John Podhoretz
As Barack Obama’s second term begins with a private swearing-in ceremony today, we know one thing: If he leaves office as a well-regarded two-termer in 2017, he will have become the most important president since Ronald Reagan and the most important liberal president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
If the American electorate deems his eight years a success, the Obama presidency will have altered the ideological trajectory of the United States.
For decades now, since the Reagan era, the United States has been most accurately described as a center-right nation. That will not be the case if Obama does well over the next four years. By 2017, it will have moved several clicks starboard — for a generation at least. Due to Obama and his policies, the United States will have become a center-left nation.
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If, however, Obama crashes and burns during his second term — either because the public turns on his policies, as was the case with George W. Bush, or (impossible to believe) because of personal misconduct, as was the case with Bill Clinton — Obama will leave liberalism in the same state of crisis in which conservatism now finds itself.
Rather than enshrine it as the dominating force in American politics, he will have discredited left-liberalism.
So the stakes are pretty high. The reward for success will be vast. The cost of failure will be severe. And Obama has made sure we will be able to tell which is which. There will be no doubt.
He’s not Clinton, who saved his presidency by tacking to the right after losing in 1994. He’s not George W. Bush, who passed an education bill with Teddy Kennedy’s help and created a new entitlement program in 2003 (the Medicare prescription-drug benefit). Both presidents were loathed unreservedly by their ideological opposites, and yet both frequently tacked to the center on domestic politics.
By contrast, Obama was the first successful candidate for the presidency to call himself a “liberal” with no discomfort since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. And he meant it. His significant legislative accomplishments, all of which have tacked to the left, would have seemed like science-fictional dreams in 2005, when it appeared liberalism had been routed and conservatism had embedded itself permanently throughout the government.
Obama’s first term began with the passage of the largest domestic spending bill in US history, the trillion-dollar stimulus.
He moved on post-haste to the partial nationalization of two auto manufacturers, an unprecedented reach into the private marketplace made all the more audacious for its naked giveaways to the same auto workers union that played such a role in leading the companies to ruin.
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