Chapter 9

A Second Recovery

Despite a second major humiliation at the ballot box, Obama made another major comeback as president, and his rating improved dramatically in the polls. One reason for this was his ability to effect change through executive action. By the end of 2015, his popularity as measured by the polls was above 50 percent, laying the ground for restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba and signing bilateral and multilateral agreements to reduce carbon emissions.

Beyond his overtures to Cuba and confronting the problem of global warming, Obama undertook a number of other new initiatives. These included an unsuccessful effort at comprehensive immigration reform and an agreement with Iran to stop its development of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. Because of a number of incidents involving police shootings of Black youth, Obama also placed new emphasis on the issue of race relations, a matter he had largely ignored through his first six years as president.

By the end of 2015, Obama was displaying a new confidence, including about his legacy as president, believing that the odds-on-favorite to win the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, would confirm as his legacy a middle-class society crossing all cultural, racial, and ethnic lines.

Election Aftermath

Even in the two months between the end of the midterm elections and the delivery of his State of the Union address, Obama proceeded boldly with his plans for the future, acting all the while as if he had a won a referendum from the voters in the midterms rather than being rejected by them.

On November 29, 2014, the president delivered a televised address in which he described the steps his administration was already taking to fix what he described as a shattered immigration system, including expanding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA). “For more than 200 years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world has given us an advantage over other nations,” he stated. “But today, our immigration system is broken—and everybody knows it.” For this, the president blamed the Republican-controlled House, which failed to consider the bipartisan legislation the Senate had passed in the previous Congress. The measure provided for a major overhaul of the immigration system, including providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “Had the House of Representatives allowed that kind of a bill as a simple yes-or-no vote,” the president remarked, “it would have passed with support of both parties, and today it would be the law.”¹

The president’s own policies toward illegal immigrants were mixed. At the same time he established the DACA program, he deported more immigrants (estimated around 2.5 million) than any of his predecessors. Part of the reason for this large number had to do with changes on how deportees were counted. The president’s supporters claimed the increase in deportations was a way for the president to show his Republican critics that he understood their concerns and was determined to limit illegal immigration. His position also had to do with his commitment to respect the law by insisting that those seeking entrance into the United States follow proper legal procedures.²

Another reason for Obama’s crackdown on illegal immigration was his determination to wrest control of immigration enforcement from state and local officials, who, as in the case of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, engaged in racial profiling and treated illegal immigrants cruelly. In response to passage of an anti-immigration law, which criminalized the failure to carry immigration documents, the president directed Attorney General Eric Holder to challenge the constitutionality of the law.³

In his November speech, he outlined his administration’s efforts regarding immigration. It was providing additional resources for border security and the speedy return of those who crossed the border illegally. At the same time, it was instituting measures to make it easier for skilled immigrants, graduate students, and entrepreneurs to remain in the country. It was also doing something for the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the country.⁴

“I want to say more about this third issue because it generates the most passion and controversy,” the president continued. “Even as we are a nation of immigrants, we’re also a nation of laws… . That’s why, over the past six years, deportation of criminals are up 80 percent.” He intended to continue focusing on deporting those illegals with criminal records. For illegal immigrants who had lived in the country for five years and maintained productive lives, he offered them assurances they would not be deported.⁵

Obama’s most notable action had to do with DACA, which, it will be recalled, extended deportation relief and employment authorization to those young immigrants who entered the country before their sixteenth birthday and went on to graduate high school or serve in the US military. The cutoff date for entering the country had been June 2007 and those eligible for the program had to be under thirty-one. Under these criteria an estimated 600,000 immigrants had been granted DACA status. Through executive action, the president changed the cutoff date to January 1, 2010, and eliminated the age requirement, thereby making an estimated 290,000 additional undocumented immigrants eligible for the DACA program. In addition, he extended deferred action and employment authorization to illegal immigrants with children who were US citizens or living lawfully in the country, and he eliminated the mandatory fingerprinting program.⁶

His changes in policy, he stressed, did not grant undocumented immigrants citizenship or even the right to stay permanently in the country. He was not granting amnesty. “What I’m describing,” the president continued, “is accountability—a common sense, middle ground approach: If you meet the criteria, you come out of the shadows and get right with the law.” He was acting within the law. His actions were similar to those taken by every president for the last fifty years. “And to those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer,” he told the members of the House and Senate. “Pass a bill.”⁷

On December 17, less than a month later, the president delivered another major address in which he revealed that his administration was in the process of negotiating the restoration of relations with Cuba. He made this announcement despite long-standing opposition to resuming relations from Congress and the influential Cuban community living in and around the city of Miami.⁸

As far back as 2008, Obama made clear that he wanted to establish a dialogue with the Cuban people with whom relations had been broken since 1959. When asked during the Democratic presidential debates in July whether he would be willing to meet without preconditions with a number of US adversaries, including Cuba, the Democratic candidate responded that he would. “And the reason is this,” he explained, “that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is somehow punishment to them … is ridiculous.”⁹

After Obama became president in 2009, he lifted restrictions on Cuban Americans wanting to travel to Cuba and to send remittances to their families still living there. He also began eighteen months of secret talks with the Cuban government. At the funeral of Nelson Mandela in December 2013, he shook hands with Cuba’s leader, Raoul Castro. With the assistance of Pope Francis and after a telephone call between the president and Castro, the negotiations concluded in a prisoner swap. Among the Americans released was Alan Gross, a subcontractor working for the United States Agency for International Development (AID), who had been in prison for five years accused of being a spy.¹⁰

During his call with Obama, Castro described at length Cuba’s grievances with the United States. When Ben Rhodes, who was listening to the conversation, sent a note to the president telling him he could cut the Cuban leader off, Obama shook his head. “It’s been a long time since they’ve talked to a U.S. president,” he told Rhodes. “He’s got a lot to say.”¹¹

With the release of Gross, he instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to begin discussion with Cuba and to open an embassy in Havana. He also asked Kerry to review Cuba’s designation as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” In announcing his actions, Obama told the nation he intended “to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people… . Neither the American nor Cuban people are well served by a rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born,” he added.¹²

The president realized that Cuba continued to oppress its people, but he hoped his liberalization of commerce and communication with Cuba might over time lead to a liberalization of its society. He was also aware that, given its history, its foreign policy would often be sharply at odds with the United States, but, in his view, it made no sense to restore relations with Communist China and Vietnam, against which the United States fought at the cost of fifty-eight thousand American servicemen dead, and not establish relations with Cuba.¹³

Once again, Obama’s announcement that he was taking steps toward restoring relations with Cuba angered Republicans, who would take control of both houses of Congress in January. They warned that they would never lift the fifty-four-year-old trade embargo on the country.¹⁴

Nuclear Weapons Agreement with Iran (February 2015–July 2015)

