Did Obama Put the White House in Blue for Fallen Police
Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States and the country's first African American chief executive on January 20, 2009, having embraced the audacious hope of promoting a more-inclusive America, providing affordable health care for all of its citizens, arresting climate change, and transcending political partisanship. He had burst on the national scene as a state senator from Illinois with a speech at the Democratic Party's 2004 national convention in which he eloquently found common ground between red- and blue-state values thought to be diametrically opposed. Yet from the start of his tenure in the White House, he was confronted with steadfast opposition from a Republican Party determined to undermine his legislative agenda. Eight years later, after two terms in office, Obama could still look back on his presidency with the satisfaction of a clutch of landmark accomplishments achieved despite partisan opposition; however, his legacy of foreign and domestic achievements appeared precarious with the assumption of the presidency on January 20, 2017, by Donald Trump, who had campaigned largely on the promise of unraveling much that Obama had done.
Obama took office with the United States suffering from an economic collapse that threatened to devolve into a second Great Depression. He and the then Democratic-controlled Congress enacted a massive stimulus and public works program that would eventually help restore the economy to growth (albeit a slow growth that never satisfied his critics). By the end of Obama's watch, unemployment—which had stood at 7.8 percent in January 2009 but climbed quickly to 10 percent—had fallen to 5 percent. Over widespread objections (including from within his own cabinet), Obama went to the defense of the auto industry, effectively making the government temporary part owner of General Motors Corporation and Chrysler, which bounced back to solvency and repaid all the government loans that had kept them afloat. Still, many Americans on Main Street castigated the president and his administration for having been too willing to bail out Wall Street from the financial debacle it had wrought—despite subsequent congressional enactment of the most-sweeping financial regulation since the New Deal.
Some of the anger roused by the Wall Street bailout contributed to the rise of the conservative populist Tea Party movement, which opposed government intervention in the private sector. The movement swelled explosively in protest against what would become Obama's signature legislative accomplishment, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, health care reform that had been pursued unsuccessfully by at least seven presidents before Obama and the Democrats made it law. Famously characterized—not quite off-mic—by Vice Pres. Joe Biden as a "big [expletive deleted] deal," "Obamacare" brought medical coverage to some 20 million previously uninsured Americans and prevented insurers from refusing coverage of previously existing conditions. Congressional Republicans hated the legislation, characterized it as socialist, and repeatedly sought to repeal it for the remainder of Obama's tenure, even after key provisions of the act were upheld by the Supreme Court's decision on King v. Burwell in June 2015.
Obama changed the face of the Supreme Court with the appointment of two women justices—Sonia Sotomayor, the court's first Hispanic justice, and Elena Kagan—giving the court three female justices for the first time in its history. In its June 2015 ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges, the court effectively made marriage equality the law of the land, reflecting Obama's own evolved stance on same-sex marriage. However, the legacy of some of his administration's most-pivotal social legislation hung in the balance after Republicans refused to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland, the president's choice to fill the seat opened by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, leaving that seat to be filled by Obama's successor.
Even before he entered the U.S. Senate in January 2005, Obama had expressed adamant opposition to the U.S. prosecution of the Iraq War. As president he was determined to remove U.S. troops from Iraq by the 2011 deadline agreed to by his predecessor, Pres. George W. Bush. (Obama was similarly bent on removing U.S. forces from Afghanistan as soon as was prudently practicable.) Although some of his generals had argued for maintaining a significant military presence in Iraq after 2011, Obama was unable to persuade Iraqi Prime Minister Nūrī al-Mālikī to invite the U.S. to do so. The departure of U.S. forces from Iraq and Obama's hesitancy to involve the U.S. military in the Syrian Civil War were blamed by some of his critics for allowing the rise of the radical Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as ISIS or Daesh) and its capture and control of large portions of Syria and Iraq. Obama's dismissal of ISIL early on as the "jayvee" (junior varsity) team would continue to haunt him. But if he was reluctant to put more "boots on the ground" in the Middle East, Obama was not shy about pursuing the war on terrorism by other means. Unmanned aerial vehicles were employed to decimate the leadership of al-Qaeda (though the use of these remotely piloted drones drew criticism from abroad and some on the U.S. left). Moreover, al-Qaeda's founder, Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks, was executed by U.S. forces in a covert operation in Pakistan in 2011.
Through determined diplomacy, the president and the secretary of state during his second term, John Kerry, played a pivotal role in the P5+1 (the United States, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany) negotiation of an agreement in 2015 that placed limits on Iran's nuclear program in exchange for the reduction of sanctions against the country (again, many Republicans were strongly opposed to this deal). Those negotiations had been catalyzed by an Obama telephone call to Iranian Pres. Hassan Rouhani, initiating the first conversation between the leaders of the two countries since 1979. Similarly, Obama's reaching out (literally, with a handshake at the funeral of Nelson Mandela) to Cuban leader Raúl Castro in 2013 resulted in the reestablishment of formal diplomatic relations in 2016 between the U.S. and Cuba, along with the removal of many economic and travel restrictions. Obama's willingness to engage diplomatically with the countries of the world as partner after the era of preemptive U.S. action under the Bush Doctrine contributed largely to his winning the Nobel Peace Prize early in his first term.
Obama's frustration with congressional gridlock led him to aggressively use executive action to further his policy agenda. In the absence of immigration reform, in June 2012 he granted a two-year reprieve from deportation and the opportunity to seek a work permit to those aged 30 and under who had immigrated to the U.S. before age 16 and met several other criteria; unable to persuade Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, in February 2014 he signed an executive order raising the hourly minimum wage of federal contract workers to $10.10; and in August 2015 Obama rolled out new climate regulations designed to reduce the production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the country's electrical power industry. Obama's commitment to addressing climate change also resulted in the U.S.'s playing a leading role in the negotiation and implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement.
Arguably the executive action closest to Obama's heart was that aimed at gun control. Gun violence (a small portion of which was inspired by sympathy with radical Islamist aims) was rampant in the U.S. during Obama's tenure, with the tragic stories of a series of mass shootings telegraphed by a long list of place-names, including Virginia Tech, Umpqua, Fort Hood, Aurora, San Bernardino, Charleston, Dallas, and Orlando. The shooting of small children at Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 had a significant impact on Obama, who was outraged when the Senate failed to pass gun control legislation in its wake.
Another familiar list of names, those of unarmed young African American men who perished in police custody or at the hands of police, pointed to another widespread problem during Obama's tenure, the escalating tension and growing lack of trust between police and African Americans. The belief that police were unleashing indiscriminate, unwarranted, and excessive violence on young African Americans gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and to calls on Obama from African American leaders to react forcefully to racially motivated violence. For much of his tenure in office, the first black president had minimized his involvement in race-related issues even as racial tensions in the country escalated. Some pundits argued that this was at least partly in response to his presidency, even though his ascent to the country's highest office had also been hailed as the dawn of a new postracial era. Through the years, again and again, Obama called on Americans to channel the better angels of their nature and reminded them that their differences paled in comparison with what they had in common.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/story/barack-obamas-presidential-legacy
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