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As the 2010s draw to a close, the end-of-decade retrospectives are rolling in. The New Republic, utterly transformed from its neoliberal warmongering early-2000s self, has a package savaging the Democratic Party's leaders of the period called "The Decade from Hell."

New York's Jonathan Chait, who worked for the old TNR, is annoyed. "Does the Left Have Any Better Ideas Than Obama's?" he asked in a recent piece about the package. They do indeed but this raises a better question: are liberals like Chait ever going to honestly reckon with the disastrous failures of the Obama presidency?

Let's start with the stimulus bungle in 2009, and Chait's book Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail (a book which came out in January 2017 and whose title had to be changed at the last minute, alas.) Back then, the economy was in free fall, and the Obama administration badly fumbled its response. Then-economic adviser Larry Summers bullied Christina Romer (another adviser) into cutting the administration's stimulus package proposal far below what she estimated was necessary to restore economic health. Then it turned out the original estimates of the size of the recession were themselves undershoots the crisis was actually much worse than they thought. Whoops!

This faceplant set the stage for the ensuing pivot to austerity, a decade of economic stagnation, growing backlash politics, trillions in output flushed straight down the toilet, and the election of Donald Trump.

Chait, to his credit, does fault the administration for the lowballed initial bid. Other more hackish administration apologists argue that this was as much as could be gotten, but as The Intercept's Ryan Grim argues in his book We've Got People, the administration did not even try to pressure moderate senators by putting an aggressive stimulus before Congress and blaming them for any economic chaos if it should be voted down exactly what happened with the initial round of the bank bailout under Bush.

However, Chait does drastically overstate the scale of the stimulus. He repeats Michael Grunwald's line that "even Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal only consumed about 1.5 percent of the economy at its largest point." But even if narrowly true, this is quite misleading, because the New Deal was much bigger and went on longer. As economist Bill Dupor writes, "the cost of the Recovery Act was equal to 5.7 percent of the nation's 2008 output. On the other hand, the cost of the New Deal ... was 40 percent of the nation's 1929 output." At bottom, the New Deal was a drastic reordering of the American economy, which produced thousands of pieces of infrastructure that are still in use, and the Obama stimulus was by design a conservative, timid attempt to restore the pre-crisis status quo.

Second, let's consider the foreclosure crisis. The administration's actions here were far, far worse than anything they did on the stimulus as it actively chose to make foreclosure worse. The mechanisms were extremely complicated, as financial analyst Carolyn Sissoko writes, but basically the administration used a variety of tricky, subtle actions to ensure that it was homeowners and the government who ate the losses of the foreclosure crisis, not the banks.

Under direction of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the government largely nationalized most of the mortgage lending system, allowing the banks to quickly shed millions of toxic waste loans off their books. Then Obama reneged on his promise to change bankruptcy law to allow a homeowner to write down the value of their primary mortgage down to its actual market value (or "cramdown"). Then the administration refused to include principal writedowns (or reductions in the amount owed) for the first two critical years in its Home Assistance Mortgage Program (HAMP) basically a slush fund from the original bank bailout granting Obama wide authority to help homeowners and the actual program was such a Kafkaesque nightmare that almost nobody participated.

The reason the administration did these latter things was because cramdown or principal reductions would have created big losses for the banks. As Sissoko writes, "There was a housing bubble. Somebody was going to have to absorb the losses that are created when lending takes place against overpriced assets. Because in the name of financial stability the Fed and Treasury decided that banks weren't going to bear any of the losses on the origination and securitization of bad mortgages, they had to find a way to put the tab to the government and to the public."

The words "home assistance mortgage program" or "HAMP" do not appear in Chait's book. Neither does the "robosigning" scandal, in which the Obama Justice Department arranged for a wrist-slap fine for banks committing industrial-scale mortgage fraud.

Obama's illegal refusal to prosecute Bush-era torturers is not mentioned either in Audacity, nor his illegal justification for their crimes. Neither is his decision to back the CIA to the hilt in its bureaucratic trench fight with the Senate Intelligence Committee over suppressing the Senate torture report recently dramatized in the film The Report.