On January 20, 2015, the president delivered his sixth State of the Union address to Congress. “Middle-class economics works. Expanding opportunity works,” he began his remarks. “Tonight, after a breakthrough year for America, our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999,” he continued. What he emphasized in his address, though, were not the economic gains achieved during his administration, but what he believed still needed to be done to achieve the type of society he envisioned in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention when he spoke of a United States of America” rather than a nation of blue states and red states. “At this moment … we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth. It’s now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next 15 years and for decades to come,” he said.¹⁵

His one-hour address was optimistic, ambitious, and delivered with humor and defiance. “The improving economy is the backdrop for the speech, and context for the economic debate over the next two years,” his senior adviser, Dan Pfeiffer, stated. When the president remarked that he had run his last campaign, Republicans broke out in cheers. Smiling, Obama responded by saying he knew he had run his last campaign because he had won both of them.¹⁶

Undeterred by Republican control of both houses of Congress, Obama laid out one of his most ambitious agendas as president. He made no mention of the midterm elections, offered no concessions about his leadership, and offered no compromises on issues important to the Republicans like tax cuts. Rather than proposals to rein in government, he asked for new government spending to create “a 21st century infrastructure.” The money would also be used to train workers better, assure free community colleges, establish a system of national high-speed internet service, guarantee sick days, and provide childcare and paid parental leave for those with newborns and young children. “Today we’re the only advanced country on earth that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers,” he remarked. “Fifteen years into this century, we have picked ourselves up, dusted off, and begun again the work of remaking America… . Let’s begin this new chapter together.”¹⁷

Obama proposed such an ambitious set of goals not because he believed Congress would approve any of it. but because he wanted to make clear what he wanted as his legacy. The irony of the midterm elections was that its results emboldened him to be more defiant of a Congress he knew would defy him. As a lame-duck president, he was prepared to take even bolder executive action than in the past.¹⁸

As he anticipated, the Republican response to his State of the Union address was quick and almost entirely negative. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), widely regarded as a moderate Republican, remarked that the president’s speech was replete with “things Congress wouldn’t ever do.”¹⁹

Alexander’s prediction was borne out. On April 2, the president announced that his administration had reached a preliminary agreement with Iran by which Tehran would stop the development of a nuclear weapon in return for lifting economic sanctions against Iran. Since taking office, his administration had made clear that he considered nuclear proliferation one of the most dangerous threats to world peace. Despite a protocol Iran had signed in 2003 giving the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the right to conduct snap inspections of its nuclear facilities, it secretly continued developing weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. The president was committed to stopping Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. In response to Iran’s violation of the 2003 agreement, the White House imposed increasingly harsher sanctions against the country.²⁰

In his speech Obama delivered at Cairo University in June 2009, he stated that he wanted to open a new dialogue with Iran and even acknowledged its right to have peaceful nuclear power, but he made clear that Tehran had to stop producing and stockpiling weapons-grade nuclear material. Two developments that year delayed progress toward any negotiations with Iran and led, instead, to the imposition of additional sanctions against Tehran. First, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cracked down harshly on dissidents who had taken to the streets in opposition to the government. Second, the US revealed the existence of a secret, underground Iranian nuclear facility.²¹

By the spring of 2013, the way seemed open once again to try diplomacy. That year a more moderate government, led by Hassan Rouhani, who had campaigned on a platform of seeking improved relations with the West and tying progress on the nuclear issue to the lifting of sanctions, was elected to power. Sensing the opportunity to turn a new page in the United States’ relations with Iran, the president sent a letter to Rouhani proposing talks on the nuclear issue. Within weeks, he received a response in which the Iranian president made clear he wanted to start the negotiating process.²²

Almost two years of negotiations followed. Just deciding on a place to hold the talks (Oman) and on an agenda for the discussions took months. A routine followed where the negotiating team, led by career diplomats, would get Obama’s input before traveling back to Muscat (Oman’s capital) in one of their many trips between Washington and Muscat. “Obama would probe what elements of their nuclear program the Iranians would put on the table, delving into arcane details of nuclear infrastructure and sanctions policy,” wrote Rhodes, who sat in those meetings.²³

After a few weeks, the American negotiators settled on a framework for an interim agreement in which Iran would freeze its nuclear weapons program in return for limited relief from sanctions. Once Washington got the support of its partners for the framework, the administration discussed whether Obama should meet Rouhani, who would be attending the opening of the UN General Assembly in September. When Iran indicated it would be interested in a meeting, Obama decided to see Rouhani, but when the time came for the meeting, the Iranian leader failed to show.²⁴

Despite his no-show, the president made a last stab at contacting Rouhani. In a fifteen-minute conversation, the two leaders agreed on the urgency of reaching agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Later that fall, American negotiators, led by Secretary of State Kerry, held a series of meetings in Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland, with their Iranian counterparts to finalize an interim agreement.²⁵

The meetings were contentious as the Iranian negotiators hammered the US for its history of helping overthrow its legitimately elected government in 1953, opposing the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and supporting Israel. Still Obama was able to announce on April 2, 2015, that an agreement had been reached. “Iran will face strict limitations on its program,” the president stated, “and Iran has also agreed to the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history.”²⁶

As he expected, his announcement of a preliminary agreement with Iran resulted in a strong backlash from Republicans and the powerful Israeli lobby in the United States. Two months earlier, House Speaker John Boehner had departed from protocol by inviting, without any input from the administration, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress. In his speech Netanyahu emphasized his disappointment with the White House for reaching an agreement on Iran’s nuclear weapons program with a regime, which, he said, “pose[d] a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world.” Afterward, forty-seven Republican senators wrote a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini, warning him against reaching an agreement with the White House not endorsed by them.²⁷

Once the White House announced the accord in April, Republicans and the Israeli lobby stepped up their attacks on the deal. The president, nevertheless, called the preliminary agreement a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to limit the spread of nuclear weapons while reassuring critics that he still kept all options open if Iran violated the accord. As a way of providing assurances to skeptics, he met in the Oval Office with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times to discuss at length the draft deal.²⁸

To win the support of those doubters who accused him of giving away too much to the Tehran government, Obama emphasized once more his determination not to allow, under any circumstances, the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, which, he acknowledged, posed an unacceptable threat to Israel. “If anybody messes with Israel, America will be there,” he told Friedman. He was distressed by what he regarded as false suggestions, even from Prime Minister Netanyahu, that he was anti-Israel. “Look, Israel is a robust, rowdy democracy,” he told the New York Times journalist. “We share so much. We share blood, family… . And part of what has always made the US-Israeli relationship so special is that it has transcended party, and I think that has to be preserved.” But I must be able “to disagree with a policy … without being viewed as … opposing Israel.”²⁹

