During a press conference at the White House recently, President Obama thumped the media for its coverage of Republican contender for president, Donald Trump.
Underlining the seriousness that goes along with the presidency, Obama said that “this is not entertainment, this is not a reality show” in reference to Trump and how the media has covered his run in such an aloof manner. Further emphasizing his point, Obama remarked that “what that means is every candidate, every nominee needs to be subject to … exacting standards of genuine scrutiny.”
President Obama delivers a speech at Valencia College/Photo courtesy of the Orlando Sentinel
He’s right that the presidency is a serious job, and that anybody running for the nation’s highest office deserves sincere criticism. Same goes for Obama.
But it’s not his rhetoric that deserves criticism, it’s his positions and policies where we get to chew the fat. While Trump has enjoyed billions of dollars in free media coverage because of his antics, Obama has attempted, in some ways, to rid himself of the harms that the media may bring.
Obama hasn’t felt much fire for his drone program, the lightness of the economic recovery from the financial collapse of 2007-08, and the devastating impact his foreign policy has had on Africa, Central America, and the Middle East.
Taking a closer look at Obama’s policies with an emphasis on foreign policy, Obama has created a political vacuum that Trump is anxious to fill.
Obama and the media
In 2013 former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie produced a study that showed the aggressiveness in which the Obama administration goes after leakers. The study revealed that Obama has squelched accountability in the name of justice, and as one journalist quoted in the report said, “this is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.
Compounding matters and media access, Obama has used the 1917 Espionage Act to go after those who leak information to journalists more times than any other administration.
A short period in 2012 saw Obama go after the Associated Press where the Justice Department subpoenaed telephone records and switchboards because of the AP’s investigation into the administration’s operation in Yemen.
The report is wide ranging and includes interviews with dozens of journalists about Obama. But the most damning revelation found that the president had launched a war on leakers and it was “most aggressive since the Nixon administration.”
Obama also went after Fox News reporter James Rosen as he was labeled “co-conspirator” in a case about a leaker by the Justice Department. The DOJ attempted to siege Rosen’s personal e-mails through a search warrant in a move that former Attorney General Eric Holder called uncomfortable.
After the fallout from the Justice Department’s AP investigation, former Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the DOJ’s guidelines for subpoenaing phone records of reporters would tighten.
Obama’s economics
In 2014 Obama signed the Farm Bill into law that will slash close to $9 billion in food stamp cuts over the next 10 years. It was during a time when unemployment was coming down and stood at 6.2 percent, which was much better than the 10 percent figure reported four years earlier. But that number doesn’t include the close to 800,000 people who stopped looking for work or the millions who took part-time work because they were unable to find full-time employment.
That’s not all Obama’s fault as wage growth has been stagnant and many companies chose to not to hire full-time workers and hoarded cash instead.
Trying to deliver on his promise of bringing Washington D.C. together, Obama tried to work with Republicans in stabilizing America’s fragile economy during the financial collapse of 2007-08. Creating the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), the Obama administration promised that it would help 3 to 4 million distressed homeowners; those whose loans are subprime or unaffordable.
Unfortunately the program didn’t work and will come to an end in December of this year. HAMP helped with loan modifications and assisted about a million homeowners, but instead of giving money to homeowners to modify their own mortgages, the administration sent money to mortgage servicing companies and allowed the companies to decide whether to help or not.
HAMP’s death did not slow the foreclosure crisis and may have made it worse. According to ProPublica, the program lacked proper oversight and the Treasury Department came close to outright refusing a review of audits of companies participating in the program.
A key modifier of HAMP that may have saved the program was left out due to Republican opposition: cramdown. It would “force a modification on investors and servicers.” Yet in the words of Obama, cramdown would “cloud this thing with partisan politics.” He campaigned on the theory of cramdown and how positive it would be for homeowners, but decided against it because Republicans refused it.
Obama and immigration
In 2014 Obama announced two executive actions on immigration that gave temporary status to millions of illegal immigrants. Over 670,000 immigrants were granted protections if they participated in DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and could remain in the U.S.
He also helped migrant farm workers and those considered to be highly skilled foreigners.
It was heralded by many as a win for the immigration movement in the United States and Obama promised to keep working towards a solution on immigration in the U.S.
Yet Obama’s rhetoric was heavier than his actions.
By way of a report from CityLabs.com, the Obama administration is about to embark upon “the largest deportation sweep targeting immigrant families.” The raids by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) are targeting women and children from Central America “who have already been told to leave the United States.”
Embedded within Obama’s executive actions on immigration was a caveat: protection extended to those who entered the U.S. from Central America illegally prior to 2014.