Centrists like Chait have long pushed the idea that Obama's style of finance-friendly moderation, which dominated the Democratic Party from the 1970s through 2016, is the best possible political stance. The idea that Obama might have been handed a golden opportunity to restore American institutions and bungled it in a doomed attempt to preserve the status quo is not an attractive one for them. So perhaps easier to just not mention the above parade of gruesome failure when boosting up such a "legacy."

Read more from the original source:
The Obama legacy is not what many liberals think - The Week

Former Vice President Joe BidenJoe BidenPoll: Biden remains ahead of Sanders by 10 points 2020 forecast: A House switch, a slimmer Senate for GOP and a bigger win for Trump 2020 predictions: Trump will lose if not in the Senate, then with the voters MORE said that he would be open to nominating former President Obama to serve on the Supreme Court during a campaign event in Iowa over the weekend, The New York Times reports.

The brief statement came as Biden fielded questions from supporters at a stop on his presidential campaign in Washington, Iowa, on Saturday as part of this No Malarkey bus tour in the state.

At the event, Biden was reportedly asked bya supporter whether he would nominate Obama to serve on the bench if he were elected president next year.

Biden reportedly responded, If hed take it, yes.

The stop on Saturday was one of three campaign events Biden reportedly held in Iowa over the weekend as part of the tour.

Onlyone president in U.S. historyhas ever served on the Supreme Court: William Howard Taft. Taft, who held office as president from 1909 to 1913, became chief justice in 1921. He served in the latter role until 1930.

Though Obama has not publicly expressed interest in serving as a justice, his legal background stretches back to his time at the Harvard Law School, where he became the first African American tobe namedpresident of the Harvard Law Review in 1990.

Prior to becoming the nations first black president in 2008, he also worked as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago before serving in the Illinois state Senate and eventually the U.S. Senate.

Biden is leading national polls for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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Biden said he'd nominate Obama to the Supreme Court if 'he'd take it' | TheHill - The Hill

President Donald Trump frequently touts the growth of the stock market as proof hes done a good job for the economy.

Not much is said by Trump overwhyhe thinks he plays a role in the growth of the stock market, nor whether such growth is good for the American people. Reportedly, only half of Americans even invest directly in the stock market, and among those that do, most are doing so primarily through their retirement accounts. Its mainly the already-wealthy who benefit from a rising stock market, the Chicago Tribune has noted.

But even if we go along with the dubious claims that a good stock market is good for America, Trumps stock gains since becoming president arent the best ever seen in recent presidencies.

According to a report from Axios, the stock market has increased by about 42.2 percent under Trumps watch, since his inauguration to this week. Taken in comparison to other presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, thats a higher output.

But its lower than other presidents, too, including George H.W. Bush and Trumps immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, whom Trump is frequently trying to outdo or prove hes better than.

Indeed, during the same period of time, Bush Sr. had a 45.5 percent stock market gain. Obamas was even more pronounced, with Wall Street gains increasing by 56.2 percent.

In comparing the two most recent presidents, Trumps output in stock gains is actually nearly 25 percent slower than Obamas.

Trumps supposed economic prowesses have been challenged as of late. As previously reported by HillReporter.com, one of the current presidents predictions about the stock market proved to be untrue, as he suggested that any attempts at impeaching him would result in a crash on Wall Street.

As it turns out, within the 87 days that the impeachment process took, the stock market flourished, and vastly outperformed previous gains seen in the 87 days prior to the impeachment inquiry being announced in September.

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Stock Market Gains Were Higher Under Bush Sr., Obama, At This Point In Their Presidencies, Compared To Trump - HillReporter.com

Lin-Manuel Miranda was touring his award-winning musical, In the Heights, to his parents homeland of Puerto Rico. Donald Trump was awarding first prize on his reality TV show, The Apprentice, to a corporate lawyer turned mobile cupcake entrepreneur. The year was 2010 and, in the decade that followed, these two hustlers from New York with fiercely devoted followings would come to represent the two faces of America.

Miranda produced Hamilton, a musical mega-hit that used hip-hop, jazz, blues, rap, R&B and Broadway recast Americas founding fathers as people of color in a hymn to the immigrant nation. Trump smashed and grabbed his way into the political class, and the White House, with a nationalist, nativist message that promised to build a border wall to keep Mexicans out and make America great (white) again.

