44.) Barack Obama 2009-2017

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." - Barack Obama, on the campaign trail, Feb. 5, 2008

Nothing was ever going to come easy to Barack Obama, and many thought he was crazy for trying, but belief himself was something Obama had in spades, and it lifted him to the presidency of the United States. Follow along as Barack Obama rises from a humble start as a community organizer in Chicago to crack into Illinois Democratic politics, transform his career with a 2004 national convention speech, and shock the political establishment by becoming the first African American President in U.S. history in 2009. His reward? Two foreign wars, an economy in free fall, and an opposition party committed to saying 'no!' at every turn. It was one of the most challenging hands any president has been given, and yet he overcame it to save the American economy and settle its foreign policy on stable ground.

Bibliography
1. Obama: The Call of History - Peter Baker
2. Bush - Jean Edward Smith

Transcript

Some presidents, when they are sworn into office, inherit a great starting hand.

And some presidents are dealt hot garbage.

Barack Obama was dealt hot garbage.

A war in Iraq. A war in Afghanistan. The worst economic depression since the GREAT depression.

And the very night of his inauguration, a cohort of republican congressional leaders gathered in D.C. to commit to a scorched earth strategy of total obstruction.

In other words, the country was on fire and Republicans wanted to step on the fire hose.

But Obama, over time and with varying levels of success, overcame all of these challenges to not just right the ship, but also pass the most meaningful healthcare overhaul in half a century.

Let’s go.

—

Barack Hussein Obama jr. was born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

His white mother, Stanley Ann - and you can bet she went by Ann - met his black father, Barack Obama Sr., at the University of Hawaii when they were students. They fell in love, got married, and had a child - Barack junior. What Ann didn’t know is that Barack Obama sr. was actually already married and already a father.

Yup. Barack Senior had gotten married and fathered 2 kids back in Kenya. When an opportunity came along to study in America, he told his wife, don’t worry, I’ll be back as soon as I complete my education, and then he left for Hawaii.

Where he met, married, and parented a child with Ann.

But then an opportunity came along for Barack Sr. to go to grad school in England.

So he told his wife, don’t worry, I’ll be back as soon as I complete my education, and he left for England.

Ann soon realized that he was not coming back. She was the second wife of Barack Sr. who had been abandoned with a child.

That’s a pretty tough start. Luckily, Ann had the support of her parents, who helped raise Barack as she returned to school, earned a degree in anthropology, and married again this time to an Indonesian student who didn’t abandon her. When the young Obama was six, his mother and stepfather moved the family to Indonesia, where Obama spent 4 years before returning to Hawaii to be raised by his grandparents.

As the son of a white mother and a black father, Obama struggled with race through much of his life. From childhood to the campaign trail, blacks often viewed him as too white and whites often viewed him as too black. And yet, Obama played it cool and managed to get along well enough with everybody. He had an easy going nature. He liked basketball. He liked to party. He liked to read. And you know what? Growing up in Hawaii was pretty sweet.

Once in College at Columbia in New York, Obama became obsessed with the hardships of the poor. It led him to a career as a community organizer in Chicago - someone who identifies and solves problems for underserved communities. Like paving streets, signing elderly up for social security, or helping housewives advance their education. As one Obama mentor said, it’s hard to find good people for these jobs because you have to be really smart to effectively navigate so many different systems, and if you’re that smart, you’re probably smart enough to realise this is a really crummy job.

But Obama had a passion for it.

Until he got burnt out.

Too often, he laid the groundwork for a project that would really help folks in this neighborhood or over there, only for someone in local government to say no. And it made him wonder, what if instead of being on the outside, doing all this work, and being told no, he was a politician on the inside, saying yes.

After 3 years in Chicago, Barack Obama said goodbye, for now, and enrolled in law school at Harvard.

Harvard was good for Obama’s career. It was also good for his marriage prospects.

Toward the end of his time at Harvard, Obama sat down for a job interview with Michelle Robinson, a law recruiter from Chicago. Barack turned on the charm and landed the job. Then he tried to land a date. After many no’s, Michelle finally said yes - but they couldn’t call it a date. It was just coffee. It’s not like she was going to marry this cocky Harvard boy from Hawaii.

