Looking Back on President Barack Obama’s Legacy

Hope and Change

Wilbur C. Rich

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783030015442
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030015459
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When President Barack Hussein Obama left office January 20, 2017, he left a fascinating legacy. The Obama Presidency will remain an intriguing part of our nation's political history, and we can now say that there were unexpected achievements and failures. His tenure was both historical and complex, and will inevitably be compared with his predecessors and successors. The chapters in this volume are a serious assessment of President Obama's tenure written by a diverse team that includes political scientists, sociologists, historians, and economists. They provide critical insights into the man and his policies and, more importantly, are written in a manner that makes them available to laypersons, journalists, students, and scholars.

© The Author(s) 2019

Wilbur C. Rich (ed.)Looking Back on President Barack Obama’s Legacyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01545-9_2

Begin Abstract

The Obama Legacy in American Electoral Participation

Lyn Ragsdale¹

(1)

Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

Lyn Ragsdale

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Speaking at the 2016 Congressional Black Caucus gala, Barack Obama extolled the power of voting to ensure his legacy as president:

If I hear anybody saying their vote does not matter, that it doesn’t matter who we elect—read up on your history. It matters. We’ve got to get people to vote. I will consider it a personal insult—an insult to my legacy—if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote.¹

Regardless of how presidents hope to be remembered, their legacies are an important part of how they are judged in history and in direct comparison to each other. One of the central features of Obama’s legacy is not about what he accomplished or the tough decisions he made, but it is about being the first black to be elected president of the United States. This is one undeniable aspect of his legacy that is not subject to interpretation or revision by commentators. This chapter considers that electoral legacy, how it was shaped, and what it means in the future of the office.

Studying Presidential Legacies

A presidential legacy can be considered in two ways. Most often analysts focus on the major policy or political accomplishments a president achieved that had implications for Americans’ lives long after the president left the White House. Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of Social Security, Dwight Eisenhower’s conception of the federal highway system, and Lyndon Johnson’s establishment of Medicare come quickly to mind. But there is another type of legacy that involves a historic benchmark being reached, a precedent being set, or a political barrier being broken during the president’s tenure. A central part of George Washington’s legacy was establishing a two-term norm for future presidents. Until Franklin Roosevelt violated, it was unthinkable that anyone would seek a third term. Lyndon Johnson left not only policy legacies but also a political one—he was the first southerner elected to the presidency since the Civil War. His victory in 1964 demonstrated that the South was no longer an isolated region of the country and paved the way for southerners Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush to win the White House. As another example, Jimmy Carter appointed more women to positions in his administration than had any previo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Barack Obama and the Transformational Impulse
• The Obama Legacy in American Electoral Participation
• Managing a Regime in Crisis: The Twilight of Neoliberalism and the Politics of Economic Recovery During the First Year of the Obama Administration
• The Obama Health Care Legacy: The Origins, Implementation, and Effort to Repeal the Affordable Care Act of 2010
• Appraising the Foreign Policy Legacy of the Obama Presidency
• The World We Have Lost: US Labor in the Obama Years
• Swimming the Multiple Currents: The Political and Racial Time of Barack Obama’s Presidency
• The Legacy of President Obama in the U.S. Supreme Court
• The Obama Administration’s Global Warming Legacy: Going with the Flow and the Politics of Failure
• Unfulfilled Hopes: President Obama’s Legacy
• Conclusion: Who Was President Barack Obama?
• Back Matter