Open, inclusive and endlessly curious, Miranda personified a progressive sensibility and social consciousness around gender, race and the environment, largely associated with Americas booming coastal cities. Trump, reveling in ignorance and narcissism, embodied a populist rage against change, political correctness and liberal elites, gaining traction in small towns and rural areas that felt left behind.

As 2019 drew to a close, Americas existential crisis was the yawning, ever-growing chasm between these two tribes. With an assist from gerrymandering, blue states got bluer and red states got redder; Republicans became more white and more male while Democrats diversified. The parties were more polarized on issues such as abortion and the climate crisis than anyone could remember.

Words such as unprecedented still had some life in them just over a decade ago when Barack Obama, on the verge of his signature healthcare reform known as Obamacare, hosted a poetry jam at the White House. Fresh from Broadway success, Miranda tried out a song about the life of somebody who embodies hip-hop treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton. Far-fetched as the idea seemed, Hamilton took flight as theatres hottest ticket, featuring songs that caught on with school children across the country.

The musical that cast black actors as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other slave-owning founding fathers also became synonymous with the Obama years. First lady Michelle Obama called it the best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life and recently tweeted that Miranda painted as honest a portrait of our country as Ive ever seen.

Obama performed a freestyle rap with Miranda in the White House Rose Garden. And introducing him at Hamilton showcase in March 2016, he declared: In the character of Hamilton, a striving immigrant who escaped poverty, made his way to the New World, climbed to the top by sheer force of will and pluck and determination, Lin-Manuel saw something of his own family, and every immigrant family.

Hamilton made its off-Broadway debut at New Yorks Public Theater in February 2015. Four months later and three miles away, Trump rode down an escalator at Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for US president, declaring: When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

It was the pivot point, the moment that ensured this would be a broken-backed, contradictory decade that would confound future historians with a simple question: how did America go from Obama, its first black president, to Trump, champion of racist conspiracy theories about his predecessors birthplace?

Halifu Osumare, professor emerita in the department of African American and African studies at University of California, Davis, said: It really shows the extreme schizophrenia of this country and how race is still very much a part of the original sin to portray itself in the world as the beacon of democracy that is always looking at the inalienable rights of the individual while at the same time reinforcing racial difference and hierarchy. I think that Barack Obama was such a rupture in the master narrative of the white, wealthy male being the only possible leader for this country, the original sin of America erupted with Donald Trump and we had permission for the violent racist past to re-emerge.

Osumare, a black popular culture scholar, points to the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that erupted in deadly violence in 2017 as an example of this re-emergence. We were in denial during the Obama administration about it because it seemed that the election of the first black president meant that we were moving into a post-racial society. But we saw very quickly the backlash where that underbelly of racism re-emerged with Donald Trump.

The anti-Obama backlash had been evident in the stirrings of the conservative Tea Party movement. Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin were congressional staffers at the time. They would later become progressive organizers, co-founders of the group Indivisible and authors of the book We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump.

Greenberg said of the Tea Party: We had a lot of personal experience with them and what was really clear was that it was a white identity grievance movement. Sure, they had signs that were about the debt or the deficit but it was code for their sense that somewhere some undeserving other was getting something that their tax dollars were going for. [Trump] threw out the dog whistles and just used a bullhorn and it turned out that enough people within the Republican party were into that that he was able to seize the nomination and seize control of the party.

Wielding his bullhorn, Trump also seized control of the White House in November 2016. It was a moment of reckoning for America, forcing white liberals to confront a storied racism (see The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates) that many had believed would inevitably wither away.

There were other forces in play. The opioid crisis. The highest suicide rate since the second world war. Declining life expectancy. Automation and factory closures ripping the hearts out of communities. Cavernous inequality, pitting the top 1% against the bottom 99%, a natural conclusion of Ronald Reagans trickle down economics.

The Obama presidency was much less radical than it needed to be in order to halt the trends which led us to Trump. That doesnt mean that its all Obamas fault; most of it is not his fault, said Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University, said. But I think the eight years of Obama were in large measure a kind of self-congratulatory illusion instead of the very tough remaking of politics that probably had to happen if we werent going to get a Trump.