3 years later, they got married. Michelle Obama is an enduringly popular first lady who absolutely hates politics. Hates it. Just wait. The pair have two daughters, Sasha and Malia, and are still together today.

Obama ran his first political campaign in 1996 when he was 36 years old. The target? A seat in the Illinois state senate. When he told Michelle what he wanted to do, she told him it was the stupidest thing he’d ever tried. But she did support him and he did win.

4-years-later, he went for the next rung on the ladder, Congress. But this time he got clobbered. 60-30. Oof.

So when he started talking about skipping the house and running for senate in 2004, his friends, wife, and advisors all thought he was crazy. They even staged an intervention - Barack, you are a black man from the South side of Chicago with no money, no statewide organization, and a funny-sounding name. Here are all the reasons you are going to lose.

Obama listened. Let them finish. And then turn by turn told each of them why they were wrong. He was going to run. He was going to win.

He was right, but he also got lucky.

Obama’s senatorial rivals both ended up having more than a few skeletons in their closets that doomed their campaigns as Obama ran on, get this, the idea of hope. True, he did think ‘yes we can’ was a corny-sounding tagline that he didn’t want to say, but Michelle insisted he try it and man, it struck a chord. Obama rose above his democratic rivals to become the Democratic nominee for one of illinois’ 2 seats in the senate. 

Then, Obama got even luckier.

The 2004 democratic national convention was coming up and the democratic party wanted Obama to deliver a keynote address. The senatorial campaign hit pause and this speech became team Obama’s whole focus. The whole nation would be watching that convention. A strong performance here wouldn’t just win that senate seat, it might put Obama on the national radar.

Mission accomplished.

“____”

Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address is up there with Ronald Reagan’s 1964 Time for Choosing speech as the 2 speeches that, more than any others, radically transformed the political careers of the men who gave them.

The crowd cheered. The crowd cried. Media elites cooed. World leaders called to pay their respects. In 16-minutes, Obama had turned himself into a future democratic candidate for president.

The only question was when.

How about, four years later?

I am not going to spend much time on the Obama’s 2008 darkhorse presidential campaign here because I have an interview lined up with one of his Iowa field directors to give us the inside story, but, in short, Obama overcame a heavily-favored Hillary clinton in the primaries, then beat an experienced John McCain in the general election. Obama ran on hope. He ran on change. He ran against the disastrous war in Iraq. He ran on ‘yes we can.’

And he won. 365 to 173 in the electoral college, 69 million to 60 million in the popular vote.

And so, on January 20, 2009, 47-year-old Barack Obama, a freshman Illinois senator, former chicago community organizer, and native son of Hawaii - a man who had only entered politics 12 years earlier, was sworn in as the first African American president in American history. Or was he! Chief Justice John Roberts flubbed the oath of office and nervous lawyers feared Obama’s presidential actions might later be challenged since he hadn’t said the exact words laid out in the constitution, so, a couple days later, Roberts and Obama redid the oath, slower. And nobody ever questioned Obama’s legitimacy again. 

But what did the world, and the country, look like when Obama became president? Let’s look around.

It was bad. It was so bad.

The global economy was in meltdown. Greedy bankers had made bad home loans to folks who likely couldn’t pay them off and then repacked and sold those mortgages to other banks around the world. When the house of cards collapsed, it caused the first depression since the GREAT depression. Unemployment doubled. The stock market lost half its value. And 6 million homes were seized from borrowers who couldn’t meet their mortgages.

The United States was also caught in two wars on the other side of the world. 144,000 American troops were engaged in Iraq, where a deadly insurgency was finally nearing its end, and 33,000 troops were deployed in Afghanistan, where a Taliban insurgency was just heating up. 

And, across Washington D.C., on the very night Obama was sworn in, 15 republican leaders, including future speakers Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan, were laying a plan of resistance. They would oppose everything Obama attempted - every piece of legislation, every idea of foreign policy. They rationed that, if Obama succeeded in his presidency, even just a little, Democrats would get credit - not republicans. But if he failed - if they made him fail - the nation would vote republican in the midterms. 

“We’ve got to challenge them on every single bill,” McCarthy said.

Nothing was going to be easy.

One month before Obama was sworn in, a team of economic advisors trudged through 9 inches of Chicago snow to brief him on the failing economy.