Another matter that Friedman raised with the president was what he regarded as a common denominator in his remarks on Iran. Was there such a thing, he asked Obama, as an “Obama Doctrine?” The president said there was and described it as a willingness to take “calculated risks” predicated on the principle that America’s “overwhelming power” should give it the confidence to venture in new directions, like restoring relations with Cuba and reaching an agreement with Iran, which, he acknowledged, was “a complicated country.” “The activities that they engage in, the rhetoric, both anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, is deeply disturbing.” But, he added, “there is a practical streak to the Iranian regime. I think they are concerned about self-preservation.” Iran had a defense budget of $30 billion compared to the US defense budget, which was closer to $600 billion. “Iran understands that they cannot fight us, he responded in answering most directly Friedman’s earlier question about an Obama Doctrine. “The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our abilities.”³⁰

One other matter that the president made clear to Friedman was his insistence on entering into binding agreements with foreign powers without congressional approval. Referring to the preemptive letter Republican senators had already written to Iran’s supreme leader warning him against signing the agreement, he added, “I felt the letter that was sent was inappropriate.”³¹

On July 15, after three more months of difficult negotiations, Obama announced a “comprehensive long-term deal [with Iran] that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Among the more noteworthy provisions of the accord were the stipulations for Iran to shut down the core of one of its nuclear facilities so that it would no longer be able to produce weapons-grade plutonium and to ship its spent fuel out of the country. Additionally Iran agreed to stop production for at least the next fifteen years of any heavy water reactors used in the production of nuclear weapons and to remove by two-thirds the number of centrifuges needed to produce weapons-grade uranium. Finally, the deal gave IAEA inspectors access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain to keep it from covertly developing a nuclear weapon at some secret facility.³²

In return for Iran’s stoppage of its nuclear weapons program, the sanctions put in place because of the program would be phased out as Tehran completed the steps outlined in the agreement. In the final phase, the freeze on $100 billion of Iran’s assets being held around the world would be lifted. “This deal meets every single one of the bottom lines that we established when we achieved a framework earlier this spring,” the president remarked in announcing the accord. He also vowed to veto any Republican attempt to undermine the agreement.³³

The next day Obama held a press conference in which he reiterated the points he had made in his announcement of the deal. In response to questions from reporters, he emphasized that the only alternatives to the nuclear weapons agreement were either no deal in which case Iran could continue to develop a nuclear weapon, setting off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, or some kind of military response, which could lead to a regional conflagration. He directed many of his remarks to congressional Republicans, the Israeli lobby in Washington, and Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, all of whom expressed their strong opposition to the deal with Iran and were lobbying hard against the agreement. “I’m hearing a lot of talking points being repeated about ‘this is a bad deal’—‘this is a historically bad deal,’ ” the president commented. “What I haven’t heard is, what’s your preferred alternative?” ³⁴

Because the administration failed to submit the agreement to Congress within thirty days after it was signed, the period for reviewing—and lobbying against—the deal was extended to sixty days. In response to the lobbying effort, the administration launched its own intense effort on behalf of the agreement. The president became the chief lobbyist, inviting the entire Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill to the White House, holding interviews and making speeches on behalf of the agreement, and even going on the popular Daily Show as a way of reaching a younger audience.³⁵

As August gave way to September, the White House’s lobbying effort began to pay off. European diplomats lobbied on behalf of the agreement. Former ambassadors to Israel and retired national security officials wrote letters in support of the accord. Dozens of retired Israeli generals and a former head of Israel’s highly respected clandestine service, Mossad, turned against Netanyahu. Public opinion polls indicated that a majority of American Jews favored the agreement.³⁶

When the vote was taken in the Senate, Democrats were able to prevent Republican efforts to block the agreement from going into effect. (A formal treaty required an unattainable two-thirds vote.) Although the Senate and House leadership vowed to fight on, even threatening to bring a lawsuit against Obama over the Iran deal, the president had won his greatest foreign policy victory since taking office six years earlier. “This vote is a victory for diplomacy, for American national security, and for the safety and security of the world,” the president remarked in a statement he issued after a vote he termed “an historic step forward.”³⁷

The Trans-Pacific Partnership

The signing of the nuclear agreement with Iran did not lead to any significant change in Washington’s overall relations with the Tehran government, but it prevented another possible war, this time between Israel and Iran that could have sucked the United States deeper into Middle East policy and politics. From Syria to Ukraine, Yemen to Iran, the president was bent on avoiding getting involved in another quagmire. Reaching an agreement with Iran on its nuclear weapons program also allowed Obama to reorient US foreign policy away from the Middle East and toward Southeast Asia, where, he thought, China posed a major threat to US global interests.³⁸

Ever since taking office, Obama tried to accommodate China. In 2009, the president traveled to Beijing where he sought to replace the previous confrontational relationship between his country and the ancient kingdom with one of cooperation. While making clear to the Chinese that the United States remained a Pacific power, he acknowledged that China had become one of the most important economic players in the world and was entitled to have a far bigger voice in the global economy than it had in the past. He also understood the economic dependency on the Chinese of North Korea, which in 2009 had conducted a successful underground nuclear test. He hoped China might use its economic influence to constrain the erratic behavior of its leader, Kim Jong-un, and place limits on its nuclear ambitions.³⁹

This did not happen. Instead, China turned coral reefs in the South and East China Seas into islands eight hundred miles from the mainland and claimed as its territory what had been international waters. It also tested a new Stealth jet fighter and hacked into the computers of such large American corporations as Google and Boeing. It even threatened to depress the American economy by selling some of its holdings of American debt if US budget deficits continued to worsen.⁴⁰

In response Obama embarked on a two-track course. He kept the door open to better relations with China, but in the summer of 2010, at a conference of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Vietnam, to which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been invited, the secretary persuaded these countries to speak out against China’s policy in the South China Sea. The president made clear to Chinese president Jinping Xi that China’s effort to seize or build on lands occupied by a US ally could escalate into a US-China conflict. The administration also invested in new military technologies and increased spending on cyber defense and offense. Most important, it developed a strategy of increasing the US’s military presence in Southeast Asia starting with a small base in Australia, and reaching a multilateral trade agreement with Southeast Asian countries as an alternative to China’s own regional economic ambitions.⁴¹

The concept of such an agreement went back to 2005 when four countries with trans-Pacific interests—New Zealand, Brunei, Chile, and Singapore—signed the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPSEP). Beginning in 2008, additional countries, including the United States, participated in talks to expand the partnership. Obama expressed a deep interest in having the US become part of the union, which, he hoped, would establish “a high standard, enforceable, meaningful trade agreement” that would be “incredibly powerful for American companies who … have often been locked out of those markets.” It would also benefit American workers by allowing America to compete on a more level playing field. “I view smart trade agreements as a vital part of middle-class economics,” he later added.⁴²

