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Abraham Lincoln, Afghanistan War, Health care, Historical Rankings of Presidents, Immigration Reform, Iran Deal, Iraq War, LGBT Rights, Nuclear Iran, Obamacare, President Barack Obama, President George W. Bush, Presidential History, U.S. History, US Domestic Policy, US Economic Policy, US Foreign Policy, War on Terror

Ranking the Greatness of Barack Obama

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I disagree with President Obama on many issues, from the Trans Pacific Partnership and the overreach of the NSA and CIA to his vigorous prosecution of whistle blowers. I have no idea why our military is still in Afghanistan and keeps trying to get involved in a centuries-old civil war in the Muslim world between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and at the beginning of his Administration I thought the President was too quick to attempt to find bipartisan agreement between the Democratic and Republican Parties when the Republicans in congress had declared that their top priority was to guarantee that Barack Obama would be a one-term president, and set about trying to deny him at every turn out of fear that any sort of victory for the Obama would make him more popular and more likely to be re-elected in 2012. He made a big mistake and set a dangerous precedent by allowing the Grand Old Party to effectively hold the full faith and credit of the USA hostage by threatening to default on our national debt; while President Obama has learned from his mistake – when the GOP tried the same tactics in 2013, he called their bluff, and, by daring the Republican Party to shoot their hostage, he forced the Party’s eventual capitulation of the Republicans in congress – his initial mistake has left us with the Sequester that has resulted in lots of pain for the Americans who already have the least. But in spite of all my disagreements with the President, I think it is becoming more apparent by the day that we’re looking at one of the ten greatest presidents in the history of the United States, and the best in at least half a century.

I love to rank things, and as someone who is sort of an amateur historian, one of the many things I try to quantify is the greatness of the 43 men who have served as POTUS. The way I try to gauge our Commanders-in-Chief is to look at the condition of the USA when the president enters office and compare it to the situation on the day the president leaves office, and I primarily use the foreign, economic, and domestic states of affairs to judge the president’s success or failure. It is much harder to do this sort of thing today than it was even in the recent past, because politics has become so divisive that statistics that prove one’s argument are willingly ignored by one who feels differently. That makes it much easier to rank a historical president like Abraham Lincoln (my pick for best ever, by the way) because almost no one is arguing the basic facts that stand in his favor in the categories I mentioned before: only one month into his Administration, there were 11 states in open rebellion against the federal government, yet when he was assassinated one month into his second-term, the rebellion was over, Reconstruction had begun, slavery (its primary cause) had been extinguished first with his Emancipation Proclamation and then for good by Constitutional Amendment. Meanwhile the US economy had increased exponentially to deal with the war, most northern cities/population centers saw their economies and populations skyrocket and the US had decisively shown itself to be one of the world’s Great Powers. The contrast of the state of the United States when Lincoln took office and when he died is proof of how incredible he was.

If we use those same standards and compare the state of American foreign, economic, and domestic affairs on January 20th, 2009, the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, and compare it to today, with a year and a half still to go, the result is stunning. When President Obama succeeded President George W. Bush, the USA and the world were mired in the Great Recession (the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression); the US was stuck in the two longest wars in American history with one of them, the Iraq War, being a completely unnecessary war based on a lie; Osama bin Laden – the mastermind of the terror attacks of 9/11/2001 that had in many ways to come to define Bush’s Presidency –  was still commanding Al Qaeda, having evaded Bush for 7 ½ years;  we had engaged in a torture program under Bush that, exemplified by the Abu Ghraib scandal and the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, badly tarnished America’s global reputation; Bush had driven up a huge deficits by slashing taxes for the rich in spite of the fact that when he succeeded President Bill Clinton in 2001 the government was actually running a surplus; the integrity and legitimacy of our democracy was greatly threatened by the controversial presidential election of 2000; and many things, from the ineptitude of the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina to its inability to stop or slow down the recession had discredited government as a whole in the eyes of many Americans.