The 2008 financial crisis, which saw vast sums of money spent to rescue Wall Street, produced aftershocks that found populist expression in outsiders such as 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, targeting corporate power from the left, and Trump, scapegoating immigrants and elites from the right. They reshaped politics and put the centrism of Bill Clinton and company in retreat.

Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, said: The Democratic party moved left and the Republican party moved right and we have a contest between dueling populisms now in America. Weve got an authoritarian, racially tinged populism, and weve got a progressive economic and social populism, and thats the battle for the soul of America. The question is, will the centre hold and where is the centre? Is the centre somewhere between these two populisms or is it inside one of them?

But along with Trumps gaudy escalator ride, something else happened in June 2015 that gave hope to Raskin and millions of others. The US supreme court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. It was a win for the America of Hamilton. Not even Trump, wildly popular with Christian evangelicals, has suggested trying to overturn the decision.

Raskin recalls: When I first ran for state senate in 2006, one of my planks was marriage equality. Ill never forget, when I made my announcement speech, a woman came up to me and said, Jamie, great speech but one thing, youve got to take out all that stuff in there about gay marriage because its never going to happen and even the gay candidates dont talk about it, and it makes you sound like youre really extreme. like youre not in the political centre. That was when I had an epiphany and I said, Thank you for telling me because it makes me realise its not my goal to be in the political centre I think that progressive impulse has really taken over the Democratic party. The country has become far more progressive on a whole bunch of issues that were considered taboo in 2010.

This was reflected in protest movements that have rattled old hierarchies: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion. Not long after Trump, who had bragged about groping women without their consent, was elected to the White House, the #MeToo movement caught fire, holding Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein and other predatory men to account and demanding to know why victims had gone unheard for so long.

David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker magazine, notes: We are a contradictory people, and just one example is that at a time when a proven misogynist is the president, a #MeToo phenomenon happens and moves us forward.

#MeToo thrived on social media. But so too did disinformation, fake news, invasions of privacy, downright lies and Russian propaganda. Perhaps the biggest winners of the decade were Facebook and Google, which defied regulation, raked in billions of dollars and changed the way we live now. Big tech enabled and incentivized people to pick fights, strike the snarkiest pose and flaunt the worst of themselves, often behind a cloak of anonymity. The giants became as influential as nations but without UN obligations.

These echo chambers were reinforced by cable news networks that seemed to occupy alternative universes, offering radically different chyrons and commentaries on everything from Robert Muellers Russia investigation to judge Brett Kavanaughs supreme court confirmation to House Democrats impeachment inquiry into Trump over his alleged attempt to bribe Ukraine to investigate one of Trumps key political opponents.

The reality TV president exploited these post-truth fractures to deny science and withdraw America from the Paris climate accords, which may prove the most consequential decision of the decade. With this and a thousand other egregious acts, he could always rely on support from Fox News, which perfected its model during the Obama years then seemingly tethered itself to Trumps White House.

David Brock, founder and chairman of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, said: Fox has given the conservative side a whole set of counter-facts and a whole different reality that they can live in that has destroyed the consensus in the country, destroyed the notion that we are operating from the same set of facts and then kind of arguing how to interpret them I dont think wed be here in the moment were in without Fox.

Social media plays an auxiliary role, Brock argues. You can definitely see that the producers at Fox are paying attention to these far-right extreme websites and social media outlets: Breitbart, the Daily Caller, 4chan, 8chan and Reddit. Of course, the Trump campaign was very adept at exploiting all that and they got a leg up on the Democrats digitally in 2016 and they still have it.

Niall Ferguson, an author, historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, has a different emphasis. Cable news has been around a while; that wasnt new, he argues. What was new was Facebook and Googles dominance of news consumption through news feed and search and, of course, the advent of targeted political advertising.

I strongly believe that without social media and certainly be more precise and say Facebook Trump wouldnt have won. That was much more important than Fox. I think the big tech companies totally changed the structure of the public sphere and its still the case that many people dont get that.

The rise of social media played a big part in the collapse of Americas local newspapers, devouring advertising revenue and creating news deserts. Facebook and other social media are unquestionably responsible for accelerating political tribalization and a breakdown of a shared reality.

