<This article is the third in a projected series of five offering a retrospective on Barack Obama's years in power. It is hoped that one will be published each week up until the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20th, 2017. In our next post of this topic we will attempt a summary of Obama's domestic policy, followed by an overview of his foreign policy. Concurrently we will attempt to make some observations about the Trump mentality and worldview.>
Washington (and the media elite) are obsessed with the White House bully pulpit, but that’s not what’s driven change in the Obama era. Obama has certainly had memorable rhetorical moments: the 2008 pre-election speech on race relations entitled, 'A More Perfect Union;' his rendition of “Amazing Grace” in Charleston, his meditation on civil rights in Selma, even his observation that Trayvon Martin could have been his son. Polls suggest his “evolution” on gay marriage helped build popular support, and his rainbow-lit White House after the Supreme Court upheld it was visible symbolism. Some Americans have surely been inspired by Obama’s history-making firsts: appointing the first female Fed chair, the first drug czar in recovery, the first gay Army secretary, the first transgender White House staffer, the first black man and woman to serve as attorney general and, of course, the fact of his own skin color. His aides also argue some of his bully-pulpit crusades have inspired change outside Washington. For example, 21 states raised their minimum wages after Obama elevated the issue.
But his minimum-wage push stalled in Congress (and is likely to die there), as did his public pushes for universal pre-kindergarten ('pre-K'), free community college and paid parental leave. Obama made some of his most eloquent speeches after the massacres in Tucson, Newtown and Charleston, but the gun control bills he pushed went nowhere. He simply lacked the votes in a Republican-dominated Congress. The same problem stalled his American Jobs Act, a package of tax cuts, infrastructure projects and other goodies he announced in a prime-time address to Congress in 2011. Pundits had been berating him for neglecting his bully pulpit, so he embarked on a national barnstorming tour to build support, leading crowds in chants of “Pass the bill!”
Congress did not pass the bill.
Obama’s aides sometimes wondered if his outspoken advocacy for his priorities made them less likely to happen, since supporting Obama’s priorities was dangerous politics for the GOP. That’s why he took the opposite approach to immigration reform, keeping relatively quiet so that Republicans who considered him toxic wouldn’t reflexively reject reform. But again, nothing happened, because, again, reform lacked the necessary support in Congress. The outside game has been vastly overrated in the Obama era. For all the change he’s driven, there hasn’t been much success in the arena of hearts-and-minds.
Instead, Obama has relied on the inside game. Since 2011, that’s meant executive orders, regulations and other unilateral actions. The president no longer had a friendly Congress, but he still controlled the executive branch, the vast bureaucracy responsible for the actual workings of government. He couldn’t pass a law requiring employers to provide paid sick leave, but he did issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to do it. He protected the world’s largest marine reserve in the Pacific Ocean and 19 other national monuments without any input from Congress. His agencies have auctioned off public spectrum to improve mobile broadband access, created a “myRA” (a starter retirement savings account developed by the United States Department of the Treasury for people without access to a retirement savings plan at work) to help Americans without pensions save for retirement and pushed through a “gainful employment rule” cracking down on colleges whose former students have high debt levels and low incomes, a rule that’s already decimating the for-profit education industry. Now his administration is finalizing a “fiduciary rule” that will require financial advisers to serve the best interest of their clients, and changing overtime rules to ensure that firms can’t deny time-and-a-half to workers making less than $50,000 a year by classifying them as managers. And he has announced a new effort to expand background checks for gun purchases, a modest attempt to achieve through executive action what he could not through legislation.
While his slogans were varied (and questionably unmemorable) -- “we can’t wait,” “pen and phone,” “Year of Action”-- his incremental move-the-needle strategy was, at least, consistent. It just became more obvious in 2015, when Republicans took back the Senate and he began joking about his “rhymes-with-bucket list.” The day after the election, in a low-key not-quite-rally-the troops talk that was quintessential Obama, he told his staff to take an hour to mope, then get back to work.