A lot of those issues are simply due to the fact that George W. Bush was one of the worst presidents of all-time (I have him 3rd worst, and at the bottom for all two-term presidents), but the wreckage W. left behind makes it easier to view the successful Administration of his successor. In January 2009 the unemployment rate was at 7.8 and it quickly grew to 10 % before the 2009 Stimulus fully kicked in, and today it sits at 5.3 %. When President Obama took office we still had 150,000 American troops fighting the unnecessary Iraq War, and when the last US troops left the nation in 2011, over 4,000 Americans had died fighting in that war with tens of thousands more wounded either physically or emotionally, and that does not even touch on the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed or wounded or the millions who lost their homes. And it was President Obama who gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, doing in under 2 ½ years what Bush could not do in the 7 ½ years he was in office after 9/11. President Obama’s bailout of the American automotive industry was also a huge success, with GM and Chrysler paying back their loans way ahead of expectations. There has been a great leap forward in LGBT rights, which is all the more impressive when one remembers that part of the reason Bush won the 2004 election over John Kerry was by campaigning against gay marriage, with many states across the nation putting gay marriage bans on the ballot that same day, and seeing those bans pass with huge margins. And yet today, only 11-years after that contentious 2004 election, gay marriage is now legal in all 50-states and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed, allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military for the first time.

One of the most amazing features of his Presidency has been that Barack Obama accomplished all the things I mentioned before with a dedicated Republican opposition to him that is one of the most sustained and vehement in US history. The Republicans have even abandoned their own bills when those bills were supported by President Obama, and they have ground Congress to a halt, leaving it incapable of doing almost anything. None of this has been an accident, as it has been the part of an almost nihilistic effort to deprive Obama of anything that might have been perceived as a victory for him, and while this was just as despicable early in Obama’s Administration as it is today, at least then the GOP was doing it as part of a plan to keep Obama from being re-elected in 2012. However, even though President Obama won big in his 2012 re-election bid, the Republican resistance has not weakened at all. Even when the President has gotten strong bi-partisan support for a bill, as he received with is proposal for comprehensive immigration reform (it received 67 votes in Congress), it failed in the House because Speaker John Boehner refused to bring the bill up for a vote in spite of the fact that the vocal support of many Republicans in the House seemed to show that the bill would pass and become law. Congress also killed multiple proposals from the Obama Administration to raise the national minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour, and left without the help of Congress, President Obama took Executive Action on both issues to try to save as many immigrants from deportation as possible, while raising the minimum wage for all government employees and contractors to $10.10.

Perhaps the most lasting achievement of President Obama will be the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, more commonly known as ‘Obamacare,’ a name Republicans had coined in an effort to kill health care reform, just as they had successfully been able to do in 1993-94 when they labeled the Clinton Administration’s proposal ‘Hillarycare,’ and made it so unpopular, it fell apart before it even got a vote. However this time the GOP was unable to kill Obamacare (though it is not for lack of trying), and it is now the law of the land, expanding health care coverage to millions of Americans and ending pre-existing conditions. While many liberals (including myself) were upset that Obama tried to compromise with Republicans by not aiming for single-payer health care or at least propose a public insurance option, especially because his alterations to the plan – which actually made the plan almost identical to the health care reforms the Republican Party had championed in the fight against ‘Hillarycare’ as being the free market solution to universal health care – refused to get a single Republican vote in either House of Congress anyway. The Republicans in Congress desperately tried to kill Obamacare, but were unable to do so and so brought the law to the Supreme Court, which in a surprise 5-4 ruling (a surprise because the Court is currently divided 5-4 in favor of conservative, Republican-appointed justices) declared that the law was constitutional, and they made it a huge focus of the 2012 presidential election, but President Obama won re-election by 5 million votes over Republican nominee and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. And while Healthcare.gov got off to a rocky start and many states with Republican legislatures and governors have actively worked to sabotage the law at the expense of their own people, so far the law has been a huge success, has expanded health care to people who have never before been able to afford it, and has led to the smallest rise in health care costs in decades. However, the obvious success of the law has not led to any more Republican-controlled states expanding Medicaid to make sure that some of their poorest citizens can still get health care, purposefully hurting many of their own citizens, and Republicans tried again to kill the law at the Supreme Court based on a ludicrous technicality, but were again rebuffed, this time 6-3. All of it means that Obamacare is here to stay, and it is likely to be the crowning achievement of the Obama Presidency.

