Rónán Burtenshaw-
At the end of 2008 I worked for the election campaign of Barack Obama. The night of his election was euphoric, and the hope of that period has stayed with me. It would have been inconceivable to me then that just two-and-a-half years later, when Obama came to Ireland to deliver a speech at the gates of my university, I wouldn’t be there to see it. But so it has transpired. I have joined the growing ranks of the disillusioned. In this first article I’ll discuss my perspective on the failings of the Obama administration on the domestic front, before moving on to foreign policy in part two.
It seems fitting to begin an article on the failures of the Obama administration by discussing legislation often touted as their greatest success. When Barack Obama entered office the United States faced a health care system in dysfunction. Its two greatest problems were 45 million uninsured people, the deaths of thousands of whom due to lack of coverage was a stain on the world’s wealthiest nation, and the cost of health care. In 2004 health care spending in the US reached $1.9 trillion, or 16% of GNP. By 2008, the average American paid $7,538 per annum, 2.41 times the OECD average.
The bill that was passed will not fix either of these problems. There were some positives; parents being able to keep their children on their policies until the age of 26 and the ban on insurance companies denying coverage to children based on pre-existing conditions – if it isn’t circumvented – will affect millions of children and young people. The high-risk pool to provide access to the uninsured who have pre-existing conditions and the tightening of regulations on dropping people from plans when they get sick will also help. But the underlying problems will remain unsolved.
In fact probably the largest contribution that ‘ObamaCare’ will have is to move 32 million uninsured people into a broken system by 2019. By that time, however, at least another 23 million Americans will be uninsured. Not only does this render Obama’s promise to pass a “universal health care bill into law… that will cover every American” (made in Hartford, Conn., June 2007 for those counting) broken but it means that a generation from now the US will still be the only Western nation in which people die through lack of coverage.
If ‘ObamaCare’ failed to solve one of the chief problems it left the other completely untouched. It completely fails to provide a mechanism to bend the cost curve. The one viable measure presented in the process to achieve this, the public option, the Obama administration actively worked to scupper in the Senate after its passage through the House. The costs were the part that the US health insurance giants were most concerned about. After the passage of ‘ObamaCare’ – without a public option – their stock value rose dramatically. In truth the administration never tried to make this happen – they knew as well as anyone that in order to end on a compromise of $5, when one side wants $0, you’ve got to ask for $10. They began on $6. The public option began as the sacrificial lamb in the process. The marginal increase to health care costs this bill will actually cause – as a result of its mandates – will only highlight the folly of its absence in years to come.
The way in which the Obama administration conducted the health care campaign was consistent with his style of governance since. The attempt to reach out to the closed fist of the Republican Party with an open hand is the natural continuation of a communitarianism he first outlined in his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It was the speech which launched his career:
“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America; There is not a black America, a white America, a latino America, an Asian America, there is the United States of America… We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes.”
The American theologian Tryon Edwards once said that compromise was “the sacrifice of one good in the hope of retaining another – too often ending in losing both.” This has very much been the case for President Obama. In the negotiation of his health care bill more than fifty sacrifices were made (including the public option) for one Republican vote in the 435 member House and none in the Senate. Corporate Democrats and Joe Lieberman found that their demands for goodies for their backers in the industry were met with a hefty dose of carrot and no stick. Some of these concessions directly hit the President’s progressive base – the tax on union insurance plans led to a protest vote which saw Republican Scott Brown carry that demographic on his way to winning Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat. Despite this America is as divided as ever, if not moreso after the rise of the Tea Party movement.
Among the more damaging parts of this trend of conceding ground to the Republican Party was the recent Budget deal. Another promise – this time to repeal the Bush-era tax cuts for the uber-wealthy – was sacrificed to maintain the status quo on welfare payments. The result of this budget deal, ostensibly a deficit reduction package, is actually an increase in spending in the short-term. This cost is not chiefly down to health care, welfare, education or other progressive areas of concern but is instead to cover the cost of the largest US military budget since World War Two. In addition to the direct effects of this deal – austerity measures such as cuts to housing programmes and heating subsidies for the poor in winter – it will also be used as a hatchet to cut away at Social Security, MediCare and MedicAid. Obama’s deficit commission, which he filled with right-wing ideologues, has already led the attack on these popular liberal institutions. Barack Obama may well be the President who, by giving it the air of bipartisanship and the fig leaf of Democratic Party support, end Social Security, MediCare and MedicAid as we know them. Watch this space.
The tax cut deal was a continuation of a policy trajectory which towed the line of the status quo and refused to challenge the mighty Washington establishment Obama was elected to change. In economic policy the manifestation of this was the shunning of nobel laureates Paul Krugman or Joe Stiglitz entirely as advisors – and the token positions given to reformers such as Paul Volcker – in favour of an economic team comprising Larry Summers and Tomothy Geithner, whose policies directly led to the collapse of 2008. Obama’s financial reform bill, according to an article in The New York Times, was met with “a sigh of relief” on Wall Street. It failed to break up institutions or challenge the concept of “too big to fail” by placing limits on their size, it failed to tackle the amount of money banks can charge credit card holders to borrow and didn’t reverse the disastrous amalgamation of trading and commercial banking that was created in 1999. Financial transactions remained untaxed and individual bonuses – which have hit record levels again since the crash – are similarly untouched. The bill is riddled with loopholes which render almost all serious attempts at reform ineffectual.
But helping the health care industry, Wall Street and the super rich isn’t all that Obama has been doing. In 2009 he met with Phrma, a ‘Big Pharma’ corporation, behind closed doors to negotiate their support for his health care bill. He broke his campaign promise about lowering drug costs while making a deal with the man, former Congressman Billy Tauzin, he explicitly targeted in campaign ads as an example of the corruption Big Pharma uses to rig the system in their favour. The deal saved Tauzin’s company $220 billion which will now be passed onto American consumers. This is just one deal out of many – another such example was the end to offshore drilling his administration negotiated with Big Oil, just before the Gulf of Mexico disaster. For those of us who had hoped that Obama would occassionally fight for the little guy seeing him continuously support policies which favour the rich and powerful – especially against a backdrop of a global recession where the poor, working and middle-classes are paying for the gambling those same groups – has been a bitter pill to swallow.
There is, however, a more fundamental disappointment that the formerly ‘hopeful’ feel. There is a system in place in the United States that makes it almost impossible for popular ideas, endorsed by huge majorities of the population, to be successful if they conflict with the interests of major corporations or the wealthy. This revolving door between public service and lobbying creates a corporate-government complex. This profoundly anti-democratic system is buttressed by the phoney ‘bipartisanship’ of Washington consensus, now led by Barack Obama. Bailouts, subsidies, tax cuts and corporate welfare become the norm in a society so skewed towards the rich that Joe Stiglitz rightly dubbed it ‘of the one percent, for the one percent, by the one percent.’ The candidate Barack Obama told us many, many times on the campaign trail: “I don’t want to learn how to play the game better, I want to put an end to the game-playing.” This is what he was elected for. Not to make a few minor reforms within the perameters of the status quo, but to change that status quo. All Presidents want to make change, but something more fundamental is expected of those who win a campaign based solely on its mantle with the votes of those being screwed by the system.
It was with the realisation that such a campaign strategy could not work again that the President embarked earlier this year on his whirlwind fundraising tour for 2012. He hoped to raise a mammoth $1 billion, far eclipsing the record set in 2008, mainly from those same wealthy and powerful people he’s run his administration for. The calculating Barack Obama has emerged from behind the hopeful, inspiring façade we were introduced to in 2008. And he’s figured out that when you no longer have any ideas to sell to the people, you buy the election instead.
