In his presidential memoir “A Promised Land” Barack Obama on the first page laments the heartrending fact that in 2016 he yielded the highest office in the land to Donald Trump, an uninhibited egomaniac who was “diametrically opposed to everything that we stood for,” which is a statement that begs for a much closer look.

Just a page later, Obama commences his chatty account of the skyrocketing political career of an earnest and ambitious young man (himself) deeply concerned with discerning how to “fit in,” and there’s the rub. Fitting in with the establishment is the last thing one expects from a professed agent of change.

Advertisement

Obama turned out to be nothing of the sort. In the influential circles Obama craved to enter the players are lauded by their peers and by the media for appearing, like Joe Biden today, as “reasonable,” and Obama, unlike raucous Trump, is gifted with a knack for striking sober poses of the utmost reasonableness.

After eight years of George Bush Jr.’s own piratical administration, ordinary Americans in 2008 after a financial crash reckoned it was highly reasonable for the next government to provide national health care, withdraw from deadly foreign mires, punish corrupt corporations and banks, tax the rich and launch job-creating infrastructure programmes.

Obama, who one of us heard deliver a stirring anti-war speech in 2003, presented himself as the special politician to do it, or at least begin it. The thrilling prospect of real reform is what gave many average income Obama voters, who later defected to Trump, the vain hope that their pressing everyday concerns, not the agendas of the wealthy, would be addressed at last.

Alas, what is defined as reasonable can change in the blink of an eye when a smart young reformer steps into the “business as usual” realm to which he obligingly adapts because he is so, well, reasonable. One adapts to the powers that be, to ‘go along to get along’, to consecrate things as they are. Where do hope and change figure into that beady-eyed imperative? What we beheld in Obama, and his Goldman Sachs cabinet, were cronies who indulged in socially acceptable cynicism, which meant one reneged, however regretfully, on promises to the hoi polloi.

In Ron Suskind’s book “Confidence Men”, Obama at the outset of his presidency, and after ample time to plot his course, hosted a gang of nervous Wall Street and banking titans who were deeply nervous when the meeting began. In exchange for crucial Federal bailouts Obama could have asked the tycoons to do backflips if he pleased, only it was he who did the backflip, promising these malefactors of formerly great wealth, who inflicted their own wounds, that he would restore their wealth, positions and status.

Not one was prosecuted.  All you need to know is who the president’s advisors are to know what policy will be, and his key advisors were all Wall Streeters who easily nudged the economically innocent Obama their way. To be fair, Obama faced a Republican-dominated Congress for the last six years of his presidency, but the obvious abject failure to help out the “little guy” during his first two years with a Democratic Congress had something to do with that electoral turn.

Estimates run to a tsunami of 10 million evictions in the 2008 crisis, but no one knows the total for sure because the US government does not keep data on foreclosures. It relies on dodgy information from self-interested mortgage lenders and realtors instead, both of the groups that centrist Democrats are determined to please.

Meanwhile, we do know that 15 too-big-to-fail banks today, out of over 5,000 federally insured banks, command 52 per cent of all deposits according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Obama did not even have the stomach to appoint firebrand Elizabeth Warren as head of a new financial oversight agency with actual powers to punish culprits.

What happened in the Obama years? The “Overton window”, is a dubious but general notion in political science which argues that politicians, much like idealized markets, respond to the public’s definition of needs, not vice versa. Political authorities evidently can only wring their hands until public preferences somehow align with their own goals.

This naive view sidesteps the vast influence that the Executive branch, and accommodating private media, exert over public opinion. Examples? It was a very short distance from Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1985 to depicting the latter as the greatest threat to world peace since Adolf Hitler. Colin Powell, credit to him, is still ashamed of his misleading UN speech in 2003 that opened the floodgates to the invasion of Iraq.

We could go on and on with cases of politicians manipulating the public, for good ends and ill. This “Overton window” of permissible policy at any given time is the more the result of an imbalanced struggle between politicians, special interests and the public. Franklin D. Roosevelt used the “bully pulpit” to whip up support for the New Deal, and it worked.

Lyndon Johnson likewise created expectations ~ dashed by the Vietnam war ~ that a civil rights and welfare-oriented nation would welcome hitherto marginalised groups.  Obama simply saw no percentage in promoting policies against stiff opposition from his campaign donors. If the measure of a presidency is the failure, and indeed disinclination, to meet the high expectations one generates,

Obama should go down as the most disappointing president in American history. Who else prepared the way for Trump? Biden did not make the same mistake, generating no uplifting expectations he could fail to fulfill. That too is likely to be a grave mistake.

(The writers are well-known commentators and the authors of No Clean Hands, Parables of Permanent War, and other books)