However, it is President Obama’s recent impact on the world stage that led me to write this article, and while his recent climate change agreement with China, and his starting to normalize relations with Cuba – something that a majority of Americans have been in favor since at least the end of the Cold War in 1991 – have been very impressive, the major story has been the initial agreement that his Administration has reached with Iran concerning its nuclear program. There is a lot to the tentative Iran deal, and it still has to make it through congress and past the hardliners in Iran, if the agreement works out, it will cement Obama’s legacy as the greatest president of at least the last half century and one of the best ever. The plain logic of the deal with Iran is hard to ignore, as it acknowledges that American, Israeli, and other leading nation state’s regimes are in nearly entire agreement that Iran possessing nuclear weapons is a threat that we can’t really live with. Once it is accepted as a truth that we will not allow Iran to attain nuclear weapons, the question then is how we stop that from happening, and the only realistic options are diplomacy (such as the deal the Obama Administration just worked out) or war. It is that simple, and the fact of the matter is that it has been true at least since the Bush Administration that we cannot just wipe out Iran’s nuclear capability in one blow, which means they would still retain the knowledge of how to build a bomb and have enough centrifuges and enough enriched uranium to build a bomb. We would then have the choice of either using our own nuclear weapons against Iran OR of waging a conventional war against the country, which would entail fighting a nation with around 80 million people who live in a nation the size of Alaska – which is contrasted to an Iraq we invaded in 2003 that had around 25 million people in a nation the size of California, and that war did NOT go well. There is almost no American support for a war with such a huge nation, as it would entail years and would result in the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands and maybe even more in a war we would largely be fighting for the benefit of our ally Israel, a nation which has under 7 million people, meaning that if we do not choose to try to wipe the nation of the face of the earth with an instant nuclear strike, we would be doing most of the fighting and the dying in that war. I find it hard to imagine that the American people, upon learning the true size, scope, and difficulty of a war with Iran, would not swiftly turn on both the war and on Israel itself, for how many lives are we willing to sacrifice to support such a small nation? Anyone who peddles a potential third option outside of diplomacy or war is being dishonest, and it is easy to see how serious the opposition to this agreement is by seeing what the opponents are selling; most of them understand that there is no support for a huge war against Iran, so they are instead selling some nebulous ‘better deal,’ without any specifics except that if not for the ‘weak’ Obama Administration, we could get Iran to give up ALL of its nuclear program instead of dismantling almost all of it, agreeing to constant inspections, and making it so that the soonest they can produce a bomb is 10-15 years from now. The options are peace or war and there is no support for war, which means that the Obama Administration just got the best deal we could get, and if it makes it through Congress, it really will be a crowning historical achievement for Barack Obama.

There is still a year and a half to go in President Obama’s term, and anything can happen in that time, but he is on the cusp of locking up the position as the greatest US president of the last half-century, and with all that time left, he has a real chance to even pass Eisenhower and become the best President since Truman. With how divisive our politics are today, I know that there are many conservatives who earnestly believe that Barack Obama has been a horrible president (and some think he is actively working to hurt America, which is ridiculous, but no less of a real belief for being so) and who believe that Ronald Reagan is the single greatest president in American history, but I am not really writing this for them, as they mostly had their minds made up on the Obama Presidency before he even took office. I am not writing it for the person who asked me (with absolute sincerity) if I was ‘ready to admit’ that Obama was the ‘worst president since Jimmy Carter,’ and potentially the worst ever, less than six months into his first term in 2009. Instead, I am writing this for those who did not have their mind made up already, and who can appreciate the historical significance of a national health care plan, a saved economy, the expansion of LGBT rights, and the potential for a real and lasting peace. I am writing this for those who still have faith that government can have a positive role in making peoples’ lives better, and can see that President Obama has done a lot to restore that faith, which is a hell of an achievement when one remembers how little trust in our public institutions was left after a Bush Administration that lied us into a seemingly endless war, could do nothing to help the people devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and left amidst the greatest world-wide recession since the Great Depression. Neither government, nor a president, can do everything, and both governments and presidents can do bad things, but once in a while, when the right person comes along, he or she can restore your faith and make you remember why you had that faith to begin with. Barack Obama has done that, and his legacy will only grow because of it. He truly is one of the greatest of all-time.

