A H I S T O R I C E L E C T I O N

The economic crisis had potent political effects. As two preeminenteconomists noted, “In the eight years since George W. Bush took office, nearlyevery component of the U.S. economy has deteriorated.” Budget deficits,trade deficits, and consumer debt had reached record levels, and the totalexpense of the American war in Iraq was projected to top $3 trillion. DuringPresident Bush’s last year in office, just 29 percent of the voters “approved” ofhis leadership. And more than 80 percent said that the nation was headed inthe “wrong direction.” Even a prominent Republican strategist, Kevin Phillips,deemed Bush “perhaps the least competent president in modern history.”

Bush’s vulnerability excited Democrats about the possibility of regain-ing the White House in the 2008 election. Not only was the Bush presidencyfloundering, but the Republican party was in disarray, plagued by scandals,riven by factions, and lacking effective leadership. In 2004, the Americanelectorate had been evenly divided by party identification: 43 percent forboth the Democratic and the Republican parties. By 2008 the Democratswere leading the Republicans 50 percent to 35 percent.

The early front-runner for the Democratic nomination was New Yorksenator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the highly visible spouse of ex-presidentBill Clinton. Like her husband, she displayed an impressive command ofpolicy issues and mobilized a well-funded campaign team. And as the firstwoman with a serious chance of gaining the presidency, she garnered wide-spread support among voters eager for female leadership. In the end,

A Historic Election • 1487

however, an overconfident Clinton was upset in the Democratic primariesand caucuses by little-known first-term senator Barack Obama of Illinois, aninspiring speaker who attracted huge crowds by promising a “politics ofhope” and bolstering their desire for “change.” While the Clinton campaigncourted the powerful members of the party establishment, Obama mountedan innovative Internet-based campaign directed at grassroots voters, donors,and volunteers. In early June 2008, he gained enough delegates to secure theDemocratic nomination.

Obama was the first African American presidential nominee of either party,the gifted biracial son of a white mother from Kansas and a black Kenyan fatherwho left the household and returned to Africa when Barack was a toddler. Theforty-seven-year-old Harvard Law School graduate and former professor, com-munity organizer, and state legislator presented himself as a conciliator whocould inspire and unite a diverse people and forge bipartisan collaborations. Hepromised to end “the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminationsand worn-out dogmas that for too long have strangled our politics.”

Obama exuded poise, confidence, and energy. By contrast, his Republicanopponent, seventy-two-year-old Arizona senator John McCain, was the oldestpresidential candidate in history. As a twenty-five-year veteran of Congress, a

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The Clinton campaign

Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at the FortWorth Stockyards.

leading Republican senator, and a 2000 candidate for the Republican presiden-tial nomination, he had developed a reputation as a bipartisan maverick will-ing to work with Democrats to achieve key legislative goals.

Concerns about McCain’s support among Republican conservatives ledhim to select Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, the firstwoman on a Republican ticket. Although hardly known outside party cir-cles, Palin held the promise of winning over religious conservatives nervousabout McCain’s ideological purity. She opposed abortion, gay marriage, andstem-cell research, and she endorsed the teaching of creationism in publicschools. For his part, Barack Obama rejected calls to choose Hillary Clintonas his running mate. Instead, he selected seasoned Delaware senator JosephBiden, in large part because of his knowledge of foreign policy and nationalsecurity issues. Biden was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

T H E 2008 E L E C T I O N In the 2008 presidential campaign, Obamashrewdly capitalized on widespread dissatisfaction with the Republicansand centered his campaign on the echoing promise of “change.” He

A Historic Election • 1489

The 2008 presidential debates

Republican presidential candidate John McCain (left) and Democratic presidentialcandidate Barack Obama (right) focused on foreign policy, national security, andthe financial crisis at the first of three presidential debates.

repeatedly linked McCain with the unpopular George W. Bush. Obamapromised to end the war in Iraq and he denounced the prevailing Repub-lican “economic philosophy that says we should give more and more tothose with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyoneelse.” He described the 2008 financial meltdown as the “final verdict onthis failed philosophy.”