“Mr. President. This is your holy shit moment,” the lead advisor said before diving into the brief.

Obama had known it was bad. He was told it was worse. American businesses and American families were more entangled in the banking system and the stock market than they had been on the eve of the Great Depression. Aka, they were all more exposed to risk. If Obama didn’t turn things around, this would be worse than the great depression.

But there was a playbook on how to dodge it.

Government spending. Lots of it. 

At the end of the day, the strength of the economy is really determined by how much money is flowing how quickly. When people and businesses stop spending, that can cause the economic engine to stall. So what do you do? You increase government spending to give the engine a jolt and get it running again.

But how much money would be needed?

How about, $1.2 trillion dollars. 

If your jaw is on the floor, Obama’s political team was feeling much the same way.

Congress would never approve that much money, they said. You had to make it smaller. So the economic advisors downsized by a third to $800 billion dollars.

That would prove a mistake.

Obama put together a $800 billion dollar stimulus plan that included a slew of Democratic priorities. Yes, there would be increased unemployment benefits, tax cuts, and more money for shovel-ready infrastructure projects, like road, bridge, and school repairs, but the plan also threw money at high-speed rail, broadband internet, and other forward-looking needs.

When Obama presented his plan to Congress, Republicans balked. Some wanted nothing to do with Obama - that cabal of no. Others were willing to deal, but requested tweaks or objections, to which Obama was not friendly, reportedly said “Elections have consequences. I won.” 

He may have been thinking, ‘shit guys, the economy is in free fall, we need this now, can’t you just sign it like congress did for FDR?’ But the GOP was not interested in writing blank checks. The economy was Obama’s now, and he’d be blamed for not fixing it. If he didn’t want to work with them, they wouldn’t work with him.

But also, Obama knew he didn’t have to work with them. Democrats held big majorities in both houses of Congress. 3 weeks after Obama was sworn in, the now 787 billion dollar package was passed with only Democratic votes in the house and with all the democrats plus just 3 republicans in the senate. The bill was 50% larger than the entire new deal, and yet, in hindsight, they should have gone for $1.2 trillion - the recovery would prove far slower than promised, and that would have consequences in the midterms.

But that bill wasn’t the end of Obama’s work on the economy, for the auto industry was also on the brink of collapse. Before he’d left office, president Bush had bailed out Chrysler and GM with enough money to limp past inauguration day, but that money was running out. American car companies had just reported their worst sales in a generation - down from 8.1 million cars sold in 2007 to 4.6 million cars sold in 2009. They were burdened with expensive pension plans and union contracts they struggled to meet. The math wasn’t mathing.

But should the federal government really be in the business of bailing out billion-dollar companies? Why should taxpayers pay because auto CEO’s sucked at their jobs?

On the other hand, what would the cascade effect be if the American auto industry was allowed to fail? There were tens of thousands of jobs in the network of suppliers and vendors who depended on the auto industry - some regions could see 24% unemployment if the auto industry failed. Should all those folks have to suffer because GM didn’t know how to make a Corolla?

Despite being warned that an auto bailout would be massively unpopular, Obama felt he had to do it to save American institutions, pride, and, most importantly, jobs. He lent GM and Chrysler $80 billion dollars, but there were strings. GM’s CEO had to resign and Chrystler had to merge with Fiat. Both were ushered through planned bankruptcies that let them restructure operations, debt, and labor cost.

The American auto industry was saved.

But the healthcare industry was what everyone was talking about.

Let’s talk about Obamacare. Aka, the Affordable Care Act.

45 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2009, and those who had it often held policies that sucked. What’s that, you broke your arm? Well, we’ll think about reimbursing you, but in the meantime, your rates are going to go up. Thanks.

As a result, un- or underinsured Americans often avoided getting medical treatment until minor issues had ballooned into medical emergencies, expensive medical emergencies.

But because ER’s couldn’t turn you away, if you couldn’t pay, well, you now spent your life in debt, and in the meantime, everyone else at the hospital had to pay a little more to cover the bills you were unable to pay.

It was awful for everybody. But democrats had long held a dream of how to make it better.

Universal healthcare.

Aka, a system where everyone pays a bit more tax and gets free healthcare in return. 

Harry Truman had called for universal health care in 1945, the same year England and Belgium created their national healthcare systems, but where England and Belgium succeeded, Truman failed.

