Jonathan Chait makes a stirring case for a president who reflected America as it is and will be, even after the dark and destructive Republican interregnum to come

Jonathan Chait’s brilliant new book, Audacity, upends the conventional wisdom of the Washington commentariat – and a surprising number of liberals – that Barack Obama’s presidency was little more than eight years of disappointment and broken promises.

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Obama “accomplished nearly everything he set out to do”, Chait writes, before setting out a compelling case that he was one of the most successful presidents of modern times.



Audacity barely mentions the huge strides made by the LGBT community during Obama’s administration, including marriage equality, the end of discrimination in the military and the appointment of 11 openly gay federal judges. But Chait, a writer for New York magazine, is quite comprehensive about the Democrat’s legislative achievements.

“Obama’s program has already reshaped the economy, healthcare, energy, finance and education in quantifiable ways,” Chait writes. Those ways include a record 75 straight months of job growth, a 4.7% unemployment rate, an increase of 9.7% in the incomes of the lowest 10th of American households, the lowest rate of uninsured Americans ever because of the Affordable Care Act, and the most serious reform of the financial system in 75 years through Dodd-Frank.

In one of scores of surprising statistics sprinkled throughout the book, Chait notes that before the financial crisis of 2008, “financial firms accounted for a staggering 30% of all corporate profits in the United States”.

“By 2015,” he writes, “after the reforms of Dodd-Frank, that share had fallen to 17%. The financial industry, swollen beyond any reasonable scale, has been cut down to size.”

At the end of the 21st century, the vision of American pluralism that is taught to schoolchildren will not be Trump’s Jonathan Chait

While Chait thinks the Trump administration will follow the usual Republican pattern of failing to enforce regulatory laws like Dodd-Frank, Chait thinks it is unlikely to be repealed – and therefore will remain on the books to be enforced by a future Democratic president.

Chait reminds us of almost everything we have already forgotten about Obama and the economy: that Republicans began Obama’s administration by opposing any stimulus, pretending that all of Franklin Roosevelt’s early efforts to end the Great Depression had been failures; that even mainstream publications like the Washington Post described a proposed $800bn stimulus as “staggering”; that nearly all news outlets were obsessed with the danger of federal deficits instead of the pressing problem of huge unemployment created by the 2008 financial crisis.

Initiatives now recognized as great successes, like the rescue of the auto industry, were portrayed by rightwing analysts like Andrew Grossman of the Heritage Foundation as “a microcosm of the lawlessness that threatens our freedom and our prosperity”. Even Obama appointees like financier Steve Rattner, who led the successful effort to restructure the auto industry, warned the president that the odds that it would succeed were only “51%”.

‘The leader of all America’

Chait also recalls the extreme and relentless racial attacks on Obama by Republicans like Newt Gingrich, who said: “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?”

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Chait counters such offensive nonsense, writing that rather than treating the civil rights movement “as a thing apart, Obama placed it at America’s historical center, weaving black America’s story and the larger American narrative into an inseparable fabric”. In his speech in Selma in 2015, Obama said: “We are Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea … We’re the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the South. We’re the ranch hands and cowboys who opened the West.”

He portrayed “the struggle for black freedom as not merely a part of the American story but as its epitome”, Chait writes. If he had allowed himself “to be cast as a ‘civil rights leader’” he would have forfeited his ability “to be the leader of all America”.

“By fusing the civil rights story with the American story, he eliminated the contradiction.”

Contrasts with the Republican opposition to Obama – and what will come after him – are of course stark and frequent. Chait argues that in the fight against climate change, for example, “the Paris agreement represented a staggering triumph of cooperative diplomacy”.

“Only in the United States,” he continues, “does one of the two major parties question the validity of climate science. So, while presidents from Australia to Norway had to hammer out difficult negotiations with industries and fellow politicians to propose emissions targets they could live with, only Obama had to face down an opposition party that denied that dumping unlimited carbon into the atmosphere amounted to a problem.”

Chait did some impressive last-minute rewriting after the surprise presidential election result, and he does a fine job of describing the importance of racism to Donald Trump’s success. He also believes Hillary Clinton’s loss “reflected the unusual construction of the electoral college … Trump’s aging supporters were disproportionately clustered in battleground states, allowing him to prevail despite her clear win in the national vote.”

If we can survive the next four years of Republican rule, Chait says, Trump’s success will ultimately be viewed as a pyrrhic victory for his party – and it is Obama’s legacy that will prevail.

“The triumph of a blustering, cartoonishly dishonest and manifestly anti-intellectual candidate was a forceful display of the [Republican] party’s retreat from seriousness,” he writes. “[Trump’s] ideas did not represent the future of the country envisioned by most Americans, and especially not the youngest ones who would have the most to say about that future.

“He was a deadly death rattle, a polarizing and even loathed figure … At the end of the 21st century, the vision of American pluralism that is taught to American schoolchildren will not be Trump’s.

“It will be Obama’s.”