Acting, Boardwalk Empire, Character Study, Directing, Drama, HBO, Morality Tale, The Sopranos, TV, TV Writing, World War I

An Empire Washed Away

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I loved HBO’s Boardwalk Empire from the first minute. I thought it was beautifully shot, well written, and had one of the greatest casts from top to bottom of any show I’d ever seen (I don’t know if it’s possible to top a cast led by Steve Buscemi, Kelly MacDonald, Michael Pitt, Shea Wigham, Jack Houston, Michael K. Williams, Gretchen Mol, Michael Shannon, Stephen Graham, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Dabney Coleman among others). I loved how the show could be daring, how no fictional character seemed safe, and how the show would start slowly as each season introduced new characters, themes, and plots, only to pick up at about the midway point and then sprint toward the season finale with each episode being more tense and explosive than the last. I loved that each season wound down with the new revelations and character developments making a second viewing of each episode not only rewarding but almost necessary. And yet for all of that, Boardwalk Empire’s conclusion left me with a bitter taste in my mouth far beyond what I felt for other dramas with divisive finales like The Sopranos, Lost, and (to a lesser degree) the Wire.

Coming into this final season I was upset with the time jump to 1931 and about only getting 8-episodes to say goodbye to the show (which had previously had 12 episodes a season, meaning this year was only 2/3rds of a typical BE season). As the final campaign began there was still a lot to love even if in many cases some of the good things seemed either rushed or too late. For example, the flashbacks showing Nucky Thompson’s rise were very interesting and added a lot of color to certain scenes and character relationships this season, but the flashbacks would have been far better if the scenes had come earlier in the show’s run because they gave us a much deeper understanding of who Nucky was, what drove him to do the things that he did, and how he became the mysterious man we had watched for five-years. It seemed a little late in the game to attempt to add depth to a character who, for most of the show’s run was (regardless of the great acting job by Steve Buscemi) probably the weakest leading man of all the great antihero-centric dramas that sprung up after the Sopranos. Had they come earlier in the show’s run, the flashbacks would have kept Nucky at the forefront of the show, but instead for four-seasons we had watched Nucky fade into the background of his own show and disappear behind more colorful and exciting characters like Jimmy, Arnold Rothstein, Al Capone, Margaret, Chalky White, and – perhaps the show’s most memorable original character – Richard Harrow. My unhappiness with the finale ties to Richard as well as the fact that a show that had done a great job at staying unpredictable began telegraphing its punches so blatantly in the final season.

It was obvious to me from the first second we met ‘Joe Harper,’ that the young would-be protégé hanging around Nucky was likely to be Tommy Darmody, but it seemed too sloppy to me for a show that had always been so precise because the ages didn’t seem to line up (based on my knowledge of history, Tommy would have been 14 at the oldest in 1931). However, that was only a small part of what concerned me with Tommy’s appearance and his pursuit of vengeance against Nucky for what Nucky had done to the Darmody family. Tommy’s knowledge that Nucky had murdered his father and betrayed his grandmother stretched credulity to the breaking point, but another thing that has been gnawing at me ever since we saw Tommy kill Nucky (and get arrested directly after): Richard Harrow’s entire storyline throughout seasons 3 and 4 is now meaningless.