LBJ picked up the baton in the 60s and created medicaid and medicare in 1965, granting healthcare to millions of poor and elderly americans. But the great majority still depended on private insurance, either from their employers or bought themselves, or they went without it and prayed for good health.

Bill Clinton tried to finish the job in 1993, but was so resoundingly defeated that it broke his presidency.

And so, as Obama approached the challenge in 2009, he hoped to be more a Lyndon and less a Truman or Clinton.

The good news for Obama was that everyone seemed to agree we had to do something. Both Obama and McCain had run on healthcare reform. Everyone agreed the system sucked. But while liberals dreamed of taxpayer-funded universal healthcare, conservatives dreamed of federal subsidies for private insurance - aka, funnel more money to those fat check-writing insurance companies. 

Despite democratic majorities in both chambers, Obama did the math and realized the liberal dream was not going to happen. Democrats were just as good at accepting insurance donations as Republicans were, and a single senator, Democrat-turned-independent Joe Lieberman, killed a universal healthcare option after receiving 1.1 million dollars from the insurance industry.

So Obama tried to find a silver lining. If he couldn’t get the liberal dream, well, maybe he could get a bipartisan win instead. He could pursue the conservative plan, which had been piloted by Republican governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. 

Like Romney’s plan, Obamacare penalized businesses that didn’t insure their employees, penalized citizens who didn’t purchase insurance coverage, subsidized insurance for americans earning up to 3x or 4x the federal poverty level, helped pay preventative services, banned annual benefit caps, and allowed children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 25 or 26.

The main difference was that Obamacare also expanded medicaid eligibility to 138% of the poverty level.

So Republicans were going to get almost everything they wanted in healthcare reform, and yet… remember that dinner of opposition? Republicans refused to accept the win. They didn’t want it.

These were early days and Obama still didn’t know about the “say no to everything” plan, so, even though he had Democratic votes to quickly pass almost anything he wanted, he decided to take it slow and let everyone in Congress go home and talk to their constituents about it instead. He thought Republicans would vote for the bill if they went home and heard from constituents who wanted reform, but that’s not quite what happened.

Instead, conservative media attacked the bill relentlessly, claiming it would introduce death panels or hand out mandatory abortions. Opponents spent $235 million dollars to try and convince Americans the bill was a bad idea. A political movement called the Tea Party swarmed town hall meetings, hardening republican resolve and making even some democrats squeamish. Political advisors told Obama that Americans thought it was irresponsible to introduce an expensive new healthcare plan when the economy was still reeling from the financial crisis. 

When Obama addressed a joint session in Congress to advocate for the bill, a Republican back-bencher interrupted him to yell ‘You Lie!”

But, well, Democrats did have big majorities in Congress. Obama had the votes. In November, 2009, The affordable care act narrowly passed the house, 220 to 215. though 38 Democrats had joined 177 Republicans in voting against.

Seven weeks later, the senate narrowly passed its own version with 60 votes - just enough to avoid a GOP filibuster. 

Obama thought victory was in reach. Because the 2 bills were slightly different, the house and the senate would have to negotiate some tweaks to make them identical in a process called reconciliation, and then they’d vote again, but it had already passed once. It would pass again, right?

And that’s about when a senate election in Massachusetts blew Obama’s dreams apart.

Democratic senate icon Ted Kennedy had died the previous summer and, in the special election to replace him, a Republican former underwear model shocked his hapless Democratic opponent to win Ted’s seat.. 

With that one upset, Senate democrats lost their veto-proof majority.

Republicans smelled victory. If any changes were made to the senate bill during reconciliation, Republicans could mount a filibuster that Democrats couldn’t break, blocking a vote on the bill.

Unless… what if no changes were made to the senate’s bill?

Obama’s team convinced Democrats in the house to forego the usual reconciliation process and pass the senate’s bill as was. Sure, there were things the house wanted to change, but once legislation had been passed and signed, it could later be amended through spending bills that only required 51 votes. Aka, the filibuster could be avoided.

Yeah, our political process is archaic and weird.

Republicans called it a run around the rules, but the strategy worked.

On March 21, 2010, House Democrats passed the senate’s version of the affordable care act. 3 days later, Obama signed it into law.

