Conservative Legacy

The Wall Street Journal is a bastion of conservative thought, in many ways a standard-bearer for Republican ideology, and I’m sure home to many of the best and brightest journalists who lean to the right. So it’s not surprising that their piece on President Obama’s legacy (it might be behind a paywall, but here's the link: Obama's Legacy) comes to the conclusion that he was a failure, but the shallow level of analysis, the willfully ignorant arguments and outright misrepresentation of reality points not to Obama’s failure, but to the failure of the right-wing press and conservative intellectual arguments in general.

The basic gist of the article is that Obama and his progressive policies have left the country, the whole world really, in worse shape than it was in before. The fault lies with him and him alone. It starts by arguing that he chose to push through a left-wing agenda and rejected bipartisanship, ignoring the fact that Democratic control of government lasted for less than two years of his Presidency, that the Republicans in Congress literally stated from the beginning that their goal was to obstruct and defeat everything he proposed regardless of its merits or even their previous positions on issues such as stimulus spending or immigration reform. Even the Affordable Care Act, passed in that first window of opportunity, was ultimately a compromise, ceding a public option and prescription-price controls to satisfy the right - two of the largest weaknesses in the current law.

And while the Wall Street Journal does consider the ACA a failure, it doesn’t bother with the details of why or who is responsible - it’s simply Obama’s fault. That it is a failure is also glibly assumed, despite an additional twenty million insured, the lowest uninsured rate in history, and price levels that have risen slower over its lifetime than at any time in the last two decades. The ACA is flawed - all compromises tend to be - but it is far from a failure and the fact that no Republican alternative exists (after six years of claiming they would have one any day now) shows how hypocritical their attack on Obama really is.

They also blame Obama for the poor growth of the economy, contrasting his results with those of Reagan and Clinton. No mention of the recession he inherited from his Republican predecessor, no mention of the Republican blockade of any further stimulus from the government - something even most conservative economists agree would have been helpful. It's also quite telling that they don’t mention that Reagan’s government ushered in the modern era of crushing federal debt or that Clinton’s policies of de-regulation ultimately led to the financial crisis (a position that they’ve argued many times before). No, they threw in Reagan, analysis free, because conservatives blindly accept he was the last great President and they included Clinton in a poorly disguised (and ultimately futile) attempt to pretend they are not partisan and it’s Obama in particular who is a failure.

They blame Obama for pulling us out of Iraq too soon without mentioning he simply followed the scheduled Bush had structured, and they completely ignored why we were there in the first place. Obama was a bad president because of Syria and ISIS, but no mention of Al Qaeda and 9/11 which resulted from the policies of the (supposedly) great Reagan and Clinton years. The responsibility for all the world’s problems lies solely on Obama’s shoulders with no effort given to find any other possible explanation.

They even blame Obama for the poor state of our race relations, noting that as a black President he surely should have done better. While not stated, it’s clear that by ‘better’ they mean keeping the black folk from complaining so much. Because you can’t make the claim that life was better for oppressed minorities under Clinton and Reagan - all the data shows it was just as bad if not worse - but the wealthy white folk at the Wall Street Journal (and by extension their readers) didn’t have to hear about it. They actually think Obama failed because minority groups now feel they have a voice and the freedom to speak out.

It’s common for partisan news outlets to slam the other side, and any President’s legacy is open to interpretation and argument, but to do so with such openly motivated reasoning and disregard for the obvious complexities of reality and thoroughly documented facts of the past show who is the real disappointment over the past eight years: the Wall Street Journal and conservative intellectualism and integrity.