Richard Harrow is probably the most beloved character to come out of Boardwalk Empire. A sniper in the US Army who had half his face destroyed by a bullet during World War I and wore a poorly painted tin mask to cover up his wounds, Richard returned home from the Great War so broken both physically and emotionally that he had lost his moral compass. Richard became close to fellow-soldier Jimmy because good-looking Jimmy – with his toddler son Tommy and pretty young wife Angela – was if anything even more damaged internally than Richard was. After Jimmy’s death at the end of season 2, it seemed that Richard’s role as a character on the show had died too, but instead he became a richer character as he tried to take Jimmy’s advice and ‘come back’ from the horrors he had witnessed, perpetrated, and endured in WWI and beyond. The prime mission in Richard’s life became taking care of the orphaned Tommy and trying to give him a better life, something that he saw would be impossible if Tommy was forced to stay under the care of his manipulative and mentally ill grandmother Gillian. Gillian chose to raise Tommy in a brothel she ran, and in order to free Tommy from that brothel and from Gillian, Richard mounted an assault on the gangsters who had taken over Gillian’s mansion in the season 3 finale and rescued Tommy.

However we found out in season 4 that Tommy was not totally free from his grandmother’s reach. Richard had brought him to stay with his girlfriend and later wife Julia Sagorsky but Gillian was pressing her own claim on the boy and in order to give Tommy a truly clean start, Richard was forced to take on one more mission for Nucky. Richard sent Tommy and Julia to Richard’s sister’s house in Wisconsin, but he struggled with having to kill again and he made a mistake, killed an innocent person, and was himself mortally wounded in turn. He died dreaming of the better life he had built for Tommy in Wisconsin. But the show ended with Tommy coming back and murdering Nucky in front of federal agents, meaning he is going to be arrested for premeditated murder and either jailed for life or even executed. Two seasons of Richard risking everything and eventually losing his life to save Tommy had been thrown away in order to have a neat symmetrical end where Tommy killed Nucky by shooting him in precisely the same place under the left eye where Nucky shot his father.

And now we come to the biggest problem with Tommy’s actions against Nucky: how did Tommy even know Nucky did anything to deserve such vengeance? Not only did Gillian almost certainly never tell Tommy that Nucky had murdered Jimmy, it would have been incriminating because her story to the world was that Jimmy had overdosed on heroin in the bathtub of her mansion. Richard almost certainly never told Tommy about what happened to Jimmy, and those who raised Tommy (Julia, her father, and Richard’s sister and brother-in-law) had no knowledge of Jimmy and almost none regarding Gillian and Nucky. Gillian lost custody of Tommy when he was somewhere around 6 or 7-years-old, meaning that the complexity of Nucky’s betraying the 12-year-old Gillian and giving her to the Commodore (whom Nucky knew to be a pedophile) would be lost on Tommy. And that brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves in any kind of fiction: a character being punished for something that we in the audience know that he or she did but that the other characters in the show (or book, movie, play, or whatever) would absolutely have no knowledge of.

It can be tempting for any writer to turn their story into a kind of morality tale – Nucky did bad things, and therefore he was punished for them; it is a common trope in fiction. However I had thought that with Boardwalk Empire, creator Terrence Winter was aiming higher and trying to give us a great character study and examination of crime in the 1920s-30s. In real life people do bad things all the time and no one ever finds out – although admittedly, most of those things don’t involve murder: people cheat on their spouses, steal from friends/family/strangers, and hurt people and they often get away with it. We in the audience know what Nucky did because we got to be there to watch him do them, but how on earth would Tommy know enough not just to be mad at Nucky, but to leave his home in Wisconsin and travel around 1,000 miles (during the Great Depression no less) with the intent to murder him? Yes it was poetic justice for the audience to see Nucky killed by a Darmody after he had done so many awful things to the family, but in real life there isn’t always such a clear answer and many times people get away with the awful things they do.

I am fine with the fact that Nucky died as I don’t always require happy endings, but the way it happened cheapens the show in so many ways as to leave me angry at the ending of a show I had loved from the beginning. I thought I was watching a character study that refrained from judging the characters for the often grotesque and despicable acts they committed, but at the end it turned into a morality tale that all boiled down to: don’t shoot the son of a 12-year-old girl who you handed over to a pedophile under his eye, or his son will track you down and shoot you under your own eye.