Assessing the Obama presidency six years on

So as we come down to the midterm elections and the last two years of President Obama’s administration, how might one rate this administration? I would argue that in national politics “intentions” count for nothing; only results count! So what have been the results?

1.      The Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). Passed without the support of a single Republican, and only by some dubious hardball politics in the House, ObamaCare still remains unpopular with a majority of Americans. Personally ObamaCare has been a disaster. Despite the glib promise (which Obama himself apparently knew was not true) that if we liked it we could keep our current plan, my health plan disappeared, as did the plans of some estimated 5-6 million other Americans.  Despite the promise that our premiums would go down, ours went up, as did those of millions of other Americans, and despite the higher premiums, our new plan covers less.   And despite the promise that 7 million uninsured would now have insurance, the current ”real” numbers (not the ones the White House is desperately spinning these days) suggest that most of the new enrollments are from people who were previously insured, many of who were paying their own premiums but now have government subsidies. In the end it looks like the true number of newly insured will be somewhere in the range of 1 – 1 ½ million, not much of a result for the massive dislocation the rest of us have gone through.  And of course nothing in the act addressed the fundamental underlying problems with the US health care system that are driving costs through the roof. On balance I would give this whole effort a solid F.

2.      The economy. Six years after he took office, although the stock market is up, the economy as a whole is still struggling, with a whole new cadre of permanently unemployed. I attribute this in part to Obama’s decision to divert most of his political capital in his early months to getting his ideological child ObamaCare passed, at a time when he should have been focused aggressively on improving the economy as fast as possible. In the five years since he has proposed precious little to address the problems with the economy, and his latest proposal (to raise the minimum wage) shows a poor grasp of economics (jobs that aren’t worth the new minimum wage will simply disappear, expanding the ranks of the permanently unemployed).  I would rate him no better than C in this area.

3.      The national debt and federal deficit.  The national debt grew significantly under Bush administration, much to my dismay (so much for Republicans being fiscally responsible), but the Obama administration has made the problem much worse, in a much shorter time.  Obama has proved to be a classic tax and spend Democrat, and without much to show for it. I give him a D in this area.

4.      The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Well, he promised ever so eloquently to get us out of both wars, but in fact we are still in both wars, still spending enormous sums and still taking American casualties. We will finally get out of both in the next few months, but only because we are, in essence, being thrown out by the governments involved, not because he got us out. I would rate his performance here about  a C-.

5.      The promised Russian “reset”.  Crimea. Nuff said. Putin’s choice to invade the Crimea was no doubt influenced by Obama’s weak and naïve “lead from behind” foreign policy in his first years. Performance = D.

6.      Syria. There are good arguments both for more active involvement and for staying away from the whole issue. But Obama’s painful waffling between one position and then the other was terrible foreign policy, and terrible leadership. Performance = C-

There are other, less important issues, but this is enough, I think to give the Obama administration a pretty poor grade – something like a C- at best.  I wouldn’t have thought any administration could be as bad as the Bush administration was, but I think on balance this one has been slightly worse.  Of course he has had to work against an obstructive Republican House, but that doesn’t explain his questionable choice of issues to push, his clear failure to even try to work across party lines, and his naive foreign policy (if he has any  policy at all).

There is probably a good reason why so many Democrats up for re-election in the Senate and the House are distancing themselves as fast and as far as possible from their president.

Recommended: Russian Examines its Options

George Freidmen, CEO of STRATFOR, has just written a good article entitled Russia Examines its Options.  It is well worth reading.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop....

There are really two stages to the current Ukrainian crisis. The first stage is already well underway - the annexation of the Crimea. Russian already controls the Crimea militarily, and no doubt the upcoming referendum will be solidly in favor of returning to Russia.  First of all, the majority of Crimean inhabitants these days are Russian, bolstered by the mass of Russian troops that have just be sent there.  And if that isn't enough to get a majority, Moscow is talented at stuffing ballot boxes, as the 2012 presidential election of Vladimir Putin showed.

On the other hand, the Crimea has been a part of Russia since the 1700s.  Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukraine in 1954, never thinking that the Ukraine wouldn't be an integral part of Russia forever.  It is the port for the Russian Black Sea fleet, so naturally the Russians are upset at the possibility of losing it. Although their approach has been heavy-handed, there is certainly reasonable precedent for Russia's claim to the Crimea, and no doubt they will end up with it again, whatever the West does or says..

The second act has to do with the rest of the Ukraine. It is important to understand that although the Ukraine is in fact  a separate country, Russians have always considered it part of Russia. Going to the Ukraine for them is like going to California or Arizona for us.  And losing the Ukraine to the West is for them more or less like California leaving the US and joining an alliance with Russia would be for us.  Russia is paranoid about invasions from the West (for good reason - think of Napoleon and Hitler in recent times) and has always wanted a series of friendly buffer states on its western borders. So to lose control of the Ukraine is a very, very big setback for them, and they will not let it go lightly.

So the second shoe we are waiting for is whatever Russia decides to do about the rest of the Ukraine.  At the very least they will engage in a long-term effort to regain political control of the Ukraine, and once again put into power a Moscow-friendly government.  They might decide to foment unrest in the more Russian-populated eastern provinces, and then invade to "protect" Russian citizens.  We will have to wait and see - but they will surely try to do something to regain control of the rest of the Ukraine - it is a high priority for them.

In fact the "Westernization" of the Ukraine would be a good thing for Russia in the long term, though a bad thing for the current power elite, because it might eventually help to bring real reform to the Russian system.  But "westernizing" it won't be easy.  The Ukraine suffers from the same endemic corruption that infects Russia. The government that took over after the "Orange Revolution" of 2004-2005 was just as corrupt as the Soviet establishment it replaced. Kleptocracies like this are hard to reverse, because the corruption gets embedded deeply in the whole culture. - it is simply "the way things are done".

