The economy definitely is not growing fast enough, but blaming Obama doesn’t really make sense. Very weak growth is a problem throughout the developed world, and the US economy is if anything better than average.
What did Obama do wrong?
Leaving aside issues that are primarily questions of personal values, I see a couple of important failures that seem pretty objective.
Affordable Care Act: The rollout of Healthcare.gov was an embarrassing debacle, but the law itself just isn’t very good—even from a liberal perspective (the basic plan was originally a proposal by the right-wing Heritage Foundation). It doesn’t achieve anything like universal coverage, there have been continued large increases in insurance premiums, the insurance “corridors” are hemorrhaging money faster than expected, and there are some signs of the “death spiral.” (United Health is losing so much money they plan to exit the [individual] market.) Even Obama has admitted that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it” turned out not to be true. Keep in mind that ACA was designed so that many of its aspects don’t take full effect for years, so we still don’t really know how things will shake out, but it’s clear Obama’s signature legislation isn’t curing America’s healthcare woes.
Obama administration policies of supporting regime change against secular Arab governments has basically been a disaster, leading to disastrous civil wars in Libya and Syria. Islamists are almost certainly a lot stronger than they would have been if the administration had done nothing. The side effects of this are disastrous for long-term US policy goals like supporting European integration, since the resulting refugee crisis has (temporarily?) killed Schengen and made the nationalist parties in Europe stronger. And the crisis is ongoing, we have no idea how bad it will get.
Which liberal health policy experts have you been reading to get that impression of the Affordable Care Act? Most liberal economists I have read have mixed feelings on the act, but think it was largely an improvement. While conservatives would probably agree with most of your statement, I would hardly call your view an objective one if a lot of experts would disagree with it.
Which liberal health policy experts have you been reading to get that impression of the Affordable Care Act?
I’m saying the law, taken on its merits, is not actually good by the standards liberals profess. I’m aware most liberals supported it (with some grumbling) but I think that’s mainly because of Halo Effect/Affective Death Spiral. If George W. Bush had proposed this, I suspect liberals would have criticized it for locking us even deeper into the private insurance trap (giving corporations a captive market).
Is the U.S. health care system as a whole better than before the ACA in your view?
No. I’d mostly prefer market-oriented reforms for healthcare (plus vouchers), but right now we tend to get the worst of both worlds. Single payer would also probably be better than what we have now.
Also, could Obama have gotten anything more liberal—like universal coverage—through congress?
The main obstacle wasn’t really that it was too liberal. Opposition from the insurance lobby is what killed “Hillarycare” back in 93 even though Democrats had huge majorities then as well. Once the insurance lobby got the “public option” removed from the legislation, they supported it.
What are your politics?
Mostly paleoconservative, less opposed to “big government” than most paleocons.
He created very high expectations (remember Hope & Change?) and massively underperformed.
Basically, he turned out to be a mediocre President, not horrible, but not particularly good either. He disappointed an awful lot of people.
As to claims that you mention, Presidents have little control over economy. Economic growth is just not a function of who currently lives in the White House. With respect to “weaker globally”, it’s a complicated discussion which should start with whether you want US to be a global SWAT team.
He created very high expectations (remember Hope & Change?) and massively underperformed.
And “Yes We Can!”. :)
I guess all political slogans blend together for me. All of this year’s nominees are making similar over-the-top type claims about what they will accomplish. I’m sincerely surprised anyone believes any of them.
One “change” that happened was the ACA. I know this is contentious depending on your politics, but it at least qualifies as the sort of “change” Obama’s constituents likely had in mind when electing him.
Basically, he turned out to be a mediocre President, not awful but not particularly good either.
Do you have any metrics in mind to support this? Presidential rankings seem problematic to me. Especially trying to rank Obama so early on, since we haven’t seen the long term impact of anything he has done.
As to claims that you mention, Presidents have little control over economy. Economic growth is just not a function of who currently lives in the White House.
This is also my sense, though I don’t know much about economics.
My terribly over-simplified view is that the economy was horrible in 2008, and now it is much better. So that is good. And while I don’t give Obama anything like full credit for that, I also don’t accept criticism that he made the economy worse or didn’t grow it “enough”.
With respect to “weaker globally”, it’s a complicated discussion which should start with whether you want US to be a global SWAT team.