The president also believed an expanded Pacific agreement would have important strategic value. It would make clear to doubters America’s commitment to the nations bordering on the South and East China Seas and its staying power. It would also create a strategic wedge against China’s increasing influence in the region.⁴³

In early November 2011, Obama visited a number of Pacific Rim nations before becoming the first American president to attend a meeting of the ASEAN countries on the island of Bali. On his way across the Pacific, he stopped in Honolulu where he announced, along with the leaders of eight other trans-Pacific countries, the broad outlines of what became the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He also called together some of his closest advisers to express his frustration at how he was being characterized in Washington as distant and detached. “Few things irritate me more,” he said mimicking those who described him this way. “ ‘He’s aloof, he doesn’t have friends.’ ” They could not be more wrong, he continued. “I’m almost always around people. I just have a different group of friends than people who’ve been running for office since they were twenty-two.”⁴⁴

In Bali, the president and leaders of the other ASEAN nations once again challenged China’s claims to the resource-rich South Asian Sea. Obama rattled Chinese premier Wen Jiabo by announcing that he was stationing twenty-five hundred Marines in Australia and had gained backing for a regional free-trade bloc. He also revealed that he was considering restoring diplomatic relations with Myanmar (Burma), a Chinese ally. In response, the Chinese claimed the United States was trying to destabilize the region and said that conflicting territorial disputes should be settled by bilateral negotiations.⁴⁵

The president remained undeterred. The next year he visited Myanmar on his way to the 2012 meeting of the ASEAN countries in Cambodia. Even though the country of fifty-three million had been shut off from the rest of the world by a xenophobic military junta that had ruled it for nearly fifty years, the situation in Myanmar had begun to change by the time Obama took office. The military adopted a new constitution paving the way for a civilian-led government and freed from more than twenty years of house arrest the Nobel Laureate and leader of the democratic movement in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi. By visiting Myanmar, meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, and delivering a speech at the University of Yangon in Rangoon, in which he stated that the US was “a Pacific nation” whose future was “bound to those nations and peoples to our West,” the president was reasserting the United States’ position as a Pacific power and warning the Beijing government not to interfere with the transition taking place in the country.⁴⁶

At the ASEAN meeting in Phnom Penh and in the three years of negotiations that followed, the administration worked out the difficult details of a final TPP agreement, which ranged from the complex issues of copyright law to labor conditions and tariffs among the twelve signatory nations. The negotiations were complicated by the fact that due to the government shutdown at home, the president had to cancel his planned trip to Asia in October 2013. China’s president Xi Jinping also offered economic incentives to the ASEAN countries, including establishing a $50 billion Chinese infrastructure bank, as a way of drawing them into its orbit.⁴⁷

Despite the obstacles along the way, twelve Pacific Rim countries agreed to the TPP in February 2016. Even many Asian critics of TPP feared China’s expansionary ambitions in Southeast Asia and, despite being wary of Washington’s commitment to the region, understood that only the United States had the economic and military power to contain the Chinese threat. In addition, they were so anxious to gain greater access to American markets that they made numerous concessions to the US in the negotiations.⁴⁸

The signatories to the TPP represented roughly 40 percent of the world’s economic output. The agreement was designed so that it could eventually create a new single trading bloc akin to the European Union (EU). In order for it to go into effect, at least six of the original twelve negotiating countries accounting for at least 85 percent of their combined GDP had to ratify the agreement within two years of its signing. Since the US had by far the largest GDP, this meant it needed Senate consent. Because of opposition to the agreement, even Democrats, who feared that the free trade nature of TPP would cost American jobs, and complaints about the domination of the large corporate interests in determining America’s negotiating positions, ratification of the agreement in an election year seemed unlikely. Even one of the architects of the agreement, former secretary Clinton, disavowed it because of the flack she was getting from her chief opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders (VT), a strong opponent of all free trade agreements.⁴⁹

Despite the opposition, Obama sought TPP’s speedy ratification. He hoped to avoid having the agreement drawn into the politics of a presidential election year. Even when it became apparent in August that the Senate would not ratify the agreement before the 2016 presidential elections, Obama remained determined to have it passed by the end of the year. If the Senate failed to ratify the TPP before the elections, he said he would bring it up again during the lame-duck session that followed. “We are part of a global economy,” he added. “We are not reversing that.”⁵⁰

In retrospect, the president never had a chance of getting the Senate to ratify the agreement. The opposition was simply too great. Fearful of losing more jobs to Asia, key labor leaders, who had been among his strongest supporters, spoke out against the agreement. Partisanship also played its role. Once the party of free trade, Republicans, led by Paul Ryan (R-WI) who had replaced John Boehner as House Speaker in September 2015, and Senate Majority Leader McConnell, condemned the agreement as a sellout of American interests. The fact that the final terms seemed to favor large corporate interests even led to accusations that the president had always been a tool of corporate America.⁵¹

Most of the foreign policy officials and advisers in the administration agreed that the president regarded TPP as a way to expand American trade into Southeast Asia and to create an economic bloc that would contain Chinese expansion into the region. As Defense Secretary Ash Carter later wrote, it was part of a “rebalance in American foreign policy.” It was driven by Obama’s “conviction that the United States had dissipated too much of its strength in the Middle East.” Just as in the case of the ACA, the president allowed corporate interests to have their way in the negotiations so that they would not obstruct completion of the final agreement.⁵²

Global Warming and Climate Change

One of the problems the president took up with the Chinese in the last years of his administration was the twin issues of global warming and climate change resulting from carbon emissions. As a new US senator in 2007, Obama introduced legislation mandating reductions in emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. As a new president in 2009, he made a commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. He also committed $90 billion of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to promote renewable energy sources. By the end of his first administration, electricity generated from wind, solar, and geothermal sources had more than doubled.⁵³

In late December 2009, the president traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, in an effort to get most of the world’s developed and less-developed nations to reach an agreement that would mitigate the effects of climate change already being felt throughout the world. He decided to go to the meeting despite having recently returned from Oslo, Norway, where he had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. During the conference, Secretary of State Clinton announced that the US was prepared to lead a collective effort by developed countries to provide $100 billion annually by 2020 to help the poorest and least prepared nations respond to climate change.⁵⁴

Getting representatives from virtually every nation in the world to reach a binding accord proved impossible. China, rapidly becoming the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, led a group of other developing nations in opposing stringent emission controls. Other countries complained during the negotiations about corporate favoritism, the lack of funding to help developing countries combat the effects of climate change, and the lack of transparency. As a result, signatories to the final agreement pledged to curb carbon emissions by modest amounts through 2020, but without providing any enforcing mechanisms.⁵⁵

On Capitol Hill, a number of senators, including the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar (R-IN), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), praised the administration for what it had accomplished at Copenhagen. Most environmental groups, however, blamed the White House for what was widely regarded as a failed summit. They were especially critical of the speech Obama gave at the conference. He offered the poor and developing countries nothing to help them reduce emissions other than the $100 billion global fund Clinton had already promised them. “We have charted our course, we have made our commitments, and we will do what we say,” he told the delegates at the Copenhagen summit.⁵⁶

Limiting carbon emissions meant cutting back on the use of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil. There was no broad base of support to reduce the use of coal to produce electricity or oil to heat homes and fuel vehicles. To the contrary, even those who regarded global warming and climate change as important issues, thought of them as long-term problems rather than ones requiring immediate structural changes. Others regarded them as developments that occurred periodically over millions of years rather than being man-made, the argument fostered by the powerful oil and coal lobby.

