An unexpected string of executive actions by President Obama suggests that now is the time for a reappraisal of his presidency — by the Republican leadership, by the American people, and even by some leading Democrats.
Through his first six years as president, Obama has confronted unrelenting Republican attacks, with incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell threatening that he would oppose anything the president put forward.
A Washington Post columnist in December called 2014 Obama’s worst year and cited “a growing sense among the public that Obama simply isn’t up to the job to which he has been twice elected.”
Some Americans from the start privately expressed the still-lurking remnants of anti-black bigotry. Democrats tended to blame his failures on the Republican roadblocks.
But a sudden transformation has come with the approach of Obama’s final two years in office.
What might be considered a new Obama has emerged, most recently with his call for an end to the 54-year diplomatic and economic breach with Cuba.
His surprise announcement ordering resumed relations with Cuba came weeks after equally unexpected executive actions on immigration, to allow 5 million unauthorized residents to work here without fear of deportation; on a climate-change agreement with China; ensuring equal treatment of websites by Internet service providers; and his earlier decision to negotiate with Iran on its nuclear weapons capabilities.
Each of these moves has been carried out with secret negotiations, thus depriving critics of ammunition to head them off. All are controversial, but Obama tackled them as a man relieved of the burden of effective political opposition and concerns about his own political future.
The overture to Cuba is by far the most contentious. The Washington Post promptly weighed in with an editorial declaring that “Obama may claim that he has dismantled a 50-year-old failed policy; what he has really done is give a 50-year-old failed regime a new lease on life.”
Florida’s Republican Sen. Marco Rubio called the move “disgraceful” and “just another concession to tyranny.” Older Cuban-Americans, some in Obama’s own party, have denounced the move, although many younger Cuban-Americans welcome the drastic change.
But the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who has often called Obama weak and ineffectual, argued that the new policy may leave an old foe less active. “If the policy fails,” she concluded, “we’ll be no worse off than we were and can revert back to the old order, yanking out our embassy and re-erecting old barriers.”
Do these actions mean there is a new Obama? Not really. What we see is just an unleashed Obama, flexing his muscles and establishing a legacy by a series of executive actions that the new Republican-led Congress should find hard to reverse.
He did end two wars and led in creating a new national health-care system. Now he is carrying out many of the goals he had set forth six years ago.
His critics should take another look at what history may well regard as a courageous president who dared to take on fierce challenges.
Richard Dudman, who lives in Ellsworth, is a retired reporter and correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and later a senior contributing editor of the Bangor Daily News.