HE WAS OUR MAN IN WASHINGTON

A HISTORY OF THE OBAMA YEARS

by Owen Symes ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2021

A debut author’s history of President Barack Obama’s administration.

After graduating from Michigan’s conservative Hillsdale College with a history degree, Symes became increasingly dissatisfied with work in the private sector and experienced an ideological shift in his own “political awareness.” This book, written from an openly socialist perspective that rejects “the prevailing narrative of radical individualism” and free market economics, approaches Obama from the viewpoint of a budding historian committed to “critiquing power and holding it to account.” Along the way, he portrays the president as a corporate shill and as a leader of a fundamentally “undemocratic system” whose only progressive advances, Symes says, came due to leftist pressure. Even during his groundbreaking 2008 campaign, according to the author, Obama’s “rousing words” belied a neoliberal worldview, as the candidate frequently offered passionate defenses of individualism and free market capitalism. The author grants that Obama’s rhetorical recognition of Americans’ “everyday hardships” resonated with millions who were tired of Republican “prioritization of business over people,” but he asserts that only marginal differences existed between Obama’s and his predecessors’ approaches to the environment, foreign policy, the economy, and other issues. Symes does acknowledge that congressional Republicans presented impediments to even moderate reform, and he nods to the effects of a racist, far-right campaign that included the “Birther Conspiracy,” but he suggests that, ultimately, it was Obama himself who “abandoned any pretense to progressive change.” Overall, although the book acknowledges improvements in health insurance availability and progress on civil rights issues, its assessment of Obama’s record is generally highly critical, indeed.

Written topically rather than chronologically, this history of the Obama years effectively focuses on six key areas: foreign policy, the economy, health care, civil rights, climate change, and Indigenous relations/oil pipelines. On most of these, the book argues, the president effected little change. During the “Forever War” against terrorism, for instance, the author notes that Obama maintained an active, destabilizing U.S. presence in Afghanistan and the Middle East, accepted civilian casualties in drone strikes, and kept the prison at Guantanamo Bay open. The book is supported by an impressive network of endnotes, and it presents a well-researched argument. It doesn’t contain groundbreaking research or introduce readers to oral histories or archival materials that aren’t available elsewhere, but it’s still a solid policy assessment of the Obama presidency. Still, critical archival material is yet unavailable, and there remains an ever present philosophical question of whether one can make an adequate historical assessment less than a decade after Obama’s tenure. And although the argument is clear, its tendency toward digression sometimes results in a loss of focus. Extended discursions, including entire subsections, expound on the failures of free market capitalism or the origins of human-made climate change, for example, which provide historical analysis that’s far beyond the scope of the Obama administration. Additionally, some readers may grow tired of a narrative that wears its ideology on its sleeve and frequently uses sarcastic phrases, as in its description of Obama as the “leader of the Free World™.”

A thorough, if meandering, recollection and critique of a presidency.

Pub Date: May 1, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-78904-331-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Zero Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2021

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | UNITED STATES | U.S. GOVERNMENT | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL HISTORY