Whatever their new reality was, the executive branch still oversaw the largest organization on earth, with a huge capacity to do good. So the internal message was: let's do the best we can, while we can.
Obama’s most aggressive uses of Washington’s levers of power have involved energy, most visibly his Climate Action Plan to avoid 6 billion metric tons of carbon through 2030. Its highest-profile element is his carbon rule for power plants, which aims to slash power-sector emissions by 32 percent. But a slew of lesser-known restrictions on soot, mercury, sulfur dioxide, smog and other coal-fired pollutants have already helped force nearly one-third of America’s coal plant capacity into retirement, getting the sector more than halfway to its carbon goal before the carbon rule was even announced. The stimulus-launched clean energy revolution is also helping; the administration has already approved 57 renewable power projects on federal land, 57 more than every previous administration combined.
However, the most ambitious plank of the Climate Action Plan, accounting for half of its emissions goals, has been practically invisible. It’s an energy efficiency effort known as “appliance and equipment standards.” It’s on track to slash 3 billion tons of emissions by 2030; that’s the equivalent of taking every car off America’s roads for two years, or shutting down every power plant for a year and a half—a striking behind-the-scenes example of the Obama administration taking matters into its own hands.
Since 1979, the Department of Energy has set standards to cut energy waste from all kinds of products sold in the United States, reducing electricity consumption while saving consumers money on utility bills. The standards have worked; the average refrigerator sold today, though considerably bigger and cheaper than 1970s models, uses one-fourth as much power. But the program sputtered to a virtual halt in the Bush administration. In his third week as president, Obama visited the DOE and pledged to wipe out the growing backlog of overdue standards. “We’ll lead a revolution in energy efficiency,” he said. He talked about efficiency with such enthusiasm while the economy was falling apart that comedians (and pundits) could not resist making fun of the president’s priorities. At an event at a Home Depot later that year, the president actually declared energy efficiency “sexy.”
The DOE has responded by completing new standards for 39 separate products, from pool heaters to clothes dryers. It finalized more than twice as many rules in 2014 as it finalized during the entire Bush administration, and it still hopes to complete as many as 20 more. Obama’s new standards for industrial motors and fluorescent lighting have each produced record electricity savings—and the upcoming rule for commercial air conditioners will surpass them by far. Most of the new rules even drew support from the manufacturers who must comply, although lately they have pushed back.
That’s because the DOE’s rule-making pace has gone from hectic to frantic since Obama made the standards so central to his climate plan. The danger was that the race to generate new initiatives soon took on the appearance of items sent down an out-of-control conveyor belt and the plethora of constant announcements drowned out the messaging. After all, people could only absorb so many pronouncements on appliance safety before their minds shut down. But like it or not, the barrage of strict new rules is a key reason why U.S. power demand, after decades of growth, is now virtually flat, averting the need for new plants while saving consumers billions of dollars.
The rules are just part of a larger efficiency crusade that included more than $15 billion worth of stimulus investments; a leap in automobile fuel-efficiency standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 along with the first-ever fuel standards for heavy trucks; and an intensive effort to green the government and cut federal emissions 40 percent. Obama has authorized $2 billion in contracts for agencies to pursue green retrofits financed by future energy savings, which have helped reduce federal energy use to its lowest level in 40 years—while avoiding the need for congressional approval. There’s been a special focus on greening the Pentagon, where leaders in the Obama era held titles like the Navy's and Air Force's "energy chiefs." whose focus was to get the world’s single largest consumer of energy to consume a lot less of it. The Air Force has already cut its carbon footprint 21 percent since 2008, through changes like LED-lit runways and fuel-efficiency upgrades for a fleet of jets larger than all U.S. airlines’ combined.
There is still a long way to go in the sustainability battle, but Obama and others on his team have had their chance. Now it remains to see what Donald Trump will do.