But the women and kids who are here illegally are on the run for fear of persecution. In areas where the violence is too dangerous to withstand, like Guatemala and Honduras, many have turned to smugglers to sneak them into the U.S. to get away from the violence.
Compounding the issue is the 2009 military coup in Honduras that ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. The United States doesn’t have an official role in the coup, but then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted in her 2014 autobiography “Hard Choices,” that she worked with other foreign leaders to keep Zelaya out of office.
Honduras wasn’t the safest place before the coup but violence soon engulfed the republic and made it the murder capital of the world. The most famous story line to emerge from the coup was the murder of environmentalist Berta Caceres. Before her death, Caceres criticized Clinton for the U.S. and its role in keeping Zelaya out of office.
Since the coup a human rights crisis has developed in Honduras. A 2015 Human Rights Watch report found that the United States has given $50 in aid but withheld $30 million due to human rights abuses.
Obama’s foreign policy
After the killing of Osama bin Laden right before the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, Obama was championed as having a progressive and authoritative foreign policy. Slaying the dragon that Bush couldn’t, he would be remembered as the president who killed Osama bin Laden.
He would drawdown troops in Afghanistan, and as promised right after his election, would fight to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Since then the president has requested within his defense budget money to spend modernizing America’s nuclear weapons arsenal. To keep up with Russia and the rest of the world, Obama wants to spend $1 trillion over the next thirty years to update outdated nuclear weapons and equipment.
That’s a pivot from his previous position that the world has no use for nuclear weapons. It was part of the reasoning behind awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize; that the world needed arms control and “stimulated disarmament.”
Obama has also changed positions on Afghanistan and a troop drawdown. Troops will remain there until at least 2017 as Obama wants to ensure America’s security as well as that of the region due to ISIS and the Taliban.
But perhaps his largest missteps have come from a State Department headed by Hillary Clinton and a drone program responsible for killing thousands of civilians.
In documents known as “The Drone Papers,” we find that the president’s drone program is ambiguous in its targets, and at one point, “90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”
It is as if the United States military is playing space invaders with a more sophisticated joystick. Obama’s lean on drones has been well documented by some in the press but doesn’t seem to be full-throated enough to leave a lasting mark. Either that or we’re just failing to pay attention.
In Yemen, the U.S. has gotten stuck and Obama is being accused of war crimes by those who have followed events in the war torn country. As Foreign Policy noted last year, there was an attempt within the United Nations to hold the United States accountable for human rights abuses in Yemen, but the measure was blocked.
Making matters worse, Obama and Clinton sold war planes and smart bombs to Saudi Arabia to help the oil rich nation in its attack on Yemen.
There is also the quagmire in Libya in which the president called his “worst mistake.” While he’s at least remorseful for his role in creating a power vacuum in Libya, his former secretary of state is not. Clinton has openly blamed Obama for what went wrong in Libya but has gushed about the death of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi as “we came, we saw, he died” in a jovial manner.
Obama has also aided in the construction of a wall along the Jordan border that will cost U.S. taxpayers at least half a billion dollars. It is described as a defense fence with surveillance towers that will “stem the flow of refugees and also wall off the increasingly important American base from the disintegration of Syria and Iraq.”
Giving the commencement speech at Rutgers University, Obama chided Trump’s idea of building a wall along the Mexican border and his idea to ban Muslims from coming into America. He said that erecting walls dampens economic prospects and that it is “not the way of the future.”
While Obama’s view of the world is certainly more progressive than Trump’s, his application of that view is one of a neocon, the title that progressives love to hate.
Obama has been an imperfect president as has every one that proceeded him. But if we’re to take the notion of an Obama presidency seriously while burning down the theory of Trump because of his archaic and bigoted political themes, we’ve lost something in translation.
A Trump presidency would be bad for America and the world in the face of Obama’s flawless execution of a neoconservative foreign policy. Building a border wall would be bad as well as keeping Muslims out of the country for security reasons.
Trump doesn’t truly have a foreign policy position on much of anything besides bombing ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and torturing terrorists. He has displayed a position of isolationism by stating he would pull America back from NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and question why we’re allies with certain countries, such as Japan and South Korea.
As Americans, we often live in echo chambers that enclose our beliefs. At times that’s fun and ok as we like to yell and shout about sports and entertainment. Yet it shouldn’t be that way in politics.
Questioning our belief systems and finding new information about them will either blow them up entirely or force us to cling strongly to them.
Donald Trump isn’t America’s best because his ideas are born out of fear and resentment. But Obama has contributed to that fear by way of his policies domestically and overseas. Building a wall Jordan, killing Muslims in the Middle East, slashing money from safety net programs, and going after whistle blowers isn’t exactly progressive.
If we’re to view Trump through a lens of skepticism then Obama deserves the same treatment but to a greater degree.
-JH
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