And yet, the fight wasn’t over.

26 states sued to challenge the constitutionality of the affordable care act. Specifically, a stipulation that Americans must buy health insurance. The rational being, if young and healthy americans didn’t buy insurance, there wouldn’t be enough money to take care of the sickly and elderly. Young healthy people needed to pay in for the conservative model Obama had embraced to be financially viable.

But can the government force americans to buy healthcare insurance?

The supreme court said no, but also yes. What?

5 conservative judges agreed that the government cannot force americans to buy health insurance. But one of the justices, chief John Roberts, then joined the 4 liberal justices to rule that the government does have the power to tax people. So, if you think of the penalty for not buying health insurance as a tax, yeah! You can do that.

The argument was so convoluted that as Obama watched the TV in the white house, both Fox and CNN initially reported the Affordable Care Act had been struck down, shocking Obama, until an aide ran into the room and told Obama that it had actually been upheld - woo! Emotional roller coaster.

But… the fight still wasn’t over.

All that grassroots anger that had been whipped up over Obamacare? The republicans rode that plus a sluggish economic recovery to massive midterm gains. I’m talking the biggest electoral swing in house membership since 1948. 

Once republicans held the house, everything became a proxy battle for Obamacare. Want us to pass a budget? Not unless you dismantle obamacare! Want us to raise the debt ceiling? Not unless you dismantle obamacare!

And Obama struggled to figure out what to do. A 2011 fight nearly led the nation to default on its debt, which would have caused financial meltdown worse than 2008, and a 2013 fight shut down the government for 16 days.

But Obamacare did survive. And its popularity increased over time. While the Affordable Care Act almost always polled below 50% approval during Obama’s terms, 64% of Americans approve of it today. Obama and Biden continued to tweak and improve the law, reducing premiums, expanding tax credits, and so on. 41 states have now used the ACA to expand medicaid, with only 9 deeply republican states refusing to accept more federally-funded medical care to their poor. By September, 2024, nearly 50 million americans - one in seven - had received their health care cover through the Affordable Care Act.

That said, Americans still pay more money for worse results than any other country in the world. So, Obamacare was a win, but it wasn’t victory.

So, that’s Obamacare, and we already talked about the depression, which means there’s one topic left to talk about

Obama at war.

Obama inherited two wars when he came into office, which he thought of as the ‘dumb war’ in Iraq and the ‘good war’ in Afghanistan.

The Afghan war had started after Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, and operating out of Afghanistan, had struck the United States by flying hijacked airliners into the world trade center buildings in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. killing 2,977 people. Goerge Bush, president at the time, had demanded Afghanistan’s government, the TAliban, turn Bin Laden over. When the Taliban said no, he invaded, toppling it quickly and standing up a democracy in its place.

But Bush never did capture or kill Bin Laden, he never did wipe out the Taliban, and never did secure Afghanistan. The Taliban regrouped in neighboring Pakistan and began a slow and steady insurgency against the United States. Bin Laden disappeared. And the American-backed Afghan democracy grew wobblier by the day. By the time Obama became president, the Taliban was again active in 33 of 34 Afghan provinces and was launching more than 7,000 improvised explosive device attacks every day.

Obama wanted to win that war. He wanted to get Bin Ladin. That was his ‘good war,’ and he’d do what it took to win it.

Iraq, on the other hand, was the dumb war. George W Bush had ordered the invasion of Iraq after claiming the country’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was secretly developing weapons of mass destruction. But the U.S. never did find evidence, so it became a war to turn Iraq into a democracy. This backfired badly. Fighting broke out between Sunni’s, Shi’ites, and kurds; American troops overstayed their welcome; and Al Qaeda tried to establish an Islamic State of Iraq. It took a massive troop surge, and some luck, to quelch the violence.

As Obama entered office in 2009, the ‘dumb war’ in Iraq was already dying down, with most American troops scheduled to withdraw by 2011. The only question was how many would stay.

The answer, it turned out, was zero.

Obama didn’t want US forces in Iraq, and Iraq didn’t want them there either, so an agreement for forces to stay was never reached. The American presence in Iraq ended in 2011.

For now.

