[driveway]

A lengthy article from Politico about the policy achievements of the Obama presidency. Spoiler alert: Nobama won't like this article, it's rather glowing of Obama's policy accomplishments, if skeptical of his political ones.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...nts-213487?o=0

Extensive quotes behind the spoiler:

Spoiler!

Over the past seven years, Americans have heard an awful lot about Barack Obama and his presidency, but the actual substance of his domestic policies and their impact on the country remain poorly understood.
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Even Republicans like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who hope to succeed Obama and undo his achievements, have been complaining on the campaign trail that he’s accomplished most of his agenda.
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It’s remarkable how often Obama has gotten what he wanted, in many cases policies that Democrats (and sometimes moderate Republicans) have wanted for decades, and how often those policies have slipped under the radar.
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The results are pretty straightforward. The economy was bleeding 800,000 jobs a month when Obama took office; it has now enjoyed a record 69 straight months of private-sector job growth, though economists disagree about how much credit Obama deserves for the recovery, and in any case wage growth has been tepid. The deficit has shrunk by nearly $1 trillion, and Medicare’s long-term solvency has been extended by 13 years. The resuscitated auto industry produced 11 million vehicles in 2014. Federal contractors can no longer discriminate against gays, women can now serve in combat and the rich are paying higher taxes. A new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is policing unscrupulous mortgage brokers, payday lenders and other rip-off artists, and the financial system has much less risky leverage.
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Before Obama, Americans were using more energy every year; now we use less energy overall, and more of that energy is clean. Oil imports are down 60 percent from 2008 levels, more than a third of America’s coal plants are shutting down and sales of LED bulbs have increased 50-fold. Health care inflation and the uninsured rate have fallen to their lowest levels in half a century, and doctors now use iPads instead of clipboards. Student borrowers can now ratchet down their monthly payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income and get their loans forgiven after 20 years, rules that are gradually and almost silently easing the student debt crisis.
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a $25 billion incentive program in the stimulus for health information technology has helped drag a pen-and-paper medical system into the digital age, with adoption soaring from about 10 percent of hospitals and 20 percent of doctors in 2008 to about 80 percent of hospitals and 80 percent of doctors today.
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The stimulus also offered an introduction to Obama-ism. Purity was not a priority. He needed three GOP senators to avoid a filibuster, so he caved to their demands, including an $800 billion cap and the removal of a $10 billion initiative to renovate America’s schools.
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Obama’s new consumer bureau may be the most influential new regulatory agency since the EPA, already collecting more than $10 billion in fines from financial players that used to enjoy relative impunity.
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But behind the headlines about access, Obamacare had another set of even more transformative goals for the system. ... America’s long-term fiscal problems were almost entirely health care problems ... The obstacle to cost control was that no one was sure how to do it. There were dozens of ideas floating around ... Obama insisted on including almost all of them. Less than one-fourth of the bill was devoted to access. The rest was stuffed with almost every cost-control idea in circulation.
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And so far, the cost curve is bending even faster than White House officials had dreamed. Health care is still getting more expensive, but since 2010, the growth rate has slowed so drastically that the Congressional Budget Office has slashed its projection for government health spending in 2020 by $175 billion.
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GOP critics have hammered away at Obama’s false promise that all Americans who liked their plans would be able to keep them, at an Obamacare adviser who suggested voters were stupid, at the fiasco with its website, at the unpopular “individual mandate,” at problems with exchanges and co-ops and other new planks of reform. Patients have complained about high deductibles and heightened uncertainty; many providers are unhappy about reduced reimbursements; a frenzy of mergers is reshaping the entire industry. ... Meanwhile, much of the left is still upset that Obama didn’t push for the “public option,” a government-run insurer that could have helped cut costs by competing with the private sector but that didn’t have 60 votes in the Senate.
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Obama has certainly had memorable rhetorical moments: his rendition of “Amazing Grace” in Charleston, his meditation on civil rights in Selma, even his observation that Trayvon Martin could have been his son. ... But his minimum-wage push stalled in Congress, as did his public pushes for universal pre-K, free community college and paid parental leave. Obama made some of his most eloquent speeches after the massacres in Tucson, Newtown and Charleston, but the gun control bills he pushed went nowhere.
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The outside game has been vastly overrated in the Obama era. For all the change he’s driven, there hasn’t been much in the hearts-and-minds arena. Instead, Obama has relied on the inside game. Since 2011, that’s meant executive orders, regulations and other unilateral actions.
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He couldn’t pass a law requiring employers to provide paid sick leave, but he did issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to do it. ... He protected the world’s largest marine reserve in the Pacific Ocean and 19 other national monuments without any input from Congress. ... Now his administration is finalizing a “fiduciary rule” that will require financial advisers to serve the best interest of their clients.
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Obama’s most aggressive uses of Washington’s levers of power have involved energy ... a slew of lesser-known restrictions on soot, mercury, sulfur dioxide, smog and other coal-fired pollutants have already helped force nearly one-third of America’s coal plant capacity into retirement, getting the sector more than halfway to its carbon goal before the carbon rule was even announced. ... the most ambitious plank of the Climate Action Plan, accounting for half of its emissions goals, has been practically invisible. It’s an energy efficiency effort known as “appliance and equipment standards.” It’s on track to slash 3 billion tons of emissions by 2030; that’s the equivalent of taking every car off America’s roads for two years, or shutting down every power plant for a year and a half
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Obama’s new standards for industrial motors and fluorescent lighting have each produced record electricity savings—and the upcoming rule for commercial air conditioners will surpass them by far.
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“They’re hell-bent to ram through as many rules as they can, as fast as they can, at the highest levels they think they can justify to a judge,” says Stephen Yurek, president of the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute.
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There’s been a special focus on greening the Pentagon ... the Air Force has already cut its carbon footprint 21 percent since 2008, through changes like LED-lit runways and fuel-efficiency upgrades for a fleet of jets larger than all U.S. airlines’ combined.
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But any evaluation of Obama’s policy legacy has to grapple with the fact that it’s been a political debacle for most Democrats who aren’t named Obama. The GOP now has an iron grip on the House and a solid majority in the Senate; compared with 2009, there are 10 additional Republican governors and some 900 additional Republican state legislators.
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The resurgent Republicans made spending cuts their top priority, threatening to shut down the government or force it into a catastrophic default if Obama didn’t agree to a retrenchment. ... That fiscal squeeze, along with Obama’s tax hikes and the economic recovery, has helped reduce deficits from an unsustainable 10 percent of GDP to a relatively stable 3 percent. But it also threatens the future of Obama’s progressive project.
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2016 will be in part a referendum on the Obama era, even if the Democratic nominee is named Clinton, even in the increasingly unlikely event the GOP nominee is named Bush. ... When I put this to Obama’s political aides, they acknowledge everything isn’t amazing, especially middle-class wage growth ... Obama’s Change We Can Believe In is clearly less resonant today than it was as an alternative to Bush in 2008.
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while his team was focused on policy, nobody in the White House thought they wouldn’t have to sell it. And they tried to.
It just didn’t sell. The question is why, a question I can’t answer, but a question that matters for 2016.
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It may be that, just as Americans wanted to Do Less abroad after Bush, they’ll look for someone who will promise to Do Less at home after Obama.
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if Democrats do manage to hold the White House, Obama’s domestic legacy as a Do More guy will be safe. The prevailing media narrative of his era has been all about Washington paralysis, but the prevailing historical narrative is much likelier to focus on social and economic change, for better or for worse. For those of us who follow policy and politics in real time, that gap between perception and reality in the Obama era ought to be a BFD.