Its not just polarization; its atomisation now. The most striking difference between 2016 and 2012 at the national aggregate level was the depressed African American turnout. That didnt happen just by accident. That was the core objective of the Trump social media campaign and it worked, saidFerguson.This is the big difference that this decade will be remembered for, and also the fact that during this decade the big tech companies basically were unrestrained by any regulation and were able to take the implications of financing online content with ads to the illogical reductio ad absurdum of having Russians post political content anonymously on American social media.

Americas cold civil war, as veteran journalist Carl Bernstein characterises it, has been described as a more profound threat to national security than any external foe. Combined with Trumps manta of America first, which shakes the trust of old allies in Nato and beyond, the US is widely seen to be ending the decade in a far weaker position than where it began. Ferguson published Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire in 2004, soon after George W. Bushs disastrous war in Iraq still arguably a greater blow to Americas standing, and to trust in leaders, than anything Trump has said, done or tweeted.

The real story of the last 10 years has been that there are two ways of managing imperial decline, the British-born historian sayid. You could do it a kind of refined, law professor way as Obama did, giving lectures and then taking actions like not intervening in Syria. Or you can just walk away with complete insouciance as Trump has. I think its really actually two flavors of the same ice cream.

The past decade witnessed the deaths of former president George HW Bush and Senator John McCain and, some argue, the Republican party as they knew it when it became consumed by a personality cult. The bipartisan unity that followed the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks now seems a relic from a different era. Back in 2010, Leon Panetta was the director of the CIA, planning the raid that would kill Osama Bin Laden the following year. He said: Those who wanted to undermine America and our democracy and create distrust have been very successful. Whether its the terrorists of 9/11 or whether its Putin and Russia, I think the objective of creating a divided America that began to lack trust in the institutions of our democracy: that was their goal and, if you look at America today, theyve largely succeeded.

The past decade it is ending with a looming, pit-of-the-stomach sense of dread, of a potentially violent election, of future conflict with China, of apocalyptic global heating for many Americans. In the short term, the November 2020 election will determine whether Trump was a four-year aberration, last time he did lose the popular vote by nearly three million after all, or the crass messenger of a more profound shift in direction.

Oceans rise, empires fall, sings King George III in Hamilton. Will future historians see in this decade the decline of the American empire?

Panetta said: I think were very much at a crossroads where there are really two paths. One is that we really could be an America in renaissance, if we could get our act together and deal with these challenges. Or we could be an America in decline. And right now, my sense is that were are clearly moving on the wrong path of an America in decline.

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The contradictions of 2010 to 2020: An era that began with Obama and ended with Trump - Milwaukee Independent

"Redesigning Women," the debut single from country music supergroup the Highwomen, has landed a significant mention from former President Barack Obama. On Monday (Dec. 30), the 44th president of the United States included the tune among his year-end "Favorite Music of 2019" list.

That's some high praise for the group, comprising singers Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Amanda Shires and Natalie Hemby. They're the same foursome who helped a slew of fellow female music icons open the 2019 CMA Awards last month with a stunning country medley.

First released this summer, "Redesigning Women" is a fierce but funny anthem of empowerment. The song'saccompanying music video, directed by Elizabeth Olmstead and produced by Melissa Michalak, amplifies the Highwomen's support for their sisters in country music and beyond.

"From hip-hop to country to The Boss, here are my songs of the year," Obama says of his genre-diverse list of songs that includes the Highwomen's single. "If you're looking for something to keep you company on a long drive or help you turn up a workout, I hope there's a track or two in here that does the trick."

Elsewhere among the former president's "Favorite Music of 2019" are selections from Summer Walker, Kaytranda, Lizzo and Maggie Rogers. A few of the tracks previously appeared on Obama's summer 2019 playlist.

That summer playlist also featured Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road," the country-rap chart-topper that later found country singer Billy Ray Cyrus among the phenomenon's many remixes.

For their part, the Highwomen appear entirely pleased with Obama's nod to their tune. "Why, hello, Mr. President!" the group responded on Monday. "Thank you so much for including 'Redesigning Women' in your list of 2019 favorites."

These Are the 30 Most Powerful Women In Country Music:

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The Highwomen Included in Barack Obama's Favorite Songs of 2019 - Taste of Country