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The irony is that Obama leaves office with a solid approval rating and more popular than President-elect Donald Trump. Get your history fix in one place: President Obama, with laser-like focus, tried to change the way we thought about what our government does for us at home and what it does abroad. In so doing, he strengthened and broadened the social safety net and redefined the American engagement with the world.
We will see in the coming years what the American people want to preserve of those changes. President Obama, by virtue of being elected, had already secured the first sentence in any future historical account of his life: The other thing I might add is that President Obama is among those presidents most aware of history. I look forward to reading what he has to say about his legacy. President Obama righted the ship through a stimulus package including infrastructure improvements , expanded relief of failing banks and investment firms, and the bailout of the American auto industry. The dignity and grace that he and his family brought to the White House will constitute his most enduring legacy.
Read more about the criteria Perry uses to judge presidential legacies. I find him reflecting in some ways both John F.
Kennedy and Dwight D. In addition, both had First Ladies who were significant assets to their administrations. In contrast to both of those predecessors, however, he had to deal with a starkly oppositional Congress bent on undermining his agenda, and that situation has certainly affected his initiatives. Barack Obama became President after years of attritional warfare, and in the midst of a financial crisis that posed systemic risks to the U. In the face of these obstacles, he avoided scandal, faced down right-wing brinksmanship, refused to debase common political discourse and achieved a measure of success in areas of foreign and domestic policy, including economic recovery, the Iran nuclear deal and the expansion of health insurance provision.
But, with respect to other pressing issues—reducing widening economic inequality, moving beyond overly militarized approaches to foreign policy and confronting the ecological damage of climate change—Obama made only marginal, even negligible gains, and did not achieve the progressive, political breakthrough he promised. His soaring oratory and dignified bearing will be fondly remembered for its vision of a more perfect union—one that President Obama was decidedly unable to deliver. Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University: In terms of legislation, Obama achieved some big things: Those are big changes in what government does and the kinds of activities it undertakes.
He expanded the social contract.
After , he used executive power to move forward on immigration policy, climate change and a historic nuclear deal with Iran. The question is, does it last? His legacy is also leaving the Democratic Party in pretty bad shape, so that puts his legacy at even greater risk. President Barack Obama delivers his inaugural address at the U. Capitol in Washington on Jan. President Barack Obama delivers his farewell address in Chicago on Jan.
January 20, 6: Sign Up for Our Newsletters Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know now on politics, health, money and more. When prominent Indonesians visit the U. Barack Obama did live in Indonesia for four years as a child, and he could in fact speak the local language passably well.
Some would argue that his childhood experiences, as well as his mixed heritage his father was Kenyan, his mother from Kansas , gives him a better inner compass on foreign policy than most Americans. They cite the pioneering work of Ruth Hill Useem, the late sociologist of Michigan State University, who spent her career studying what she called Third Culture Kids — the millions of U. Obama wrote at length in his two books about his experiences growing up as the child of mixed-race parents and the issues that accompanied that status, and he noted in his first book, Dreams From My Father that before entering politics he had used marijuana and cocaine.
Teenage boys are frequently confused. In Dreams from My Father , Barack Obama writes of a childhood experience occurring on a day when his mother dropped him off at a library on her way to work, and he began thumbing through issues of LIFE magazine:. Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. He must be terrible sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybem or an albino — I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things.
The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this? What about her boss — why was he so calm, reading through his reports a few feet down the hall?
I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before. As far as we know, no one has yet found any matching article in the pages of LIFE magazine.
However, that does necessarily not mean Barack Obama saw no such article; it may simply mean that, writing decades after the fact, he misremembered the title of the magazine he was viewing. In , just after winning election to the U. Senate, Barack Obama said during a press conference , in response to a question about his possibly running for national office, that:. An examination of Illinois records shows at least 36 times when Mr.
Obama was either the only state senator to vote present or was part of a group of six or fewer to vote that way. In more than 50 votes, he seemed to be acting in concert with other Democrats as part of a strategy.
In other cases, Mr. In Illinois, political experts say voting present is a relatively common way for lawmakers to express disapproval of a measure. It can at times help avoid running the risks of voting no, they add. From until his election to the U. Senate in , Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from to He was a Senior Lecturer from to , during which time he taught three courses per year.
Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status.
Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined. Obama did help pass a major ethics reform bill as an Illinois State Senator, and th U. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks.
A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr.
Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks. Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Some of the records that have surfaced have done little to dampen the demand for a more complete accounting.
Although in his book Obama emphasizes his own role in the effort, many other people who took part in are indeed mentioned as well.
Barack Obama did pass 26 bills in his final year as an Illinois state senator. When Democrats took control of the state Senate, Jones, though he risked offending colleagues who had toiled futilely on key issues under Republican rule, tapped Obama to take the lead on high-profile legislative initiatives that he now boasts about in his presidential campaign.
And when Obama wanted a promotion to the U. Senate, Jones provided critical support that gave the little-known legislator legitimacy, keeping him from being instantly trampled by the front-runners. Exactly what was said is not so clear, however. In September , the U. Senate voted on a resolution to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization:.
It would also allow the U. Treasury Department to move against firms subject to U.
They had learned through hard experience what Frederick Douglass once taught -- that freedom is not given, it must be won, through struggle and discipline, persistence and faith. Ybarra, Michael J February 7, One of the great things about America is that individual citizens and groups of citizens can petition their government, can protest, can speak truth to power. Stimulus created as many as 2. You failed to mention anyone else but yourself, in your books.
Senator Obama was on the campaign trail at the time and did not return to Washington for the vote.