In Defense Of The Obama Presidency

Paul Krugman was not an Obama supporter when he campaigned for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton.  He was asked by Rolling Stone to review his presidency.  It was not an easy job.  The far right has been against everything he attempted to do since day one.  Many on the left have also been disappointed by the degree to which his transformational rhetoric exceeded the scope of his accomplishments.  Krugman examines several aspects of his performance and concludes that he has had a successful presidency.  Clearly, it has been much more successful than we would have had if the other side had won.  This is especially the case in foreign policy.  A McCain presidency would have been a global disaster.   Obama's greatest accomplishment was the Affordable Care Act.  A single payer system like Canada's would have been better but that was not politically possible.  Millions of Americans now have access to healthcare and healthcare price inflation has decreased  since the passage of the ACA.  That is a big deal.  In fact, the federal deficit has been reduced dramatically under Obama.  Much of that is the result of declining healthcare costs which are a large part of the federal budget.  Obama, of course gets none of the credit for the shrinking budget deficit.  Most Americans do not even know that it has been substantially reduced.  Most depend upon TV for their information and the talking heads still have a fixation about budget deficits and the need to reduce social welfare spending.  They also do not know that the greatest increases in US budget deficits occurred during the Reagan and Bush presidencies.  They chose to finance tax cuts by increasing government borrowing.

Krugman covers other areas in which Obama accomplished more than one might have expected in the political environment that he faced.  He was not a transformational president, but Krugman argues that he accomplished much more than most of his predecessors.  Historians will give him higher grades than the public opinion polls which have been less kind to him.