So it will be interesting to see how this second act plays out, and how effectively the West can counter it.  I expect that Putin is relying on the notoriously short attention span of the West, and Western greed, to limit the effectiveness of whatever sanctions we might attempt, and he may be accurate in that assessment.  We will have to see.

Recommended: Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin

In today's Russia, Vladimir Putin calls all the shots. He is known to Kremlin insiders (only partly in jest) as "tsar". Unlike Stalin, however, Putin doesn't rule through terror; he rules through an affiliation of supporters, most of them personal friends from his days in St Petersburg, whom he has made quite wealthy. One might think of his role as the "godfather" of an extended Mafia family, or perhaps (as Judah suggests in the book), as the monarch of England in the court of Elizabeth I, juggling the allegiances of powerful barons.

To understand what is going on in the Ukraine these days, one has to understand Putin - what motivates him, what his world view is, what his objectives are, and what political constraints he has to work under. One has to also understand what the ordinary Russian thinks, hopes for, and expects, and why Putin had such a wide appeal in Russia for so long (and still does, though it is diminishing).

Ben Judah's 2013 book Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Live with Vladimir Putin is a good starting point. Judah, a journalist whose work has appeared such places as The Economist, The Financial Times, and Foreign Policy, spent five years crisscrossing Russia and talking to government officials, ordinary Russians, and oligarchs, and has assembled a fascinating portrait of Vladimir Putin's  rise to power, and the cultural shifts occurring in Russia that first elevated Putin and now hinder him.

Well worth reading.

Never interrrupt your enemy .....

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake"
                                                                Napoleon Bonaparte

This advice seems appropriate today with respect to Putin's recent moves in the Ukraine.  The last thing he wants is a stronger, western-oriented NATO on his boarders. Yet that is precisely what his actions in the Ukraine are bringing about.  All the old Soviet colonial states on Russian's border are looking at this military incursion and thinking that they had better get closer to the West if they want to avoid a similar fate sometime in the future.

It is a little hard to see why Putin himself can't see that he is defeating his own long-term objectives, but then he is constrained by the mythologies of his own world view just as we Americans are constrained by our own mythologies.

The War on Drugs - Deja Vu

We like to listen to audiobooks and Teaching Company lectures on long driving trips. These days, on a recent trip to Arizona we were listening to Bill Bryson's  One Summer: America 1927, a truly wonderful book that explores the REAL history of America, as opposed to the sanitized mythology we all learned in high school.

When he discussed prohibition at some length, I was struck by how similar the tale is to today's "War on Drugs".  A valiant, high-minded but ultimately futile campaign that (a) hasn't reduced drug use, in fact has increased it massively, (b) produced well-funded smuggling cartels that now have incomes approaching that of small nations and violence approaching full-scale wars, and (c) produced a whole well-funded underground  industry genetically engineering more potent marijuana plants and building new designer drugs.  As a nation we apparently learned absolutely nothing from the disastrous and ultimately futile prohibition experiment.  All we have to show for it thus far are overfilled jails and decades of massive federal and state expenditures that could have been better spent on education.

The Ukranian Crisis

The developing confrontation in the Ukraine between the new Ukrainian government and Russia is fascinating to watch.  It is a high-stakes game of chess for all sides. From the Western viewpoint, the Ukrainians ought to be allowed to choose their own destiny.  From the Russian viewpoint, losing the Ukraine from its political/economic orbit would seriously weaken Russia.  And in particular, losing the Crimea would seriously impede Russia's access to the Black Sea.

Both President Obama and President Putin have a lot at stake in this confrontation.  For Obama, if he looks weak and ineffectual in the long term he reinforces the already widespread perception that Democrats are weak on military and foreign policy, and in the short term he jeopardizes his party in the upcoming midterm elections. President Putin always has to placate the strong nationalist and right-wing forces in his nation, and if he fails to hold the Ukraine his own hold on power is at risk.  So neither side is likely to blink early.  The European Union, by contrast, is probably largely ineffectual in this whole game. They really don't have much to lose whatever the outcome.

Russian does supply the EU with much of its gas and oil, and could always cut off that supply.  But that isn't as strong a card as it looks, since Russia's economy is only kept from going into free fall by the revenue it gets from its gas and oil exports. So cutting off exports to the EU would quickly produce an economic crisis in Russia.

In the long run, of course, Russia will lose this confrontation, since Russia itself is on an unsustainable downward spiral, beset with looming demographic problems, a highly inefficient kleptocratic government, a pervasive culture of corruption at all levels, an economy that is only sustained by its declining oil and gas exports, and increasing nationalistic tensions in all its old "colonial" holdings (including the Ukraine).  But Putin may well win this local battle and retain at least the Crimea in Russia's orbit for the time being, if for no other reason than (a) he has more leverage than the west (including a large military force already in the Crimea), and (b) the immediate stakes are probably higher for him than for Obama or the EU - he cares more about the outcome.  But winning will come at a high cost to Putin, who has tried to refashion Russia's image in the world community.  That image will be seriously tarnished if he is seen to crush the Ukrainians with military force.

For America in the short term, the real issue will be if and how President Obama reacts to this crisis.  He appears to have been outmaneuvered by President Putin several times recently, most recently in Syria - if he is perceived to have been outmaneuvered again in this crisis it will likely cost the Democrats dearly for years to come.  If, on the other hand, he appears to outmaneuver Putin this time, it will go a long way toward strengthening the Democrat's credentials in foreign policy.

It is a fascinating chess match to watch.