more time. “Bush screwed everything up so badly,” they claimed, “Obama’s still cleaning up the mess — and it’s a big one!”

A big mess it is indeed, but the time has long since come to take a serious, critical look at our current president. We must remember that a big reason the Republicans were so roundly defeated in November 2008. McCain was seen as a continuation of the Bush legacy, about which many conservatives by that time had become visibly embarrassed. Throughout the seemingly interminable campaign season, all the way up until Autumn, John McCain ran on a platform of staying the course in foreign policy and being more reform-minded than Bush in the domestic arena, while somehow being at the same time more fiscally conservative so as to offer a meaningful alternative to the Democrats.

Focusing broad criticism on just three policy categories, and careful to disaggregate between executive and legislative branches of government (Senatorial ineptitudes can’t be laid directly at Obama’s feet), how does Obama stack up?

Foreign Policy

Over 100,000 troops remain in Iraq (some quick withdrawal, huh?) and the War in Afghanistan continues to escalate. More Americans died in Afghanistan since Obama took office than did in Iraq. Meanwhile, US drone attacks on Pakistan continue, displacing as many as 2 million. American entanglements around the world grow, while the Defense Department budget balloons. The focus of Obama’s foreign policy may be different than Bush’s, but its essence is the same.

Obama has dramatically escalated drone strikes, launching them more than 40 times, killing far more civilians than militants and displacing as many as two million Pakistanis from the Swat valley in one of the largest refugee crises since Rwanda. Obama assures us we need not actually invade and occupy Pakistan, since it is a U.S. ally, but this policy of “stability” supposedly justifies the entire U.S. project in both nations.

In his November speech at West Point announcing the escalation in Afghanistan, Obama promised more intervention in Somalia and Yemen. He had already bombed and even with a small force invaded Somalia, and provided about eighty tons of weaponry to Somalia’s “government,” much of which ends up in the hands of the insurgents. His administration had threatened to invade Eritria in April. In the next month, at least dozens of civilians were killed in Yemen by Obama’s cruise missiles, which was soon after cited by the Christmas Day underwear bomber as the inspiration for his attempted act of blowback.

Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law

Trampling on the Fourth Amendment continues as Obama furthers Bush’s invasions of privacy like warrantless wiretapping on American citizens. The January 22 (Friday) deadline for closing Gitmo has come and passed with no end in sight. Obama’s approach towards civil liberties have been nothing but an entrenchment, ratification and expansion of Bush’s policies. This is yet another area where it feels a little like W’s third term.

The first sign that this might be the case happened shortly after Obama sealed his nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, when he reversed himself on a campaign promise and voted to legalize Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. As president in April, he demonstrated his commitment to this program as his administration fought a lawsuit to inquire into the program, citing not just the “state secrets” doctrine abused by Bush, but going further and invoking “sovereign immunity.”

In May, Obama stood in front of the National Archives – in front of the Bill of Rights itself – and engaged in the most impressive example of doublespeak in our time. He spoke well about the principles of the rule of law and how important they are to our country, even as he unveiled a plan to try some detainees in court, try others in front of military commissions and keep some of them imprisoned indefinitely – a policy of “prolonged detention” that, in a sense, went beyond the Bush policy of executive detention in that it was now asserted to be a part of our legal fabric, not just an ad-hoc executive prerogative. This was akin to Bush’s saying he had to destroy the free market to save it, except it was much slicker and actually fooled many people.

Obamanomics and Domestic Affairs

Promised transparency has been precious little, contrary to repeated campaign promises. The corporate welfare of previous administrations has been continued while government grossly expands at an unprecedented rate. Unemployment rates have continued to rise, as have the budget deficit and national debt. Proposals for universal health care are little more than further corporatism playing dress-up as populism.

Still, I’d have to say that the domestic arena has seen the most actual change, at least superficially. Most of the debates in the last year have concerned domestic policy. The flavor of central planning we could always expect under Obama is a mixture of center-left Keynesianism, corporate socialism with an egalitarian veneer, and the machine-politics pragmatism of Chicago from whence his career was launched.

Libertarians, limited-government conservatives and anti-corporatist liberals should actually agree on one thing: Obama’s economic policy has been a disaster and a betrayal in practically every way. From the selection of Geithner to the nomination of Ben Bernanke to serve another term as Fed Chairman, there has been little for anyone wanting actual “change” to celebrate.

As far as the stimulus bill, which had an official website showing where all the stimulus money was going and listed it flowing to 440 Congressional districts that don’t even exist, Obama claimed it was an emergency. The cost of inaction was said to be more Americans losing their jobs and savings. As USA Today reported fairly recently:

Even before Barack Obama took the oath of office, his economic advisers projected that without hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending, the U.S. economy could lose another 3 million to 4 million jobs on top of the 3.1 million lost in 2008. It turns out they were optimistic. Even with the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama signed in February, more than 4 million jobs have been lost in 2009, the worst year for job losses since World War II. The jobless rate that advisers projected would peak at 8% has topped 10%.

Auto-industry bailouts meant to avoid bankruptcy, hurt creditors and essentially nationalized the car industry (at least short term) and still resulted in bankruptcy. Albeit, the bankruptcy process was much less fruitful than it otherwise would have been. And for all the cinema surrounding the bailouts, tax-payers have essentially thrown billions of dollars into a black hole, never to be recovered.

We also had the “Cash for Clunkers” program, an insane subsidy project whereby cars that could have been sold to people who actually could use them were destroyed wholesale in exchange for a voucher to buy a new car, which then brought on new debt for the American consumer. The only tangible result is American taxpayers were ripped off and perfectly good cars were destroyed.

Last Spring, Obama unveiled an unfathomable $3.6 trillion budget with a $1.2 trillion deficit. The deficit is now nearly as large as the entire budget was when Bill Clinton took office in 1992. In real dollars, you can go back to the height of the Vietnam War, and the U.S. was still not spending as much as the U.S. is borrowing today. A recent proposal by Democrats would let the federal government borrow an additional $1.9 trillion of funding, a record increase that would permit the national debt to reach $14.3 trillion. That’s nearly equivalent to the entire US GDP.

Real Change?

What we have experienced over the last year is not real change. A majority of the things that were hated under the Bush Administration have been continued and in some cases expanded under Obama, with new deviations from a just government and the Constitution thrown into the mix. The answer to the problems of Obama and the vast majority of his presidential predecessors lie in recognizing the problem.

Instead of surrendering our rights due to overblown claims of terrorism, relinquishing control of our lives to government intervention. Once your power as an individual has been eroded, group and individual dependence upon government is likely to follow (as in the example of college tuition) which provides the opportunity for the ruling classes to exploit those of us that don’t have a team of lobbyists on staff.

To stop presidents from overstepping bounds, waging unconstitutional wars, denying due process to suspects, violations of the Fourth Amendment and spending the nation into a Zimbabwean style bankruptcy requires a radical change in our thinking. Barack Obama’s campaign slogan was “Change We Can Believe In”. That change in the executive branch doesn’t seem to be something we can count on, so maybe the change necessary is with us. Such a change in thinking isn’t easy, especially in a country this large, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible…nor that we should anticipate failure in our cause. Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.