This is my view as well. I have no idea where critics of Obama get the evidence that the US is less safe now that 2008. I’m assuming it’s just tribal politics, but would be open to arguments.
I don’t want to go into comparisons of “balance sheets” of good things he did versus bad things he did. That’s prime minefield territory and LW isn’t a good place for such discussions.
The thing to consider about the economy is that the president is not only not responsible, but mostly irrelevant. An easy way to see this is the 2008 stimulus packages. Critics of the president frequently share the graph of national debt which grows sharply immediately after he took office—ignoring that the package was demanded by congress and supported by his predecessor, who wore a different color shirt.
A key in evaluating a president is the difference between what he did, what he could have done, and what people think about him. Consider that the parties were polarizing before he took office.
In terms of specifics, I am disappointed that he continued most of the civil rights abuses of the previous administration with regards to due process. I also oppose the employment of the drone warfare doctrine, which is minimally effective at achieving strategic goals and highly effective at generating ill will in the region.
By contrast, I am greatly pleased at the administrations’ commitment to diplomacy and improvement of our reputation among our allies. I am pleased that major combat operations were ended in two theaters, and that no new ones were launched. I applaud the Iranian nuclear agreement.
I am pleased that major combat operations were ended in two theaters, and that no new ones were launched.
So what about Libya? What about the fight against ISIS? The former was a quick-strike operation that caused the country in question to go to hell fast. The latter is an example of things going to hell so badly after a “successfully ended operation” that we had to intervene again.
As compared to what alternative? There is no success condition for large scale ground operations in the region. If the criticism of the current administration is “failed to correct the lack of strategic acumen in the Pentagon” then I would agree, but I wonder what basis we have for expecting an improvement.
It seems to me we can identify problems, but have no available solutions to implement.
What are your criteria for good foreign policy choices then? You have conveyed that you want Iraq to be occupied, but Libya to be neglected, so non-intervention clearly is not the standard.
My current best guess is ‘whatever promotes maximum stability’. Also, how do you expect these decisions are currently made?
I wouldn’t object nearly as much to occupying Libya as to what Obama actually did. Namely, intervene just enough to force Gaddafi out and leave a huge mess.
Actually I would still object, but that’s because Gaddafi had previously abandoned his WMD program under US pressure. So getting rid of him now sends a very bad message to other thrid world dictators contemplating similar programs.
I am pleased that major combat operations were ended in two theaters, and that no new ones were launched.
What like Libya? Or the fight against ISIS? The former is an example of a fast intervention that caused things to go straight to hell. The latter is an example of him “ending an operation” and things going to hell so badly that he had to intervene again.
I think Obama’s greatest accomplishment was the overhaul of military spending he worked with Secretary Robert Gates on at the start of his administration. I’m also highly supportive of his executive actions on immigration reform.
I find the Affordable Care Act to be difficult to evaluate. They made so many changes at once that it’s hard to ascertain their net effect on health care overall. Yes, increases in health care costs have gone down. Yes, younger people are spending more on insurance that they probably don’t need. Yes, there are multiple ways to improve the system which are not politically feasible.
I think Obama’s biggest failure was Libya. The US should stop supporting rebellions, or invading countries. It’s never clear what’s going to happen when the revolutionaries take over, or the new regime is in place, and the war itself is always bad.
The issue I find most perplexing is wiretapping. It seems like Obama didn’t do anything about it, and nobody really seems to have cared. Other failures can be explained away as the fault of Congress such as his failure to close Guatanamo Bay, but I don’t think the wiretapping issue can.
One thing people don’t talk about enough is the unprecedented slowdown in the growth of government spending these past few years. Look at what happened with nominal government spending. I think this is principally due to the Tea Party because it coincides with their rise and fall almost exactly, but I still think Obama’s role in this brief change is an important one. Alex Tabarrok’s views on the subject from 2008 come across to me as prescient.
Exit is the right strategy because if there is any hope for reform it is by casting the Republicans out of power and into the wilderness where they may relearn virtue. Libertarians understand better than anyone that power corrupts. The Republican party illustrates. Lack of power is no guarantee of virtue but Republicans are a far better – more libertarian – party out-of-power than they are in power. When in the wilderness, Republicans turn naturally to a critique of power and they ratchet up libertarian rhetoric about free trade, free enterprise, abuse of government power and even the defense of civil liberties.
