Review by New York Times Review
IF EVERYTHING HAD gone according to plan, these would be valedictory days for President Obama. With the economy humming if not roaring and his approval ratings higher than they were through most of his time in office, Obama expected to take a victory lap, map out his memoir and hand the reins to a like-minded successor to build on his accomplishments. But everything did not go according to plan, and instead he finds himself bequeathing his record to Donald J. Trump, a man he disdains, who was elected in large part on a promise to take a sledgehammer to anything with Obama's name on it. Obama is left trying to explain the debacle, salvage what he can from the wreckage and make his case to history that his was still a transformative presidency. In his corner will be Jonathan Chait of New York magazine and one of the country's leading progressive voices, who has come to Obama's defense with "Audacity," a timely, trenchant and relentlessly argued book presenting the 44th president in terms that he himself would approve. Not only did Obama change America for the better, Chait writes, he also cemented a new policy infrastructure that will resist Trump's efforts to tear it down. To be sure, this was a book written largely before the November election with the evident expectation that Hillary Clinton would be preparing to move into the Oval Office, and it cannot help reading that way. After Trump shocked the world with his improbable Electoral College victory, Chait tweaked the text to address the upheaval in American politics. But he did not change his fundamental conclusion or buy into the notion that Clinton's defeat represented a harsh verdict on Obama. "She lost despite, not because of, her association with the popular sitting president," Chait writes. Republicans nurtured the opposite conclusion to justify a demolition of Obama's new foundation. "The myth of repudiation had a clear purpose: to make it appear both fair and inevitable that the conquering Republican government would destroy Obama's legacy." But, he adds, "the fatalistic conclusion that Trump can erase Obama's achievements is overstated - perhaps even completely false." Chait's point is that "good ideas advance in fits and stops" and that Obama's presidency "represented one of those great bursts" that will not simply be erased despite momentary setbacks. Whether that is the case remains to be seen. Certainly in facing the judgment of history, much of the record that Obama will point to is beyond any Republican ef-fort to reverse. He helped pull the country back from the brink of the economic abyss, saved the auto industry, ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and broke the ultimate racial barrier. Yet despite Chait's confidence in the durability of Obama's legacy, other elements of his agenda appear to be in jeopardy. Obama's health care program, efforts to ease immigration rules, crackdowns on emissions by coal-fired plants, regulations on Wall Street, labor rules intended to improve worker conditions and a free-trade pact with Asia all seem unlikely to survive, at least in the form he prefers. The fates of his nuclear agreement with Iran and his diplomatic opening to Cuba are at least in question, although Trump may ultimately find it harder than he thinks to unravel either. OTHER PRESIDENTS, of course, have been followed by successors of the other party who in the end sustained their signal accomplishments. Dwight Eisenhower did not undo Harry Truman's record, nor did John Kennedy undo Eisenhower's. Richard Nixon, given the chance, left Lyndon Johnson's Great Society largely in place. Even Obama preserved many of George W. Bush's achievements, including the vast bulk of his tax cuts, his Medicare expansion, his AIDS-fighting program in Africa and his homeland security architecture. Trump, on the other hand, is more mercurial, so it is harder to predict how far he will go to wipe out Obama's imprint on the country. He has sent conflicting signals since the election about his commitment to following through on certain campaign promises while Obama has quietly tried to nudge him away from a radical change. It could well be that Trump unintentionally helps his predecessor's case for history as a point of contrast - that whatever Obama's leadership flaws, his calm, no-drama performance will look better in hindsight to many Americans. At the same time, it raises the question that if Obama was so successful, why do so many Americans feel so dissatisfied and left behind? How could an America that twice chose Barack Obama decide to replace him with Donald Trump? Beyond noting Clinton's popular-vote margin, Chait, like others on the left, points to willful distortion by Republicans determined from the start to tear down Obama and cynical news media that were complicit in that strategy. But he also faults liberals who were too willing to flay a president they agreed with because he failed to achieve some impossible standard of progressive perfection. Indeed, Chait's book seems more like an argument with the left than with the right. "The yawning chasm between the scale of Obama's achievements and the mood of his supporters presents one of the mysteries of the era," he writes. "Its resolution also helps us understand how to judge the Obama presidency. What would a successful presidency even look like? Would Democrats recognize one if they saw it?" While Chait agrees that "Obama has not done the job perfectly," he echoes Michael Grunwald in "The New New Deal" by making the case that his programs will have long-lasting if often overlooked impact. Obama's fiscal stimulus package, for instance, was "a gigantic success," not only by helping stanch job losses but also by investing in the future in the form of renewable energy, transportation infrastructure and scientific research. Likewise, Obama's health care program covered 20 million more Americans while also producing an "economic miracle," Chait says, in slowing the rise of medical costs even though premiums for some continued to rise sharply. Obama's green energy revolution, he adds, has already brought down climate change emissions and "changed the economic