The key congressional battle between environmentalists and the fossil fuel industry after Obama took office was over legislation allowing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set a limit on carbon emissions each year and, then, in an auction system known as “cap-and-trade,” permit firms to buy or sell the rights to these emissions. Instead of the government regulating limits on carbon emissions for each industry, the proposal would allow the marketplace to determine which industries owned the right to these emissions. In the president’s view, cap-and-trade was a conservative, market-driven, proposal for achieving a progressive policy goal.⁵⁷

Although a number of Republicans still sought to work with Democrats on global warming and climate change when Obama took office in 2009, by 2010 that had changed. Facing Tea Party opposition in their bids for reelection in November, they came out against cap-and-trade. Because of a major leak of oil in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, caused by an explosion on the Deep Water Horizon oil rig owned by British Petroleum (BP), resulting in the worst oil slick in the nation’s history and inflicting major damage to ecosystems along the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida, environmentalists lost interest in any public-private fix to global warming.⁵⁸

Given the degree of opposition to cap-and-trade, the president decided in 2010 that he would be wasting his political capital by making global warming and climate change among his highest legislative goals. Even when he spoke to the American people about the disaster underway in the Gulf, he began his address by remarking: “As we speak, our nation faces a multitude of challenges. At home, our top priority is to recover and rebuild from a recession that has touched the lives of nearly every American.”⁵⁹

As the end of his first administration grew nearer, the president began to reconsider his position. By 2012, he had achieved most of his highest priorities at home. Having always been concerned about the damage being caused by global warming, the president now felt better able to address the issue. A report by climate scientists that 2010 had been the hottest year on record and a rash of extreme weather conditions—floods, droughts, heat waves, and cold snaps—highlighted to him the need to confront the issue. So did the BP spill and a battle between environmentalists and oil lobbyists over whether to permit the construction of a pipeline (the Keystone XL Pipeline) from the oil-producing tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Texas.⁶⁰

Obama joined the opposition to the pipeline. Facing an uphill fight for reelection, the president realized he needed the active support of the very environmental community he had so disappointed by his environmental record. On January 18, 2012, he issued a statement in which he rejected the application of the Canadian firm, TransCanada Corporation, for a permit to build and operate the Keystone XL pipeline. Environmentalists immediately embraced his decision. Congressional Republicans and spokespeople for the fossil fuel industry maintained that Obama’s action would be harmful to the economy and the national security.⁶¹

After the president won reelection in 2012, he elevated the importance he attached to confronting global warming and climate change. “We, the people,” he remarked in his Second Inaugural address on January 21, 2013, have an obligation to all of posterity. “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” In his State of the Union address on February 12, 2013, he warned Congress that if it did not “pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change,” he would take executive action “to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”⁶²

In June, the White House issued The President’s Climate Action Plan, which described in detail the administration’s plan for cutting carbon pollution and slowing down the effects of climate change. Predicated on his pledge to reduce by 2020 America’s greenhouse emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels, Obama offered a series of proposals ranging from cutting pollution from power plants to investing in clean energy innovation. Over the next two years, the Action Plan guided the administration’s response to global warming and climate change. ⁶³

The administration’s efforts culminated at the end of 2015. In November, Obama rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline once and for all, saying it was never as indispensable as both its boosters and detractors claimed. Even more important, the next month, the United States joined 194 other world powers in signing the Paris Climate Agreement. The most far-reaching undertaking ever agreed to by these powers to cut greenhouse gas emissions and avoid its worst potential, the agreement was a legally binding accord that was part of an internationally coordinated effort to tackle climate change. It was reached under intense international pressure to prevent a repeat of the Copenhagen failure six years earlier.⁶⁴

Instead of country-specific emission targets, the agreement provided only that the signatories commit to keeping the global temperature rise for the century well below 2 degrees Celsius (preferably 1.5 percent) above preindustrial levels. Although it left it up to them on how to achieve that goal, it established a series of monitoring processes and provided for an assessment every five years of the progress being made toward their success. It also provided for greater transparency and sought to increase assistance to developing countries faced with the impact of climate change.⁶⁵

The Paris Agreement came about only after years of multilateral and bilateral negotiations, especially between the US and China. Despite the United States’ many differences with China over its restrictive trade policies and ambitions in the South China Sea, each nation shared a common interest in maintaining good relations with the other: the former as the largest importer of Chinese goods and the latter as its biggest trading partner. As the largest polluters of the environment and biggest manufacturers of alternative energy sources, including solar panels, wind-driven turbines, and electric batteries able to power automobiles, both powers also had an interest in reducing their dependence on fossil fuels.⁶⁶

In April, Secretary Kerry traveled to Beijing where he met with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi. To Kerry’s surprise, Yang was receptive to his proposal for establishing a formal working relationship on climate change. Together they launched the US-China Climate Change Working Group to reduce the growth of global emissions. Over the next several months China and the US also negotiated terms for an international agreement on climate based on the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” Kerry’s hope was that the two countries might conclude an agreement on climate change before President Obama’s visit to Beijing in November 2014.⁶⁷

The president made clear that any accord between the two countries had to include meaningful commitments by China to reduce its global emissions. Despite last-minute tensions over targets, the two sides reached an agreement that satisfied him. On November 11, 2014, as part of a trip to the Far East, Obama met with President Xi in Beijing. In a joint press conference Xi lectured him about historical grievances China still felt toward Washington and warned foreign nations not to interfere in the growing prodemocracy movement in Hong Kong. Notwithstanding his remarks, the two leaders stood together as they announced their target emissions reductions.⁶⁸

The year of negotiations that followed between the developed and developing nations over such matters as emission targets, funding, and transparency proved difficult. In a speech at the Asia-Pacific business conference in the Philippines less than two weeks before the Paris climate summit was scheduled to meet, the president warned that there still was “a lot of work to do,” but encouraged by the Chinese-American agreement, the negotiators resolved the most serious differences. To keep the Republicans from killing the agreement, they wrote it as a voluntary pact rather a treaty requiring Senate approval. For that reason a number of environmental scientists were skeptical about its importance.⁶⁹