In Afghanistan, Obama took a different approach. After ordering a thorough review of Afghan strategy, and getting seriously ticked off over a series of unflattering press leaks from the military, Obama surged 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, on top of 10 thousand he’d already sent, more than doubling the American commitment from what he’d inherited. 

He gave the troops 2 years to accomplish their mission of strengthening the Afghan Army and weakening the Taliban.

They didn’t fully accomplish either, but this surge was ultimately overshadowed by another development in 2011.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden.

Years of searching by the CIA had led the United States to a 3-story compound surrounded by a 12-foot wall in Abbotabad, Pakistan. Bin Laden’s personal courier was there, everyone knew that, along with women, children, and a very tall man who never exited the compound’s walls. But was he Bin Laden? Nobody could say. Multiple attempts were made to confirm it, including sending a fake vaccination program to get DNA samples from children, but none of it was conclusive. Odds were 50/50. What should Obama do? Spend more time watching for clues? Drop a bomb? Raid it with Pakistan, or go it alone?

Obama ruled out dropping a bomb - a strike that left no body would birth conspiracy theories that bin laden was still alive,

And nobody wanted to tell Pakistan. The compound was less than 2 miles from Pakistan’s premiere military academy. If Bin Laden was there, someone in Pakistan’s government just had to be aware and protecting him.

Which left a covert raid as the only option for action.

This was a risky proposition. Everyone remembered the black hawk down incident during Clinton’s administration, when 3 black hawk helicopters were shot down and 18 Americans killed in Mogadishu in 1993, and some could remember Jimmy Carter’s disastrous attempt to rescue American hostages from Iran, when helicopters and planes collided in the Iranian desert, killing 8 servicemen in 1980.

If this went wrong, it could imperil Obama’s presidency, damage American prestige, and cost American lives.

Obama listened to all of the concerns, and then he said, go for it.

24 Navy Seals, in specially equipped stealth blackhawks, crossed into Pakistan airspace and infiltrated the compound. The mysterious tall man was shot and his body taken to an airbase in Afghanistan. It looked like him alright, but the best way to confirm it quickly was to check how tall he was. That’s when the troops realized nobody had thought to bring measuring tape, so a soldier known to be Bin Laden’s height was told to lay down next to the body to confirm it, prompting Obama to say, “We donated a $60 million helicopter to this operation. Could we not afford to buy a tape measure?”

It wouldn’t be necessary. The American military had finally found and killed Osama Bin Laden. The terror leader’s body was dumped at sea. Hooray.

If that was a high water mark of Obama’s foreign policy, it might have been the only one.

In Obama’s eyes, American prestige had been damaged by the Bush administration, with its swagger and disregard for international opinion. The Muslim World had an especially low opinion of the United States after witnessing the mess it had made in Iraq.

In an attempt to course correct that, Obama took one of his first international trips to Cairo, where he called for, quote, “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.”

He also said, “I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose”

The result of those words was probably not what Obama had in mind.

18 months later, a Tunisian man lit himself on fire in response to his government’s corruption, sparking a string of Arab protests, revolts, and civil wars across the region. To be clear, this wasn’t all because obama had said some words in Cairo. The Arab street was frustrated by their leaders’ wealth, western ties, and corruption. But Obama’s words did seem to offer support for trying to tear it all down.

After all, he had called for Arabs to have, quote, ‘The freedom to live as you choose.’ Did that mean he had to support these uprisings?

Or was the dictator he knew better than the chaos that would follow if they fell?

These questions turned from philosophical to life or death in a hurry. When Egypt’s dictator, who also happened to be a long-time American ally, tried to put down his country’s protests with violence, Obama was asked if he supported the protestors. Obama said regime change should happen now, and 10 days later, that egyptian dictator was deposed.

But what came next? Egyptians elected a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has ties to terror organizations like Hamas and is itself considered a terror organization by 5 Arab countries.

2 years later, the Egyptian military deposed that guy and gunned down 1,000 of his peacefully protesting supporters to restore a government friendlier to the United States and less friendly to the region’s terrorists.

It was a brutal lesson in how tragic geopolitics can get.

But it wasn’t the only brutal lesson the Arab spring provided.

