In the 2014 House of Representatives election campaigns, Democrats should run toward and not away from Barack Obama's record of leadership.
Throughout his presidency, Obama has faced and effectively dealt with an enormous array of problems, including the nearly collapsed credit and financial system that he inherited.
The Obama domestic agenda has been met with rigid opposition from a conservative-controlled House of Representatives and a U.S. Senate whose minority leader began by announcing that his most important job was to make Obama a one-term president.
Against this antagonistic, and at times irrational opposition, Obama has in his first six years in office led us in achieving good government outcomes across a range of problems unprecedented in their scope and complexity.
Financial crisis
In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was enacted at the insistence of Obama to provide $787 billion in stimulus funding to successfully arrest the greatest threat of recessionary collapse of the American economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Given our subsequent surging economic and market performance and the record of more than five years of decreasing unemployment, this act was crucially successful.
The banking industry was simultaneously recapitalized in 2009 through the government funding of repurchase of toxic bank assets. All the money that was loaned to the banks was repaid on time and with interest. And the stability of large banks was shored up by the institution of regulatory stress-testing of the ability of banks to withstand the risks of their business.
The Obama administration caused the government to lend $62 billion to the U.S. auto industry, and restored it from near death to its longtime position of world leadership. The auto rescue money has been repaid with interest, together with repurchase by the auto companies of their stock supplied to the government in the original loan transaction.
In June 2010, after a long battle against congressional conservatives, who were supported by the powerful lobby of the financial industry, the Dodd-Frank Act was enacted — a comprehensive set of regulatory measures for the banking and securities industries. The financial industry continues to fiercely oppose implementation of this law. But the struggle to implement those regulations has been carried on by the administration.
In 2014, the Volcker rule was formally adopted by the federal agencies involved in financial regulation under authority of the Dodd-Frank Act. The rule will serve as the prime protection in our financial system against banks having to be bailed out by the government by preventing them from engaging in risky transactions involving proprietary trading for their own account and from investing in hedge funds.
Health care
After a century of efforts to reform the health care system, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed in 2010, providing medical insurance to an estimated 32 million previously uncovered Americans. Since its passage, the House of Representatives has unsuccessfully sought more than a hundred times to repeal the act legislatively and through judicial challenges. At the outset, the implementation of Obamacare was seriously stalled by failures in the online enrollment software, but subsequent improved system results and robust and timely enrollment in the state insurance programs augur well for the Act.
Immigration reform
After serious and sustained attempts, the administration has been blocked by congressional conservatives from getting a full hearing on its attempt to pass comprehensive immigration reform. But the reality that Latinos constitute a huge voting bloc sustains hope that Republican legislators will relent and deal with the matter in a rational way.