Congressional opponents of the Paris Agreements and every Republican running for president made the same point. In contrast, House and Senate Democrats, environmental groups, and world leaders hailed the agreement. “This is truly a historic moment,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon remarked. “For the first time, we have a truly universal agreement on climate change, one of the most crucial problems on earth.” The overwhelming majority of environmental scientists and leaders agreed. Despite Republican opposition, over the next ten months, the administration worked out the final details preliminary to the United States’ joining the Paris Agreement on September 3, 2016.⁷⁰

As for Obama, he took full credit for the accord. “One of the reasons I ran for Office was to make sure that America does its part to protect this planet for future generations,” he remarked in announcing America’s entrance into the Agreement. “Over the past seven and a half years, we’ve transformed the United States into a global leader in the fight against climate change.”⁷¹

Because the president signed the Paris Agreement without the approval of the Republican-controlled Senate, he continued to come under blistering attack during the last year of his administration. He was accused of asserting dictatorial powers by obliging the United States, without congressional approval, to the whims of nations like China, whose interests often conflicted with those of the United States. The same charges were made when the administration entered into the TPP in February. Congressional Republicans were also incensed by the president’s empowerment of the EPA to enforce regulations on limiting carbon emissions, from increasing the gas mileage of new automobiles to requiring the construction of more heat efficient homes over the objections of the affected industries. They were also angered by his decision, as his administration neared its end, to prohibit by executive order the development of 253 million acres of public land, more than any other president.⁷²

By all these actions, the president showed that he was not the dispassionate and unresponsive president that his detractors within the environmental community had once accused him of being. Instead, he proved the opposite, a leader whose actions held out the promise, for the first time, of the world coming together to deal with what environmental scientists believed was the most existential threat to global survival ever known to humankind.⁷³

Racial Crisis

Beginning with the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin Jr., a seventeen-year-old Black teenager, in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012, and another fatal shooting of a Black teenager, eighteen-year-old Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, the president had to deal with issues of race relations in ways he had not since the angry outbursts of his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in 2008. His need to confront the issue continued through the mass murders by a white supremacist of nine Black parishioners at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. The shock to the nation, especially within the Black community, caused by these killings tested once more the boundaries of the president’s own thinking on race. They reaffirmed that while he continued to be rooted by the color of his skin, he still regarded himself as the nation’s leader, who happened to be Black, rather than being defined by his Blackness.

Trayvon Martin Jr. was killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, who claimed he had been assaulted by Martin and was acting in self-defense in compliance with Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Martin was returning from a convenience store where he had made some small purchases. He wore a hoodie and was new to the community. He did not carry a gun and had no juvenile record. Zimmerman was later charged with second degree murder but found not guilty.⁷⁴

Investigators were never able to determine exactly what happened on February 26. Because the Florida law had already been criticized by Black leaders and legal justice advocates as giving license to gun owners to shoot minorities and Zimmerman’s explanation of what happened did not square with the forensic evidence, his killing attracted national attention. Although Martin had been expelled several times from school and had some minor brushes with the law, he was widely portrayed in the media as a star athlete, who was trying to make a fresh start for himself. Rallies around the country called for Zimmerman’s arrest and an end to racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.⁷⁵

The president took a month before responding to Martin’s killing. Acknowledging its racial element, he did so without using the term “race.” “If I had a son he’d look like Treyvon,” he remarked. “Obviously, this is a tragedy… . I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this.” This was the first time he talked explicitly about racism in the justice system since the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in July 2009.⁷⁶

Obama did not comment immediately after Martin’s killing in part because he was awaiting Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.’s decision to have the civil rights division investigate the killing. “I’m the head of the executive branch and the attorney general reports to me so I’ve got to be careful about my statement to make sure that we’re not impairing any investigation that’s taking place right now,” he explained.⁷⁷

Civil rights leaders criticized the president, nevertheless, for not addressing directly the issue of race in the criminal justice system and for his failure to call Martin’s parents. “If Trayvon’s mother were white, would Obama give her a call?” asked Bruce White of Syracuse University, founder of the “Your Black World” coalition. Not until the end of July, after Zimmerman had been acquitted, did Obama address the issues that concerned his Black critics. Commenting briefly after learning of the jury’s decision on July 13 and more extensively at a press conference six days later, he made clear his recognition of the need for the nation to address these concerns. “There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store,” he remarked at the press conference. “That includes me.” ⁷⁸

The most important of the remedies he offered, however, was racial sensitivity training on the state and local levels. On the federal level, he had little to propose other than to convene a conference of business and religious leaders, and others familiar with the racial problems young African American men encountered every day. He had doubts about convening a more general conversation on race, as some civil rights leaders were advocating. “I haven’t seen that be particularly effective when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked in position they already have.”⁷⁹

The president simply did not believe racial discrimination was a significant enough problem to require a lot of his attention. “I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better,” he remarked at the end of a press conference. “Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn’t mean that we’re in a post-racial society. [But] we’re becoming a more perfect union—not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.” He was sensitive to the needs of Black people but never beholden to their causes. He remained the president of all the United States who happened to be Black.⁸⁰

His limited views on racial discrimination were tested again by the fatal shooting on August 9, 2014, of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s killing was different in several respects from Treyvon Martin’s death. Even physically there were differences. In contrast to Martin, who looked and acted like the teenager and athlete he was and whom the president embraced as someone that could have been him thirty-five years earlier, Brown was tall, obese, and adult-looking. The president could never have said of him that he was like the son he never had.⁸¹

Martin was returning from a convenience store where he had made some small purchases when he was killed. Brown was walking away from a store where he was suspected of stealing cigarillos when he was fatally shot. In both cases, the circumstances leading to the killings were unclear, but in contrast to Zimmerman, the person who shot Brown, Darren Wilson, was a police officer. Unlike the largely middle-class city of Sanford, Ferguson, where Brown was killed, was a hard scrub, predominantly poor Black city that was part of the St. Louis metropolitan area. Its police department and municipal government were notorious for balancing the city’s budget by having the police impose excessive traffic and parking tickets. In contrast to Sanford, Ferguson was a time bomb waiting to go off.