In Libya, 42-year-dictator Muammar Qaddafi found his regime on the ropes as protestors and rebels rose up against him. When he threatened to slaughter the disloyal civilians, Obama partnered with Europe to launch a bombing campaign to defend the civilians. Operating from behind this barrier of protection, the rebels toppled Qaddafi in a month, but peace did not follow. The rebels fractured as fighting broke out among them for control of the now leaderless Libya. Tens of thousands of civilians died in the fighting as thousands more fled across the Mediterranean to Europe, destabilizing Europees democracies.

Obama was left to wonder, should he never have gotten involved at all?

Yet Syria was even worse. When Syrians took to the streets in protest of their dictator, Bassar Al Assad, Assad responded by massacring them and a full-blown civil war erupted. Obama called for Assad to step down, which Assad ignored. Obama said Assad would cross a red line if he used chemical weapons on his own people. Assad ignored that, too.

On August 21, 2013, Assad fired rockets full of Sarin gas at a neighborhood friendly to rebel forces. Hundreds of men, women, and children were killed. Obama’s red line had been crossed. What was he going to do about it?

Turns out, nothing.

Obama had seen intelligence that some of Syria’s rebels were extremists worse than Assad. What if he hit Assad, Assad fell, and those extremists filled the vacuum? What if Syria turned into another Libya, a broken state where terrorists found safe haven, arms proliferated, and civilian life was cheap?

Obama talked himself out of the strike, but he didn’t want to look weak, so he chose a way out that absolutely made him look weak. He publicly asked Congress to approve a response in Syria, and Congress overwhelmingly said no. Republicans said no because that’s what they always said to Obama. Democrats said no because they didn’t want to get involved in another war in the Middle East. And so Assad faced zero consequences for his actions, Obama was rebuked by Congress, and his threats were exposed as meaningless on the world stage. 

And his caution didn’t even avert his greatest fear - the rise of a radical islamist terror government in the middle east. Less than a year later, ISIS, the Islamic State of Syria, screamed into the headlines with an invasion of Iraq. 

You may remember that ISIS got a brief mention in the George W Bush Episode. During the height of the iraqi insurgency, the local Al Qaeda cells merged with other Iraqi terror groups to declare an islamic state in western Iraq. They didn’t just want to be terrorists anymore. They wanted to be a caliphate - a movement that united all of Islam under one banner to wage holy war against the West.

Instead, they immediately wore out their welcome.

Turns out, people don’t like being strung up and murdered when they don’t practice religion the exact same way you do. Western Iraqi’s turned against this young Islamic state and worked with the Americans to evict it from the country in 2007.

But it didn’t die. It fled to neighboring Syria and hid. Then evolved.

When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, the Islamic State was one of the rebel groups Obama worried about when he stayed his hand after Assad’s chemical weapons attack. He knew they were out there and he didn’t want to do anything that would help them, but they didn’t need his help, they were doing just fine.

On January 1, 2013, the renamed islamic state of Syria - ISIS - caught the world’s attention when it invaded Iraq from the neighboring Syria and conquered large stretches of the western desert. ISIS had recognized that Iraq’s government was weak and, without any American troops to protect it, far more vulnerable than the rest of Syria was, so they’d gone for the easy target.

At first, Obama and the Iraqis didn’t take the incursion very seriously. The deserts of western Iraq are a big space with not much going on. Ok. Rule the sand. What do we care? When asked about the Islamic State, Obama scoffed, calling them a “JV squad.” It’s not like they had captured a major Iraqi city. 

Six months later, they captured a major Iraqi city.

Mosul is the second largest city in Iraq and a major oil hub on the Tigris river. In June, 2014, ISIS captured it. Just like that, ISIS controlled a third of Syria and 40% of Iraq, and its rule was brutal. ISIS massacred minority men and forced minority women to become brides to its soldiers. It was inspiring terror attacks well beyond its borders, like an airline bombing that killed 224 in Egypt, a night of terror assaults that killed 300 in Paris, and a gay nightclub shooting that killed 49 in Orlando.

Obama wasn’t calling ISIS the JV squad anymore.

Under pressure for having underestimated the threat and for having not stood up to Assad, Obama finally and reluctantly went all in, sending special force commandos to train and organize allied resistance and ordering 8,000 air strikes against ISIS targets over the following year. 

ISIS never stood a chance.

