Introduction

Barack Obama’s commitment to a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society traced back to his teenage and young adult life when, as the son of biracial parents growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii, he encountered many different cultures and societies and searched for his own racial identity.

What is most striking about his presidency, however, was his economic conservatism. His purpose was to maintain the nation’s existing free enterprise system rather than replace it with a more powerful centralized government being proposed by a more radical wing of his party. He believed strongly in supporting and rewarding entrepreneurship, in individual responsibility, and in a broad middle-class society.

What differentiated his administration from others before him were his efforts to expand opportunities to enter the middle class for those he regarded as not yet part of it. To the extent he believed the federal government had to play an important role in opening the gates of opportunity, he was fully prepared to use the force of his presidency. But because he believed in individual responsibility and achievement and thought a good education was essential for entering the middle class, he always emphasized the need for Black fathers to fulfill their parental obligations by helping raise their children, especially by taking an active interest in their education.

Obama’s commitment to conservative values materialized in other ways as well. Two of his greatest accomplishments as president were the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 and keeping the nation’s worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s from devolving into another depression. At the time of these achievements, loud voices from the political left of the Democratic Party were calling for drastic measures, including a program of national health insurance or some other kind of national option to replace the nation’s existing health system based on private insurance. Opposition to the ACA also came from the political right, which opposed any expansion of the government’s role in providing health insurance beyond Medicare and Medicaid, approved during the Lyndon Johnson administration in 1965.

As for the economic recession that Obama inherited when he became president, most economists attributed it to the collapse of an overextended housing boom caused by easy borrowing, complex financial instruments known as derivatives, and lax regulation of the nation’s largest financial and banking institutions, which dominated this sector of the economy. Those to the political left of the president called for breaking up these banks and institutions and creating, in their places, a more regulated but decentralized system of finance and banking. They also wanted more federal money used to prevent foreclosures on homes whose values had tanked because of the housing collapse and whose owners found themselves unable to meet their monthly mortgage payments. Instead, the president propped up the existing system by infusing hundreds of billions of federal dollars into it, at the expense, according to the president’s critics, of homeowners who lost their homes as a result of foreclosures and bankruptcies.

Another result of the nation’s economic recession was the near collapse of its automobile industry, in particular General Motors (GM), which was about to declare bankruptcy, and Chrysler, which also bordered on bankruptcy. Instead of allowing the collapse of this vital economic sector, which critics of the president were prepared to do in order to spur on greater industrial competition, Obama concluded that the collapse of GM and Chrysler would mean too great a loss of jobs by those employed by the auto giants or those who produced parts for them to allow their bankruptcy. Instead, his administration loaned billions of dollars to GM and Chrysler and helped arrange a sale of Chrysler to the Italian auto giant Fiat Industries.

For the most part, those who have written about the former president have either ignored or not pointed out adequately his conservative values even though they are foundational to his political outlook and the way he governed as president. Instead, these writers have emphasized his pragmatism and his progressivism. Indeed, Obama was a pragmatist and a progressive. He was pragmatic in the sense that he was more concerned about results than the means to achieve them. Although his presidency was always known for its candor and lack of scandal as compared to previous presidents and his successor as president, Donald J. Trump, Obama could also be ruthlessly pragmatic in achieving his goals.

Obama was also progressive in the sense that his goal was always a more perfect union, knowing that a perfect union was not achievable. His efforts to broaden entry into the middle class was one example of his progressivism. So was the ACA, which allowed millions of Americans who lacked health insurance to receive it. A third example was his executive order allowing children brought into the country by illegal immigrants to be granted permanent residency status.

Even in his conduct of foreign policy Obama was at the same time a pragmatist, a progressive, and a conservative. His pragmatism was evident in his expanded use of drones, first used by his predecessor, George W. Bush, to behead the international terrorist movement by assassinating its leaders. His progressivism was apparent in his efforts to confront the growing world problem of climate change and in his support of the so-called Arab Spring in the Middle East, in which millions of Egyptians and Arabs from other countries took to the streets to establish democratic institutions in the region. Rejecting revolution in which force was used to overthrow autocratic regimes, Obama advocated peaceful regime change through the ballot box and, when necessary, the application of US pressure to assure the results of the elections. Although rejecting Bush’s Wilsonian doctrine of “making the world safe for democracy,” he also envisioned a region predicated on the same principles of liberalism, free enterprise, and competition as those that existed in the United States.

The fact that Obama was a conservative as well as a pragmatist and progressive is important in understanding why he came under such heavy criticism, not only by Republicans who opposed his progressive values and expansion of government, but also by Democrats who wanted him to take more radical measures in response to the economic crisis he inherited as president and the delivery of health care in the country. There were other reasons why the majority of his achievements came within the first two years of his administration, when the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate as well as the White House. These included his failure to develop close relations even with his own congressional leadership, and the strength of the so-called Tea Party, a grass roots conservative movement that was instrumental in the Republican landslide victory in the congressional elections in 2010 and still remains a powerful force on Capitol Hill. All that said, the fact that Obama remained a conservative as well as a pragmatist and progressive explains why he alienated both the political left and the political right and, in part, why he was able to get so little done in Congress after 2010. Increasingly, he resorted to the use of executive orders to accomplish what he otherwise could not accomplish on Capitol Hill.

Even on the racial divide that has burdened the nation since the United States’ original sin of slavery and that became a dominant issue in his second administration with the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), Obama angered many Black leaders because of what they regarded as his indifference to racial issues and his failure to do more for his Black constituency. As the president acknowledged, even though he was born in 1961, he was never sympathetic to the more radical fringe of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and he always opposed violence as a means to resolve racial issues. Until the eruption of sometimes violent street demonstrations beginning with the killing of two young Black men, Trayvon Martin in June 2013 and Michael Brown in August 2014, he paid relatively little attention to issues of race relations after he became president. And while he endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement, he placed much greater emphasis on “My Brothers Keeper” (MBK), his alternative to BLM.

In contrast to the street demonstrations associated with BLM, which had the potential for violence and offered little substantive in confronting the hardships that people of color faced in their lives (other than to restore Black pride and make the privileged aware of the needs of the underprivileged), MBK was a mentoring program helping young men of color from deprived backgrounds improve their lives by filling the opportunity gaps they encountered. It was part of the president’s effort to open the middle class to those not already part of it.