2014년 12월 20일 토요일
[The Huffington Post] Obama Ends 2014 With Swagger And A Boatload Of Unanswered Questions
Obama Ends 2014 With Swagger And A Boatload Of Unanswered Questions
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WASHINGTON -- A month and a half ago, President Barack Obama went to the East Room of the White House to take his medicine. His party was fresh off a horrible midterm election loss. His name was toxic. One leading Democratic Senate candidate wouldn't even say whether she had voted for him in 2012. His failure to influence events globally, and the inability to pass major legislation domestically, had all contributed to a prevailing sense that the White House had lost its way.
The press conference was notable because Obama struck a defiant tone, pledging to plow forward on his planned executive actions even if Republicans had run against them. He seemed almost optimistic about the prospect of working with a Republican-run Senate and House. Obama was, it appeared, in denial.
But now, as he gets set to head to Hawaii for his annual Christmas vacation, it's beginning to seem like Obama knew more than the reporters who cover him. He achieved some legacy-defining victories during the lame-duck session. And in his year-end press conference on Friday, he showed a bit of swagger that seemed implausible in mid-November.
"Pick any metric that you want," he said. "America’s resurgence is real. We’re better off."
A good deal of Obama's enthusiasm is owed to a political landscape that, at least in the interim, worked well in his favor. Over the summer, he was shackled by calculations that he was a burden to the party, and he was virtually absent from the campaign trail. A series of crises seemed to overwhelm his presidency: from the claims backlog at the VA and the influx of young undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border to the rise of the Islamic State and the Ebola epidemic. November's election did not represent a Republican wave so much as an indictment of a sluggish Democratic agenda.
But elections come to a close, and crises eventually get resolved. With that comes the chance to breathe, if not claim triumph.
“We’ve gone through difficult times,” Obama said during his Friday press conference. “But through persistent effort and faith in the American people, things get better. The economy's gotten better. Our ability to generate clean energy's gotten better. We know more about how to educate our kids. We solved problems.”
By its own metrics, the administration had a majorly successful lame-duck session. Days after the post-election press conference, The Huffington Post sat down with a senior White House official to discuss what a successful end of the year would look like. The official named three priorities: passing funding to fight Ebola, getting the government funded "without drama," and confirming pending judicial nominees.
All those things, and more, have happened. The president issued an executive action on immigration, in the process granting legal protections to an estimated 5 million people. He struck a climate change deal with China, bringing the world's biggest polluter and one of its fiercest resisters of reform into the environmental protection movement. He has continued to oversee steady job growth and, for the first time, some signs that wage increases will be coming along with it. He relaxed the United States' policy toward Cuba and opened up relations with the country. And his health care law enabled Americans to successfully enroll in insurance for the second year in a row, a process that occurred almost entirely under the radar.
The question now is whether this is an interim period of achievement or if it will set the stage for more to come.
“I’m energized. I’m excited about the prospects for the next couple years,” Obama said Friday. “A new future is ready to be written. We’ve set the stage for this American moment.”
But the harsh reality, as the White House knows, is that it extending the lame-duck successes into a new Congress will be virtually impossible. In a nightmare scenario for the administration, much of what the president did will begin to unravel. A showdown looms in a matter of months over funding the Department of Homeland Security. Bills will likely be passed undoing some of Obama's environmental wins. His executive action on immigration and his new policy toward Cuba can be rolled back under the next president. The Supreme Court will issue a ruling that could fundamentally uproot his health care law.
And so naturally, the president seemed to get a bit defensive toward the end of Friday's press conference.
“I’m confident that I’ll be able to uphold vetoes,” he said. “If executive actions on areas like minimum wage or equal pay or having a more sensible immigration system are important to Republicans, if they care about those issues and these are bothering them, there is a very simple solution: pass bills and work with me to make sure I’m willing to sign those bills.”
More than any other politician, Obama knows that the current narrative surrounding his presidency is either inflated or wrong -- and certainly fleeting.
2014년 11월 26일 수요일
[International Business Times] Why Is Chuck Hagel Resigning? 5 Reasons Defense Chief Is Leaving Obama Administration
President Barack Obama praised Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's long career of public service Monday even as he showed him the door. Obama did not explain during a press conference why Hagel, a Republican who has served as the nation's defense chief since early last year, submitted his resignation, but that didn't stop political observers from drawing their own conclusions. Below are five reasons why Hagel, 68, was likely forced out of the Obama administration, according to media reports and speculation.
1. Hagel didn't understand the Middle East. Hagel couldn't get the Taliban in Afghanistan to accept a peace deal and his efforts to stop a military coup in Egypt also failed, according to Vox. He also didn't do enough to block the Islamic State militant group from gaining territory in Syria and Iraq.
2. Hagel never built a good relationship with the Obama administration. Hagel, the lone Republican on Obama's national security team, was never liked by the Pentagon or the White House, largely because he wasn't seen as an effective communicator or manager. The New York Times wrote: "Hagel has often had problems articulating his thoughts — or administration policy — in an effective manner." He reportedly didn't like to speak during Cabinet meetings, preferring to run things by Obama when they were alone. He was popular with troops, however, as the first enlisted combat military veteran to become secretary of defense.
3. Obama needed a scapegoat amid a series of foreign policy disasters. The growing popularity of the Islamic State among militant groups, Russia's assaults on Ukraine and boiling tensions across the Middle East have all made the White House's foreign policy look especially weak in recent months. By getting rid of Hagel, the Obama administration could be looking for a fresh slate, media reports suggested. "It is unrealistic to expect the president to fire himself, so others have to play that sacrificial role," Foreign Policy wrote.
4. Hagel was critical of the administration. As a Republican, Hagel was always an outsider, but he didn't help endear himself to anyone by speaking out publicly against the White House from time to time. More recently, he sent a letter to National Security Adviser Susan Rice that said Obama needed to explain his approach to Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has been helped by Obama's airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria. The letter angered White House officials, according to the Associated Press. Hagel also took a stronger stance against the Islamic State initially than the White House did,saying the militants also known as ISIS represented an “imminent threat to everything we have."
5. He didn't get along with Republicans in Congress. Hagel not only rubbed the Obama administration the wrong way, he also never won over the lawmakers who oversee military spending. Republicans lawmakers simply considered him "a water-carrier for the administration," according to theGuardian. “On paper, Hagel looked perfect for the job -- a war hero, a former senator, a successful entrepreneur,” Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia, told Bloomberg. “But his confirmation hearings did not go well, and his temperament proved ill-suited to such a politically sensitive job.”
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