I think Obama’s biggest failure was Libya. The US should stop supporting rebellions, or invading countries. It’s never clear what’s going to happen when the revolutionaries take over, or the new regime is in place, and the war itself is always bad.
IIRC, that was Nicolas Sarkozy’s idea. Obama’s fault is that he joined him.
Back in mid 1990s USA and the whole Western World was heavily criticized for not intervening in Rwanda conflict and many people in the US and Europe took that criticism to their hearts and now they tend to err in an opposite direction.
What are you trying to explain? Why do you believe that Obama did anything wrong?
Are you trying to explain his approval ratings? Shouldn’t ~50% approval be your default assumption of political polarization? If so, there is nothing to explain. Are they very different from other presidents? A little lower, but nothing out of the ordinary. W’s peak approval was just after 9/11. Clinton’s peak approval was during the impeachment. Clinton’s rose over the course of his term, while W’s and Obama’s fell. I guess you could interpret that as judging their actions, but W’s ended low and Obama’s ended mediocre.
Added: better than the summary statistics in wikipedia are these graphs (correcting the dead link in wikipedia). Obama had a two year honeymoon period and has bounced around 50⁄50 since then.
What are you trying to explain? Why do you believe that Obama did anything wrong?
Anger from the political right. Though it’s generally what I would expect given the nature of politics, I want to understand if there is an objective basis for opposition to Obama...or if it is just pure blue vs. green stuff.
I have a sense race plays a big part of the right’s hatred of him, but I’m not sure how to go about validating this.
My link also gives peak disapproval ratings. Obama is perfectly normal. W is an outlier, with a peak disapproval of 71%. Other than him, all the presidents since Ford had a peak disapproval of 54-60%. (Ford didn’t have time to do anything to merit disapproval.) Obama is exactly in the middle. (Average disapproval is probably a better metric, though.)
Are you saying there are is no objective way to evaluate a president’s performance?
Evaluating performance necessarily involves specifying goals and metrics.
If you provide hard definitions of the goals that you’re interested in, as well as precise specifications of the metrics, plus a particular weighting scheme for combining performance numbers for multiple goals, well, then you can claim that you are objectively evaluating the performance. The problem is that you’re evaluating a very narrow idea of performance, one that involves the goals and the metrics and the weights that you have picked. Other people can (and probably will) say that your goals are irrelevant, your metrics are misleading, and your weights are biased X-)
Which measures did you use to conclude the following?
Yes, I’m aware politics kills minds.
What did Obama do wrong?
I hear people say (1) the economy didn’t grow fast enough and (2) the U.S. is weaker, globally.
Is there objective evidence of either of these claims? Or is this mostly just blue vs. green tribalism?
The economy definitely is not growing fast enough, but blaming Obama doesn’t really make sense. Very weak growth is a problem throughout the developed world, and the US economy is if anything better than average.
Leaving aside issues that are primarily questions of personal values, I see a couple of important failures that seem pretty objective.
Affordable Care Act: The rollout of Healthcare.gov was an embarrassing debacle, but the law itself just isn’t very good—even from a liberal perspective (the basic plan was originally a proposal by the right-wing Heritage Foundation). It doesn’t achieve anything like universal coverage, there have been continued large increases in insurance premiums, the insurance “corridors” are hemorrhaging money faster than expected, and there are some signs of the “death spiral.” (United Health is losing so much money they plan to exit the [individual] market.) Even Obama has admitted that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it” turned out not to be true. Keep in mind that ACA was designed so that many of its aspects don’t take full effect for years, so we still don’t really know how things will shake out, but it’s clear Obama’s signature legislation isn’t curing America’s healthcare woes.
Obama administration policies of supporting regime change against secular Arab governments has basically been a disaster, leading to disastrous civil wars in Libya and Syria. Islamists are almost certainly a lot stronger than they would have been if the administration had done nothing. The side effects of this are disastrous for long-term US policy goals like supporting European integration, since the resulting refugee crisis has (temporarily?) killed Schengen and made the nationalist parties in Europe stronger. And the crisis is ongoing, we have no idea how bad it will get.
Which liberal health policy experts have you been reading to get that impression of the Affordable Care Act? Most liberal economists I have read have mixed feelings on the act, but think it was largely an improvement. While conservatives would probably agree with most of your statement, I would hardly call your view an objective one if a lot of experts would disagree with it.
Here is Austin Frakt on the Affordable Care Act.