At the end of the day, ISIS was still a bunch of dudes riding pickup trucks and carrying kalashnikovs. It controlled a lot of desert and a lot of isolated cities, which meant a lot of long, uncovered highways. Anything on the roads between those cities was easy pickings for the U.S. Air Force. By the time Obama’s end of term approached, ISIS was in full collapse. Only mop up duty remained for the president who would follow.

That’s right. Eight years had passed. And Obama’s legislative accomplishments were disappointingly few.

As it dawned on Obama that Congressional republicans would never let him get another win, he started trying to do more things without them, like creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Or DACA, in 2012. The idea being, if you were brought into the United States as a child and grew up here, should you really be deported back to a country you never knew? Let’s not do that.

Liberals loved it. Conservatives hated it. Which was par for the course with anything Obama desired.

But what really must have irked Obama was who the nation picked to replace him. At the end of his two terms in office, Obama endorsed his former Secretary of State, and one time democratic rival, Hillary Clinton for president. In a shocker, she lost the electoral college, despite winning the popular vote, to Donald Trump, a man who had advanced conspiracies and lies about where Obama was born and whether he was a legitimate president of the United States.

Obama had been elected on the promise of uniting a divided country. He had failed. At the end of this term, the country was more divided than before. Perhaps the promise had been too big. Or perhaps he had no playbook for an increasingly fractured political media ecosystem, where it was all too easy for people to hear what they wanted to hear and hide from the truth.

On January 20, 2017, Barack Obama left the white house for the last time.

So how had the United States and the world changed during the 8 years of the Obama administration?

A number of new technologies were introduced that are ubiquitous today: Drones, Artificial Intelligence, virtual assistants, uber, and modern smart watches all launched or made significant advances in their capabilities.

Fidget spinners took off in 2015.

And everything from scooters to cars became rentable with the click of an app.

Domestically, the black lives matter movement organized in response to increased awareness and visibility of police brutality against black americans.

And a string of tragic shootings - from the pulse nightclub to a Sandy Hook elementary school and a Charleston church, among others - killed hundreds of Americans, many of them children. Demand for gun control increased, Obama tried to act on it, but as was so often the case, Liberals said yes, Conservatives said no, and the no’s had it.

Internationally, Russia launched its first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, seizing the eastern part of the country and the Crimean peninsula, setting the stage for the larger war that now rages today.

The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, which hasn’t really worked out for them the way they hoped it would.

I also must say - It is also really weird reading and writing about the Obama administration and knowing that some of the biggest deals at the time, like negotiating a denuclearization deal with Iran and a climate change pledge in Paris, were immediately abandoned by Obama’s successor. So much hard work for nothing.

Obama stays largely out of the limelight between presidential elections these days, campaigning for the democratic nominee every 4 years, focusing on his charities and his family in between. When he looks at the Trump administrations, so much a reaction to his own election, he wonders if his time had come too early. If the country hadn’t been ready for a black president after all.

If you’re going to remember 4 things about Obama - that’s right, I’m giving you 4 - I recommend:

• First black president. 
• He led the United States out of its first depression since the Great Depression.
• He ordered the raid that killed Bin Laden
• And he passed the first major healthcare reform in 45 years, expanding insurance coverage to an additional 20 million americans.

As for a lesson in leadership from Obama, be wary of undercutting policy experts for political expediency. Obama’s presidency was dogged by a slower-than-promised recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Remember those economic advisors who insisted $1.2 trillion dollars of stimulus would be needed? Only for the political experts to slash it to $800 billion dollars? Yeah. That slowed the recovery, and the slowed recovery contributed to democrats losing the house and the senate. And without the house and the senate, there was little more Obama could do.

Thank you for listening to today’s episode of Abridged Presidential Histories.

If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and leave a 5-star review on your podcast-listening platform of choice.

If you’d like to support the show, you can look it up on Patreon, or go directly to www.patreon.com/abridgedpresidentialhistories. It helps me buy books and pay to host the show.

The music in today’s podcast is a public domain recording of the United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps. 

The primary biography for today’s episode was Obama, the call of history, by Peter Baker

In our next episode, what was it like to be on the inside during Obama’s dramatic 2008 darkhorse campaign? Chelsea Waliser, an Iowa Caucus field director from that campaign, joins me to talk all about it.

That’s next time, on Abridged Presidential Histories.