Unlike Martin Jr.’s killing, Brown’s death led to four months of riots, looting, and vandalism, including the burning down of businesses. Heavily armed police from the metropolitan area and the National Guard were called into Ferguson. Tear gas filled the air. Missouri governor Jay Nixon (R) declared two states of emergency and imposed curfews on Ferguson. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. ordered a federal investigation into the causes of the rioting and personally visited Ferguson, where he met with local leaders. The rioting did not end until the end of November. Even then, Ferguson remained on the edge, needing only the smallest incident to start more rioting.⁸²

Obama’s response to Brown’s killing was more modulated than in the case of Martin’s death. In his first comments on August 14, he announced Holder’s investigation, stating that the shooting in Ferguson “deserves a fulsome review.” In subsequent remarks, he spoke passionately about the long-standing problems that faced Black youths, including broken families, and inadequate schools. “In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear,” he remarked on August 18. “You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college. And part of my job … is to get at the root causes.” The president was also highly critical of the Ferguson Police Department and of police departments throughout the country for their practice of racial profiling and the inordinate number of arrests they made of people of color as opposed to Caucasian Americans. His critics even took him to task for his criticisms of the police—one critic accusing him of an “assault on the police.”⁸³

As in the case of the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin Jr., however, the president emphasized the theme of racial progress rather than racial division. While remarking upon the legitimate grievances of African Americans and other people of color, he made clear his respect for the police. Most of his criticism was also directed not at the criminal justice system but at the advocates of violence and the vandals, looters, and arsonists who followed in their wake. If they committed a crime, they needed to be prosecuted, he stated.⁸⁴

On November 24, 2014, a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Wilson for Brown’s killing. On March 4, 2015, the Department of Justice (DOJ) cleared Wilson of civil rights violations in the shooting. The forensic evidence, the DOJ concluded, and changes in the testimony of witnesses who saw the shooting and claimed at first that Brown was holding his hands up when he was shot, made clear that Wilson had not violated the law.⁸⁵

Fearing an outburst of violence in Ferguson following both announcements, Obama defended the grand jury’s decision and, later, his administration’s decision not to prosecute the officer, but not without first blasting the Ferguson Police Department for its discriminatory practices. “As they do their jobs in the coming days,” he remarked about the department in November, “they need to work with the community, not against the community.” After the Justice Department decided not to bring charges against Wilson, he went much further. “What we saw was that [the department] in conjunction with [the] municipality make traffic stops, arrests, and tickets as revenue generators as opposed to serving,” he said at a town hall meeting in Columbia, South Carolina, in March. He added that the overwhelming white force was “systematically” biased, and placing minorities under its care led to an “oppressive and abusive situation.”⁸⁶

Much to the displeasure of many civil rights leaders, however, who viewed racial discrimination as a pathological societal problem requiring a major reordering of presidential priorities, Obama stressed “the enormous progress in race relations.” Even in his remarks criticizing the Ferguson Police Department for its discriminatory racial practices, he added that the job of police departments and communities everywhere was to “work together to solve the problems, and not get caught up in the cynicism of ‘Oh it’s never going to change, everything’s racist.’ ” Obama was not race neutral. He simply did not view politics through the prism of race.⁸⁷

The president made his comments on the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Wilson while he was on his way to Selma, Alabama, where he joined forty thousand marchers to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the historic march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. At the front of the huge gathering that crossed the bridge, he joined hands with the leader of the march fifty years earlier, Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), who nearly died on the bridge in 1965 after a state trooper fractured his skull and left him unconscious. Afterward, the president delivered a speech, which most commentators agreed was one of the best of his political career.⁸⁸

In elegiac terms, the president described the nation’s history as a series of actions by individuals who defied convention to bring about progress. They were not just white and Black or drawn from a single socioeconomic group, he said. They were women and men, Hispanic and Asian, wealthy and poor, Protestants and Catholic, Jewish and Muslims, evangelicals and atheists, military heroes and community volunteers, entertainers and athletes. “Look at our history,” he remarked at Selma. “We are the immigrants who stowed away on ships to reach these shores… . We’re the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the South… . We’re fresh GIs who fought to liberate a continent… . We are storytellers, writers, poets, artists, who abhor unfairness, and despise hypocrisy… . We are Jackie Robinson, enduring scorn and spiked cleats and pitches coming straight to his head, and stealing home in the World Series anyways… . That’s what America is.”⁸⁹

Throughout his speech Obama made clear that the fight against racial discrimination was not over, and he referred repeatedly to the problems and barriers still limiting opportunities for the poor and people of color. “If Selma taught us anything,” he remarked, “it’s that our work is never done.” What happened in Ferguson was not an isolated incident, he added.⁹⁰

In his address, he also attacked the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating that part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 providing for federal protection of minority voting for those living in states and locations with histories of voting discrimination. The country had changed, the Court ruled, and federal supervision was no longer relevant. Disappointed by the ruling, he urged the one hundred Congress members who had come to Selma to be leaders in persuading other lawmakers “to make it their mission to restore the law this year.”⁹¹

What the president was seeking was balance and prudence in approaching the issue of racial discrimination. Racism remained a problem that was going to exist for the foreseeable future. It demanded a meaningful response from his administration. But his mantra remained one of hope and progress rather than cynicism.

In the wake of Martin’s and Brown’s killing, an organizationally loose social movement, “Black Lives Matter” (BLM), spread rapidly throughout the country. Its purpose was to shine light on racial discrimination within the criminal justice system. Its adherents did not advocate violence, but they emphasized the need for a major restructuring of government and the economy and the need to police the police. Many of them were also confrontational and divisive in their tactics and language.⁹²

The president recognized BLM’s appeal to young Blacks throughout the country. On several occasions after Brown’s killing, he met with these young activists to make clear his appreciation of their concerns. But he seemed to lecture them about the counterproductive nature of urban violence and stated that “young Blacks that commit crimes” need to be thrown in jail for the safety of poor Black communities. One young woman at a town meeting with the president said she and others “left in tears” because of his failure to respond adequately to “Black grief and pain.”⁹³

In contrast to his response to BLM, Obama helped organize and then devoted considerable effort to a more tightly organized movement of young Blacks, “My Brother’s Keeper” (MBK). Like BLM, MBK sought to promote racial justice. In contrast to BLM, its efforts were not so much ones of protest and demands for structural change as they were to improve the educational futures of young Black and Latino boys from preschool through high school graduation. Among its initiatives were keeping track of the progress of these boys, reducing the number of minorities suspended or expelled from school, growing the number of African American boys taking gifted, honors, and Advanced Placement courses and exams, and offering more advanced math and science courses in their schools.⁹⁴

At a White House meeting in February 2014, in which students participating in MBK were present, the president identified his own experiences as a teenager with their own. Like many of them, he remarked, he was angry that he did not have a father in the house. “I made bad choices,” he continued. “I got high without always thinking about the harm that it could do. I didn’t always take school as seriously as I should have.” Fortunately, he had loving grandparents and a mother and “wonderful teachers and community leaders—and they’d push me to work hard and study hard and make the most of myself.”⁹⁵

Obama found the statistics on reading proficiency, suspensions and expulsions, and graduation rates of Black youths numbing. “We just assume, of course, it’s going to be like that. But these statistics should break our hearts.” That is why he decided to work with government officials, private philanthropies, and business leaders in expanding the scope of MBK. Announcing that the private foundations with whom he worked were prepared to add another $200 million to the $150 million they were already investing in the initiative, he described MBK as a “focused effort on boys and young men of color who are having a tough time” to make it through school and keep out of trouble with the law.⁹⁶