I’m saying the law, taken on its merits, is not actually good by the standards liberals profess. I’m aware most liberals supported it (with some grumbling) but I think that’s mainly because of Halo Effect/Affective Death Spiral. If George W. Bush had proposed this, I suspect liberals would have criticized it for locking us even deeper into the private insurance trap (giving corporations a captive market).
Thank you for the reply. This is interesting.
Is the U.S. health care system as a whole better than before the ACA in your view?
Also, could Obama have gotten anything more liberal—like universal coverage—through congress?
What are your politics?
No. I’d mostly prefer market-oriented reforms for healthcare (plus vouchers), but right now we tend to get the worst of both worlds. Single payer would also probably be better than what we have now.
The main obstacle wasn’t really that it was too liberal. Opposition from the insurance lobby is what killed “Hillarycare” back in 93 even though Democrats had huge majorities then as well. Once the insurance lobby got the “public option” removed from the legislation, they supported it.
Mostly paleoconservative, less opposed to “big government” than most paleocons.
He created very high expectations (remember Hope & Change?) and massively underperformed.
Basically, he turned out to be a mediocre President, not horrible, but not particularly good either. He disappointed an awful lot of people.
As to claims that you mention, Presidents have little control over economy. Economic growth is just not a function of who currently lives in the White House. With respect to “weaker globally”, it’s a complicated discussion which should start with whether you want US to be a global SWAT team.
Thank you!
And “Yes We Can!”. :)
I guess all political slogans blend together for me. All of this year’s nominees are making similar over-the-top type claims about what they will accomplish. I’m sincerely surprised anyone believes any of them.
One “change” that happened was the ACA. I know this is contentious depending on your politics, but it at least qualifies as the sort of “change” Obama’s constituents likely had in mind when electing him.
Do you have any metrics in mind to support this? Presidential rankings seem problematic to me. Especially trying to rank Obama so early on, since we haven’t seen the long term impact of anything he has done.
This is also my sense, though I don’t know much about economics.
My terribly over-simplified view is that the economy was horrible in 2008, and now it is much better. So that is good. And while I don’t give Obama anything like full credit for that, I also don’t accept criticism that he made the economy worse or didn’t grow it “enough”.
This is my view as well. I have no idea where critics of Obama get the evidence that the US is less safe now that 2008. I’m assuming it’s just tribal politics, but would be open to arguments.
I don’t want to go into comparisons of “balance sheets” of good things he did versus bad things he did. That’s prime minefield territory and LW isn’t a good place for such discussions.
The thing to consider about the economy is that the president is not only not responsible, but mostly irrelevant. An easy way to see this is the 2008 stimulus packages. Critics of the president frequently share the graph of national debt which grows sharply immediately after he took office—ignoring that the package was demanded by congress and supported by his predecessor, who wore a different color shirt.
A key in evaluating a president is the difference between what he did, what he could have done, and what people think about him. Consider that the parties were polarizing before he took office.
In terms of specifics, I am disappointed that he continued most of the civil rights abuses of the previous administration with regards to due process. I also oppose the employment of the drone warfare doctrine, which is minimally effective at achieving strategic goals and highly effective at generating ill will in the region.
By contrast, I am greatly pleased at the administrations’ commitment to diplomacy and improvement of our reputation among our allies. I am pleased that major combat operations were ended in two theaters, and that no new ones were launched. I applaud the Iranian nuclear agreement.
So what about Libya? What about the fight against ISIS? The former was a quick-strike operation that caused the country in question to go to hell fast. The latter is an example of things going to hell so badly after a “successfully ended operation” that we had to intervene again.
As compared to what alternative? There is no success condition for large scale ground operations in the region. If the criticism of the current administration is “failed to correct the lack of strategic acumen in the Pentagon” then I would agree, but I wonder what basis we have for expecting an improvement.
It seems to me we can identify problems, but have no available solutions to implement.
Well, not intervening in Libya for starters.
What are your criteria for good foreign policy choices then? You have conveyed that you want Iraq to be occupied, but Libya to be neglected, so non-intervention clearly is not the standard.
My current best guess is ‘whatever promotes maximum stability’. Also, how do you expect these decisions are currently made?
I wouldn’t object nearly as much to occupying Libya as to what Obama actually did. Namely, intervene just enough to force Gaddafi out and leave a huge mess.
