In 2014, US President Barack Obama’s past caught up with him. His sixth year in office was, inarguably, his worst, when the problems that had been building throughout his second term all came crashing down around him.
The year began with Obama proposing a set of reforms to the National Security Agency (NSA), a result of ongoing national security leaks, and ended with mid-term elections that saw his party lose its Senate majority largely because of the president’s unpopularity.
In between were continued challenges to the Affordable Care Act, America’s reentry into Iraq — a war the president had long vowed to exit — and memoirs from former Cabinet officials questioning Obama’s decision-making and judgement.
Twelve months ago, we also awarded Obama the worst year, calling 2013 his “lost year” because he spent it salvaging old accomplishments rather than building his legacy. But even then, we saw a possible path back to relevance. Now, all that appears left for the Obama presidency is a narrowing of both vision and accomplishment.
What tied together all of 2014’s failures, stumbles and necessary evils was a growing sense among the public that Obama simply is not up to the job to which he has been twice elected.
Consider this: In CNN-Opinion Research Corp polling in December 2008, more than three-quarters of Americans said that the phrase “can manage the government effectively” applied to Obama; by March 2014, just 43 per cent said the same. (And that was before problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs were revealed later that month.) A late 2013 Washington Post-ABC News poll found a similar result, with just 41 per cent of respondents saying Obama “is a good manager”. A Pew Research Center survey in July showed that 44 per cent of respondents believed that Obama was “able to get things done,” a number not far from the 42 per cent of people who said the same of George W. Bush at a similar point in his presidency.
The Bush comparison matters enormously. Remember that Obama was elected in large part on his promise to restore basic competence to governing in the wake of Bush’s missteps on issues from Iraq to Hurricane Katrina. (This was the president who made “Heckuva job, Brownie” a slogan for federal ineptitude.)
Every early move Obama made — from his campaign promise of “change” to the “team of rivals” idea for his Cabinet — was driven by the notion that this president, unlike the man he replaced, was all about turning the government into a pure meritocracy that would run things right.
But that idea began to unravel with a rapid-fire series of scandals: The revelation that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was targeting tea party groups for special scrutiny, the Edward Snowden leaks about NSA surveillance and the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, to name three that happened in 2013.
That unravelling sped up over the past 12 months — fuelled, interestingly enough, by foreign policy stumbles by the president and his team.
Obama’s longtime pledge to “reset” relations with Russia was exposed as frighteningly naive when President Vladimir Putin moved into eastern Ukraine with impunity. Obama’s response to Putin’s aggression — sanctions — was derided as using a spray bottle to put out a five-alarm fire.
Then there was Iraq, the “dumb war” that Obama was elected in no small measure to end. He seemed to do that once, removing the last combat troops from the country in 2011. But then came the rise of Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), the militant group that now controls much of Iraq and Syria, made particularly infamous by its heinous tactic of beheading captives.
By this June, Obama had approved the deployment of almost 300 new US troops to Iraq. In early September, after the beheading of American journalist Steven Sotloff, Obama had approved sending more troops to the region. In November, he authorised the deployment of 1,500 additional troops, bringing the total to roughly 3,000. The cost for this redeployment in Iraq? About $5.6 billion (Dh20.59 billion).
As if that were not enough, two memoirs released this year by former Cabinet officials cast him as something short of a decisive commander-in-chief.
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton struck first, not only deriding Obama’s “don’t do stupid s--” foreign policy vision as less than visionary, but also blasting her onetime boss for not intervening earlier in the Syrian civil war and thereby potentially reducing the threat of Daesh. Yet, even that critique was nothing compared with what former CIA chief and defence secretary Leon Panetta levelled at Obama in his memoir Worthy Fights. Panetta said the president had “lost his way” in matters ranging from the fight against [Daes] to the budgetary process. He condemned Obama’s “frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause” and said the president too often “relies on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader”. (Former defence secretary Robert Gates’ memoir was also tough — but it went after Vice-President Joe Biden more than Obama.)
Then there was the matter of the mid-term elections. Republicans badly wanted to nationalise the campaign around the unpopular Obama, even as Democrats, trying desperately to hold their Senate majority, were doing everything they could to make voters forget about the guy sitting in the White House.
Enter Obama at Northwestern University in early October, delivering what was billed as a major speech on the country’s economic progress under his leadership. About halfway through that address, he uttered these four sentences: “I am not on the ballot this fall. Michelle’s pretty happy about that. But make no mistake: These policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.”
By the next morning, Republicans were using those lines in TV ads bashing Democrats as Obama clones. Already-apoplectic Democratic strategists went bananas, insisting that the president, whom they felt had ignored and underappreciated them for years, was now sabotaging any chance they had of avoiding a horrendous election.
That frustration boiled over the day after the vote — news flash: The Democrats lost the Senate, badly — when David Krone, chief-of-staff for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, blasted Obama in a Washington Post story. “We were never going to get on the same page,” Krone said of the White House and Senate Democrats. “We were beating our heads against the wall.”
Way back in March 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama delivered one of his most memorable speeches, addressing the controversial statements of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and reflecting on race in America. In his remarks, Obama drew on William Faulkner’s famous line from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
That has never proved truer for Obama’s political fortunes than in 2014. The past kept complicating his present — and clouding his future.
President Obama, for becoming a victim of history rather than a writer of it, you had the worst year in Washington. Congrats, or something.
— Washington Post
Chris Cillizza covers the White House for the Washington Post and writes The Fix, its politics blog.