calculus irreversibly." While Obama's foreign policy may not have transformed the world, Chait concludes, he made incremental progress and avoided catastrophic mistakes. For disenchanted Obama supporters, this appraisal may seem like a surprise. The Obama who leaves office has traveled a long way from the hope-and-change moment eight years ago. In his early days, he was likened to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy, even Ronald Reagan. When things turned dark, he was compared unfavorably with Johnson, Jimmy Carter, even George W. Bush. "The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline," Chait says. "Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president - either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president." Now he will be compared with his successor, and that is a comparison Chait thinks favors Obama. "Trump is the poisoned chalice of a failed ideology," he writes. "Obama, not Trump, is destined to supply the model for American governance in the decades to come." Chait's argument probably will not per-suade many on the right, who still see a president who expanded the size and reach of government at home while undercutting American authority abroad. But it may encourage those on the left and in the middle to come around again to a president they once believed in. For Obama, that may be enough for now. Deprived of the valediction he had sought in November, Obama may want to keep a copy of Chait's volume on the night stand in his new home in Washington's Kalorama neighborhood. It could be that Trump helps Obama's case for history by serving as a point of contrast. PETER BAKER, the chief White House correspondent for The Times, is the author of "Obama: The Call of History," to be published this spring.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
New York Magazine columnist Chait (The Big Con: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America) presents a concise but well-reasoned analysis of President Obama's record in office that could persuade open-minded readers that he succeeded in reshaping "the economy, health care, energy, finance, and education in quantifiable ways." Chapter by chapter, Chait presents Obama's policy objectives and his record in achieving them, sometimes by clever maneuvers that enabled him to advance goals such as reducing global warming without the support of an intractable Republican opposition, which often opposed policies it had previously supported. Bernie Sanders supporters who find Obama, and Hillary Clinton, too centrist, may be chastened by Chait's clever review of how previous Democratic presidents now held up as paragons of liberalism were viewed quite differently in their own time by those on the left. The timing of the book's publication will ultimately determine its impact, as a Trump presidency would represent a repudiation by the voters of almost all Obama has stood for, and thus undermine Chait's thesis that Obama was a transformational figure. Agent: Gail Ross, Gail Ross Literary Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
New York magazine writer Chait (The Big Con) is clear about his agenda for this book. Rather than a history of Barack Obama's presidency (2009-17) or another biography, this book presents an argument: while Obama had setbacks and made mistakes, he was successful in long-term American policy that he intended to enact when he took office. Chait's evidence comes from information available to the public. From these sources, the author shares Obama's successes in preventing further economic depression during the 2009 crisis. He also implemented the Clean Power Plan and got China on board with more environmentally friendly policies through negotiation. Last but not least, Obama got the Affordable Care Act passed. Chait not only focuses on the positive, he also acknowledges the president's blunders, such as his failure to enforce his "red line" in Syria. -VERDICT Overall, this strong account is accessible to general readers. [See Prepub Alert, 5/16/16.]-Jennifer M. Schlau, Elgin -Community Coll., IL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A cogent argument that President Barack Obama has mostly succeeded in implementing his agenda. As reflected in the book's title, New York political columnist Chait (The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, 2007), a former senior editor at the New Republic, claims that Obama established audacious goals and never lost sight of how to implement them despite the opposition of the Republican majority within the U.S. Congress and ongoing racism throughout American society. Without tipping his hand about his long game, Chait maintains, Obama decided to absorb short-term setbacks, believing he would win a second term to accomplish what could not be implemented during the first. The author does not pretend to offer a scorecard on every vital initiative presented during Obama's two terms; rather, Chait focuses on the presidents approaches to economic policy, which was designed to alleviate the recession inherited from the Republicans; health care reform and the Affordable Care Act; combating environmental degradation; and navigating the wars being waged around the globe. Within each chapter, the author questions the perceptions of presidential success versus failure,nbsp;not only among Obama's virulent detractors, but also among his leftist supporters. Chait attempts to unravel what he views as the mystery of how so many commentators put forth what became the conventional wisdom that Obama failed to achieve meaningful change during his presidencydespite the evidence to the contrary. The author predicts that after Obama leaves the presidency, this wrongheaded perception will dissipate. He also moves his argument beyond policy proposals to suggest that Obama's admirable character and steely mental makeup contributed significantly to policy successes. Chait offers a well-organized, clearly written case that will be valuable to future historians in their assessments. The question is whether readers with different opinions about Obama's performance will alter those opinions. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