Actually I would still object, but that’s because Gaddafi had previously abandoned his WMD program under US pressure. So getting rid of him now sends a very bad message to other thrid world dictators contemplating similar programs.
What like Libya? Or the fight against ISIS? The former is an example of a fast intervention that caused things to go straight to hell. The latter is an example of him “ending an operation” and things going to hell so badly that he had to intervene again.
I think Obama’s greatest accomplishment was the overhaul of military spending he worked with Secretary Robert Gates on at the start of his administration. I’m also highly supportive of his executive actions on immigration reform.
I find the Affordable Care Act to be difficult to evaluate. They made so many changes at once that it’s hard to ascertain their net effect on health care overall. Yes, increases in health care costs have gone down. Yes, younger people are spending more on insurance that they probably don’t need. Yes, there are multiple ways to improve the system which are not politically feasible.
I think Obama’s biggest failure was Libya. The US should stop supporting rebellions, or invading countries. It’s never clear what’s going to happen when the revolutionaries take over, or the new regime is in place, and the war itself is always bad.
The issue I find most perplexing is wiretapping. It seems like Obama didn’t do anything about it, and nobody really seems to have cared. Other failures can be explained away as the fault of Congress such as his failure to close Guatanamo Bay, but I don’t think the wiretapping issue can.
One thing people don’t talk about enough is the unprecedented slowdown in the growth of government spending these past few years. Look at what happened with nominal government spending. I think this is principally due to the Tea Party because it coincides with their rise and fall almost exactly, but I still think Obama’s role in this brief change is an important one. Alex Tabarrok’s views on the subject from 2008 come across to me as prescient.
IIRC, that was Nicolas Sarkozy’s idea. Obama’s fault is that he joined him.
Back in mid 1990s USA and the whole Western World was heavily criticized for not intervening in Rwanda conflict and many people in the US and Europe took that criticism to their hearts and now they tend to err in an opposite direction.
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature, working as designed.
What are you trying to explain? Why do you believe that Obama did anything wrong?
Are you trying to explain his approval ratings? Shouldn’t ~50% approval be your default assumption of political polarization? If so, there is nothing to explain. Are they very different from other presidents? A little lower, but nothing out of the ordinary. W’s peak approval was just after 9/11. Clinton’s peak approval was during the impeachment. Clinton’s rose over the course of his term, while W’s and Obama’s fell. I guess you could interpret that as judging their actions, but W’s ended low and Obama’s ended mediocre.
Added: better than the summary statistics in wikipedia are these graphs (correcting the dead link in wikipedia). Obama had a two year honeymoon period and has bounced around 50⁄50 since then.
Anger from the political right. Though it’s generally what I would expect given the nature of politics, I want to understand if there is an objective basis for opposition to Obama...or if it is just pure blue vs. green stuff.
I have a sense race plays a big part of the right’s hatred of him, but I’m not sure how to go about validating this.
My link also gives peak disapproval ratings. Obama is perfectly normal. W is an outlier, with a peak disapproval of 71%. Other than him, all the presidents since Ford had a peak disapproval of 54-60%. (Ford didn’t have time to do anything to merit disapproval.) Obama is exactly in the middle. (Average disapproval is probably a better metric, though.)
Anecdotally, a lot of the anger came from him pardoning Nixon.
Sure, his ratings (archive) crashed from 71⁄3 on inauguration to 50⁄28 after the pardon, but that just took him to a fairly normal level.
Interesting. Good info. Thank you.
I don’t see any unusual anger.
It’s election year, so the usual suspects are already hard at work operating their mud-throwers at max volume and intensity...
What in politics would you consider to be an “objective basis”?
I’m not sure. Perhaps there is very little that can be considered objective, since the two parties have competing definitions of success.
Are you saying there are is no objective way to evaluate a president’s performance? Which measures did you use to conclude the following?
Evaluating performance necessarily involves specifying goals and metrics.
If you provide hard definitions of the goals that you’re interested in, as well as precise specifications of the metrics, plus a particular weighting scheme for combining performance numbers for multiple goals, well, then you can claim that you are objectively evaluating the performance. The problem is that you’re evaluating a very narrow idea of performance, one that involves the goals and the metrics and the weights that you have picked. Other people can (and probably will) say that your goals are irrelevant, your metrics are misleading, and your weights are biased X-)
I listened to my feelings :-P