Obama's "Week to Remember" in Perspective: Opportunities, Constraints, and the Legacy of a President

Guest post by Jesse Rhodes 

At first glance, President Obama has had a pretty remarkable week. On Wednesday, the Senate finally cleared a bill granting “fast-track” congressional approval of the president’s Trans-Pacific Partnership bill, achieving Obama’s objective of strengthening US economic ties with Asian nations. Thursday saw vindication by the Supreme Court of a crucial provision of the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare”, ensuring that millions of Americans would retain health coverage under the law. Then, on Friday the Court ruled that state gay marriage bans violated the Constitution, endorsing a cause that the president has come to claim as his own.

These developments have led news analysts and pundits to describe this as Obama’s “Week to Remember” and “Best Week in Washington.” Others have gone further, anointing Obama “one of the most consequential presidents in American history.”

In truth, however, Obama’s dramatic victories came on the heels of much more disturbing news.

Barely a week ago, nine African American churchgoers were murdered by a young white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina. Earlier this week, a leaked autopsy report revealed the likely cause of death – being thrown into the walls of a moving police van – of Freddie Gray, the victim of violence by Baltimore police. And just last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported that the United States was tied with Israel for having the worst economic inequality in the developed world.

These developments pointed to deep-seated problems – an epidemic of gun violence, the persistence of racial injustice, the apparently inexorable rise of economic inequality – that the president has been unable to solve, or even really address in a serious fashion, during his presidency.

How, then, should we understand Obama’s week, and more broadly his place in American history? Is Obama a “great president” who facilitated dramatic changes in American life? Or is he a “weak president” who failed to address the most serious challenges facing the nation?

Or are these the wrong questions? Is the focus on Obama missing the bigger picture?

If we look beyond the presidency – which, frankly, absorbs an excessive amount of attention from the media, pollsters, and citizens alike – we can see that Obama’s recent history of successes and failures has been shaped by a deeper logic of opportunities and constraints. Put simply, Obama has “won” in areas ripe for achievement, and “lost” where prospects for victory were never good to begin with.

Consider Friday’s Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. While the decision is a remarkable victory for supporters of gay marriage, the president included, the fact is that public opinion shifted dramatically and irreversibly in favor of marriage equality well before it was handed down, making change of the type heralded by the ruling all but inevitable. President Obama may have played a small role in helping move public opinion along, but the real credit goes to the tireless efforts of marriage equality activists, as well as broader cultural and generational shifts.

When it comes to the Affordable Care Act, Obama deserves an enormous amount of credit. There’s little doubt that the Act would not have become law but for Obama’s willingness to stake his presidency on its enactment. At the same time, though, Obama benefited tremendously from strong support from congressional Democrats, as well as from public backing for “doing something” about health care reform. Arguably, the Supreme Court’s vindication of the law reflects its deference to Congress’s authority – as well as its unwillingness to cross millions of Americans who depend on the law for health insurance – as respect for the president’s achievements.

In short, major victories associated with Obama’s presidency are due in significant part to broader forces over which he had limited control.

And what of Obama’s failures to address gun violence, racial injustice, and economic inequality? In each of these cases, the president faced sharply divided public opinion, staunch resistance from powerful interest groups, implacable opposition from congressional Republicans, or some combination of the three. While there’s a debate to be had over whether Obama could have done more in each of these areas, in America’s highly fragmented political system obstacles such as these are almost always insurmountable. In fact, a case can be made that Obama has talked more, and more honestly, about each of these matters than any president in recent memory.

In short, the debate over Obama’s legacy is, in many ways, missing the key point. During his presidency, Obama was granted circumstances that made some changes possible and effectively foreclosed others.  This is no way a criticism of the president. Indeed, Obama likely made the best of the conditions he was given.

Jesse Rhodes is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is the author of An Education in Politics: The Origins and Evolution of No Child Left Behind.