America’s “Fundamental Transformation"
Obama’s Influence on the Democratic Party
Barack Obama left the presidency almost five years ago, but it seems he hasn’t given up the limelight or let go of the reins of power. At the Democratic Party convention last year, and again at the recent COP26 international summit in Glasgow, he described clear Progressive visions for the future that conflict with official American policy. He claimed his efforts in office had been impeded by lack of an “engaged citizenry”, insulted Donald Trump and Trump’s America, and overall sounded as if he were one wielding significant power behind the scenes.
At the climate meeting, Obama said that he would have had more power while President if he “had a stable congressional majority that was willing and eager to take action.” He also condemned all Republicans, saying that they “express active hostility toward climate science and make climate change a partisan issue.” This type of inflammatory rhetoric is not usual for a United States ex-president, who most commonly would retire from politics after competing his second term in office.
In the public eye, “Private Citizen” Obama remains eloquent and compelling. He appears much more “presidential” than Joe Biden, the current resident of the White House, who seems unable to let a day go by without making an embarrassing verbal gaffe, telling an obvious untruth, or committing a frustrating error in judgment. During the 2020 primary season, Obama hesitated in endorsing Biden’s candidacy, probably because Obama was able to accurately assess Biden’s ability, having gotten to know him well during the 8 years Biden served as his Vice President. Regarding Biden’s prospects to win the 2020 Democratic nomination for President, Obama reportedly commented, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to (expletive) things up.” When discussing political acumen, Obama reportedly said, “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.” It seems that Obama did not have much confidence that Biden had what it would take to reinvigorate the Obama legacy.
Now, as President, Biden is the recognized head of the Democratic Party, but it feels like Obama is the one directing policy. We now almost have a year-long record of Biden in office, and his governing philosophies have proven very different from those he lived by during his decades of Senate tenure, and he has shown much more partisanship than he suggested in the campaign. It may be instructive to take a brief look back at the first part of Obama’s presidency to better understand the influence that Obama may have on Biden.
The Affordable Care Act, a Bridge Too Far?
Barack Obama was the first African-American president, but did not want to settle for being only “historic”. He wanted to be historic and consequential, so he campaigned on a promise to completely remake the United States. He shared his desire to “fundamentally change the way Washington works” while speaking at the California State Democratic Convention in May, 2007, and hammered hard at that theme for the next 18 months. He took this idea seriously, and repeated it in fifty-some speeches and interviews leading to the 2008 election. Right before the vote, at a rally in Missouri, Obama famously said, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States.”
The rhetoric was inspired and many of the American people loved it. Obama won the presidency with a 7.2% margin in the popular vote and a nearly 200 vote electoral college advantage. His party gained 21 seats in the House of Representatives and 8 in the Senate, giving the Democrats large majorities. Senator Arlen Specter switched parties, and with functional supermajority in the Senate, Obama begun his first term with complete control of Congress.
Perhaps not realizing that Obama actually intended to keep his campaign promises, the electorate had given him great power. He interpreted the election results as a mandate to radically reconfigure the nation, and used many opportunities to describe the need for the “fundamental” change, reform, or transformation he envisioned. It turned out not to be just campaign rhetoric. One of Obama’s goals was to take federal control of one sixth of the United States economy by imposing sweeping regulation on the health care system. This was manifested in what became known as Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, or ACA.
On Christmas Eve, 2009, Obama and his Democrats used their supermajority to pass the Senate version of the ACA without a single Republican vote. However, the supermajority was soon lost when Massachusetts, a strongly Democratic state, elected Republican Scott Brown to fill the Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, a staunch Democratic fixture in congress for nearly 47 years. The ACA could not yet be effectively signed into law because the House bill did not match the one passed by the Senate, so Democrats used complicated parliamentary maneuvering to amend their bill to conform to the one passed by the House. This new bill would only be successful if it could be passed through the “reconciliation process”, needing a simple majority of 51 votes instead of the usual 60. Parliamentary rules meant that this could only be done by linking student loan regulation with the new health care reform bill. The combined bill passed without Republican support, and three Democratic senators voted against it. The ACA was signed into law as two separate bills, on March 23 and 30, 2010.
“Fundamental Transformation” Rejected
These bills were of enormous magnitude, and their partisan passage along strict party lines delighted one half of the electorate and enraged the other. This further polarized a nation that was already sharply divided. Regardless, the legislative victory let Obama justify his claims that “fundamental transformation” of their country was what Americans needed, and more importantly, wanted. He spoke of “fundamentally transforming” the financial sector, the U.S economy, the education system, and immigration policy. This rhetoric from the President continued until the mid-term election of November 2010, when the electorate rebelled and Obama’s political party gave up control of the House with 63 seats lost. Their large majority in the Senate vanished with the turnover of 6 seats to the Republicans.