The changes he envisioned as a result of MBK were not going happen quickly, he remarked. “Parents will have to parent—and turn off the television, and help with homework.” But, over time, he expected to break the cycle of lost opportunity and broken lives. “And this country will be richer and stronger for it for generations to come,” he concluded. In his postpresidential memoir, A Promised Land, he even stated that one of his purposes in writing the book was “to tell a more personal story that might inspire young people considering a life of public service”: how the story of his life was one of “how it was only by hitching my wagon to something larger than myself that I was ultimately able to locate a community and purpose for my life.”⁹⁷

The president did not waver from this optimistic view, in which he offered hope rather than despair, even after the mass murder of nine African American parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Church (AME) in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015, at the hand of a twenty-one-year-old white supremist, Dylann Roof. Founded in 1817, making it the oldest Black church in South Carolina, the AME held a special place among Black South Carolinians and was often referred to as “Mother Emanuel.” One of its founders, Denmark Vesey, was a former slave who was executed for attempting to organize a slave revolt in the antebellum South. In 1962, Martin Luther King had preached at the church. Its pastor at the time of the murders, and one of its victims, was Clementa Pinckney, a state senator and the youngest African American ever elected to the South Carolina legislature ⁹⁸

Despite being Caucasian, Roof had been invited into the church and sat for an hour with the parishioners in a Bible study group before he opened fire on them. Although the white supremacist fled the scene after the shootings, he was quickly captured and readily confessed to the murders, saying that he wanted “to start a race war.” During the federal trial that followed, in which he was found guilty and given the death sentence, Roof refused to apologize for what he had done and did not dispute his sentence. His major concern seemed to be that he might be deemed innocent by insanity.⁹⁹

Like most Americans, Obama was shocked that a person who had been invited into the church and welcomed by its parishioners, could suddenly slaughter them for no other reasons than they were Black, and he wanted to start a race war. That Roof chose to commit the murders in a church of significant historical importance only added to the president’s state of despair. “Any death of this sort is a tragedy,” he remarked on learning of the shooting. “Any shooting involving multiple victims is a tragedy. There is something particularly heartbreaking about a death happening … in a place of worship.”¹⁰⁰

Obama decided to go to Charleston to eulogize the Reverend Pickney at his funeral service, which was held on June 26 before a crowd of 5,500 at the College of Charleston. Earlier that day the Supreme Court handed the administration a major victory in a verdict upholding the constitutional right of gay couples to marry. While preparing remarks hailing the verdict as a “victory for America,” the president and his senior writers were also tasked with preparing a eulogy expressing the nation’s grief at the death of Pickney and the other parishioners murdered at the AME church.¹⁰¹

In considering what he wanted to say at the service, Obama decided to build his remarks around the concept of “grace.” As he explained to the worshippers, he interpreted grace to mean God’s gift of forgiveness to sinners that had to be earned not just given. Even so, he emphasized forgiveness in his eulogy, even for a white supremist murderer. He was inspired by the remarks of family members of the slain victims, who said he should be punished but forgave him, nevertheless, for the killings. Instead of using the shootings in Charleston to launch an attack against all white Americans and view the future in racial terms, they spoke in nonracial terms of forgiveness.¹⁰²

As he had done in Selma and during the year since the fatal shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, he acknowledged in his eulogy that much work still needed to be done to heal the wounds of slavery. One step would be to remove from the grounds of the state capitol the Confederate flag that had become the symbol of antebellum slavery. Removing the flag, he remarked, “would be an expression of the amazing changes that have transformed this state and this country for the better… . By taking down the flag, we express God’s grace.”¹⁰³

In words similar to those of Martin Luther King Jr., Obama described the nation’s history, from slavery through the Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth century and the civil rights acts of the twentieth century, in terms of a moral arc that was long, but always bending toward justice. He spoke of how history “can’t be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress. It must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.”¹⁰⁴

In one of the most remarkable parts of his eulogy, he paused for thirteen seconds as he neared the end of his eulogy, an unusually long pause even for skilled speakers, but a tactic commonly used by Black preachers and ministers to gain control of the moment. After the pause, he began singing the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Even when he and his staff were writing the eulogy, he told them he was planning to sing. But he took the preachers, ministers, and others on the stage behind him totally by surprise. As he continued to sing, their looks of uncertainty changed to broad grins, and they began to sing along with him. Others in the audience joined them, allowing the president to end his eulogy on a note of hope and promise.¹⁰⁵

Like the president’s remarks at Selma, his eulogy of Pinckney was widely considered one of the great speeches of his career. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times called the speech “remarkable” because he used his “gifts of language and empathy and searching intellect … to talk about the complexities of race and justice … reflecting [his] own long view of history.”¹⁰⁶

Obama’s eulogy of Clementa Pickney capped off one of the most momentous weeks of his second administration and, indeed, of his entire presidency. About the same time as his addresses, the Supreme Court handed the administration two other major victories, in addition to upholding the right of gay people to marry, by upholding a key provision of the ACA providing subsidies for low- and-middle-income Americans and by allowing minorities to continue using a civil rights era statute in housing discrimination lawsuits. Congress also passed legislation giving the president broad authority to negotiate new trade deals.¹⁰⁷

Reviewing the events of the past week, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post called it “the best week of Obama’s presidency,” remarking that it was “filled with developments, both practical and symbolic, that will reverberate well beyond not only this week or month but his entire presidency.” The conservative columnist, Peggy Noonan, added: “He’s 6.5 years into a rock ’em sock ’em presidency… . I think he just had one of the great weeks that a modern president could have… . You can tell some part of him has made a turn, and he is coming out of some doldrums.”¹⁰⁸

In fact, the entire year was one of the most successful of Obama’s presidency. During 2015 the president expanded DACA, began secret negotiations to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, signed a nuclear weapons agreement with Iran, helped establish and commit the United States to the TPP, negotiated the Paris Agreement on climate change, and responded in an uplifting way to a series of racial crises that rocked the nation. Throughout year, Obama remained optimistic about the future and stayed true to his beliefs in interdependency, diversity, and the establishment of a middle-class society.

Much of what Obama accomplished was done by executive action and over opposition from Republicans and even activists who had supported him in the 2008 and 2012 elections. This was especially true among environmentalists and younger African Americans, who felt he had not gone far enough in responding to their demands. As the president entered the final year of his administration, however, he felt emboldened by what he had achieved in 2015 and by his rating in the polls, which had risen above 50 percent for the first time in months. With the 2016 presidential election already underway, he also felt confident his successor would be a Democrat fully prepared to carry on his legacy.