Agenda Limited by Politics
Obama got the message of this election, and soon stopped publicly speaking about “radical change.” Voters had made it clear that they did not support the type of reforms he had in mind. A large percentage of Americans did not agree with the expansion of Washington power he planned, and they were not happy. They had not understood that when he said “transformation”, he meant radical changes in the way federal governmental authority was interpreted, both in origin and application. Obama toned down his rhetoric, and on February 2, 2014, in a pre-Superbowl interview with Bill O’Reilly, he disavowed hundreds of prior statements and said, “I don’t think we have to fundamentally transform the nation.” But the political damage had already been done, and the American electorate did not forget Obama’s attempts to expand the power of the federal government.
Two years later, voters rejected the Democrats’ hand picked Obama successor and turned the presidency over to the Republican, Donald Trump, who promised to repeal the ACA and to undo many of Obama’s policies. The hyperpartisanship of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party antagonized many Americans and led 10% of the population to support the Tea Party movement, which pledged to fight against Obama’s “tyranny”. A major concern of this movement was the way the ACA had been passed, not through the despotism of an autocrat, but that of a slim majority. Obama had ruled by a tyranny of the majority, the situation that the Founding Fathers had most feared.
Lessons Unlearned
Concerns about Covid 19 dominated the 2020 election cycle, and economic disruption caused by the pandemic allowed Democrats to regain the White House. Joe Biden was confirmed as President, concerns about inaccuracy in the vote notwithstanding. Democrats managed to hold onto a slim majority in the House, and with the vote of the Vice President, established razor-thin dominance of the evenly divided Senate. Today, control of the legislative and executive branches of the federal government is in the hands of the Democrats, but that control is tenuous. Their mandate for governance is weaker than they had in 2008, but they have been pushing hard to advance an agenda more radical than Obama’s. And they have been using the same radical buzzwords that Obama used before 2010.
Over the 2020 July 4th weekend, four months before the presidential election, the country was on pandemic lockdown. Americans longed for the days when they had freedom to travel, run their businesses, associate with others, and enjoy maskless lives without risk of prosecution. Tenets of liberty that their forefathers fought and died for became precious and germane, and the people of the nation wanted their freedom back. They wanted things as they used to be, not spirals into a chaotic Utopian unknown. Presidential candidate Joe Biden publicly endorsed the restoration of stability and a free republic, but his rhetoric hinted at a return to pre-2010 Obama authoritarianism. He tweeted, “... we won’t just rebuild this nation – we’ll transform it.”
This tweet was sent at 8 pm on a Sunday night, and most likely came from one of Biden’s campaign staff, most of whom had been closely associated with the Obama government. It gave the impression that the old Obama cabal was actually running things, not Biden. Of 28 political operatives working on the Biden staff, 26 have direct ties to the Obama administration, to the Obama Foundation, or to Obama himself. One must wonder whether this turn of phrase had originated with Biden himself or was a Democratic Party talking point.
Apparently, Biden and his staff had forgotten what Obama had learned, that the American people did not want radical change to their nation. During the campaign, Biden said he wanted to “transform” the transportation sector, the energy sector, the “care economy”, America’s focus on combating climate change and, summarily, the entire economy.
After the election, Biden continued to embrace the idea that his destiny was to be “consequential” by remolding the country to align with Utopian goals of the Progressive wing of Democratic Party. He said that his American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion stimulus package proposed on the day after he took office, and passed by Congress without a single Republican vote, had begun “to transform the country.” In August, 2021, he said that his Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill would “transform America and propel us into the future”, and in September said it would “fundamentally transform the lives of millions of people.“ The next month he touted that bill, saying, “Any single element of this framework would fundamentally be viewed as a fundamental change in America. Taken together, they're truly consequential.”
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, said Biden “talks like a moderate, but is governing to satisfy the far left” after the Presidential speech to the joint session of Congress in April, 2021. A better analysis would have been that Biden “talked like a moderate when he was a senator, but now speaks like a Progressive.” The fourth point of the House Progressive Promise, the platform outlined in their government website, is that Progressives have a “commitment to sweeping, transformative change.” Representative Pramila Jayapal, Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, echoed this in a letter she wrote in October, 2021, praising Biden’s Build Back Better Act, saying “This bill offers us a chance to fundamentally transform the relationship between the American people and their government.”
Barack Obama learned in 2010 that a large percentage of the American people believe that their country is the best in the world, and do not want to fundamentally transform their relationship with the government. Former U.S. Congressman Allen West may have stated this idea most clearly in 2018 when he rhetorically asked, “why are we fundamentally transforming the world’s longest running constitutional republic?“ A better question may be, “why are Americans allowing the lesser wing of a party with a scant congressional majority to dictate radical policies that affect the lives of all Americans?”