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama made history by becoming thenation’s first person of color elected president. “Change has come to America,”he announced in his victory speech. His triumph was decisive and sweeping.The inspirational Obama won the popular vote by seven points: 53 percentto 46 percent. His margin in the electoral vote was even more impressive:365 to 173. The president-elect won big among his core supporters—votersunder age thirty, women, minorities, the very poor, and first-time voters. Hecollected 95 percent of the African American vote and 66 percent of votersaged eighteen to twenty-nine, and he won the increasingly important Hispanicvote. Obama also helped the Democrats win solid majorities in the Houseand Senate races.

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Election night rally

President-elect Barack Obama, his wife Michelle, and two daughters, Sasha andMalia, wave to the crowd of supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park.

Within days of his electoral victory, Barack Obama adopted a bipartisanapproach in selecting his new cabinet members. He appointed Hillary Clintonsecretary of state, renewed Republican Robert Gates as secretary of defense,selected retired general James Jones, who had campaigned for McCain, as hisnational security adviser, and appointed Eric Holder as the nation’s firstAfrican American attorney general.

O B A M A’ S F I R S T T E R M

T H E F I R S T H U N D R E D DAY S On January 20, 2009, President Obama,calm and dispassionate, delivered his inaugural address in frigid weather amiddaunting challenges. The United States was embroiled in two wars, in Iraq

Obama’s First Term • 1491

SC8

NC15

GA15

AL9

LA9

TX34

AR6

MO11

WV5

IL21

MS6

FL27

VA13KY 8

TN 11

IN11

MI17

WI10

MN10

IA7

CA55

NV5 UT

5

AZ10

AK3

HI4

NM5

CO9

WY3

MT3

ND3

SD3NE4

(+1 Dem.)

KS6

OK7

OR7

WA11

ID4

OH20

PA21

NY31

VT 3NH 4 ME

4

MA 12

RI 4CT 7

NJ 15DE 3MD 10DC 3

Barack Obama 365

Electoral Vote Popular Vote

(Democrat)

John McCain 173(Republican)

THE ELECTION OF 2008

69,500,000

59,900,000

How did the economic crisis affect the outcome of the election? What are the similarities and differences between the map of the 2004 election and the map of the 2008 election?

and Afghanistan. The economy was in shambles, unemployment was soar-ing, and the national debt was hemorrhaging. A supremely self-confident yetinexperienced Obama acted quickly—some said too quickly—to fulfill hiscampaign pledges. He wanted to be a transformative president, an agent offundamental public policy changes. He pledged to overhaul unneeded gov-ernment regulations, reform education, energy, environmental, and health-care policies, restructure the tax code, invigorate the economy, and recastU.S. foreign policy. In March, Obama froze the salaries of his senior staffers,mandated higher fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, and increasedthe federal cigarette tax. Obama also eased restrictions on travel to Cuba thathad been in place for nearly fifty years.

T H E S LU G G I S H E C O N O M Y The new Obama administration’s mainchallenge was to keep the deepening global recession from becoming a pro-longed depression. During late 2008, the economy was shrinking at an annu-alized rate of nearly 9 percent and losing seven hundred thousand jobs amonth—symptoms of a depression. Unemployment in early 2009 hadpassed 8 percent and was still rising. More than 5 million people had losttheir jobs since 2007. The financial sector remained paralyzed. When Obamapromised to act “boldly and wisely” to fulfill his campaign pledges and stim-ulate the stagnant economy, many progressive Democrats expected him tomimic Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 and launch an array of New Deal-likeprograms to help the needy and restore public confidence.

That did not happen. Most of Obama’s financial advisers, as it turned out,came from the gigantic Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachsand Citigroup that were in part responsible for the greatest financial crisissince the Great Depression. In responding to that crisis, the new administra-tion focused most of its efforts on helping shore up Wall Street—the veryfinancial interests that had provoked the crisis. As Time magazine noted in2010, Obama’s advisers devised a recovery plan for the huge banks “that fur-ther enriched their cronies without doing much for the average Joe.” The bigbanks and brokerage houses received lavish government bail-outs, while theworking class and hard-pressed homeowners received much less help in theform of spending to provide debt relief or to stimulate the flagging economy.Yes, the massive infusion of federal money shored up the largest banks, butin a way that required taxpayers to assume all the risk for the reckless specu-lation the banks had engaged in that had triggered the crisis.

In mid-February, after a prolonged and often strident debate, Congresspassed, and Obama signed, a $787-billion economic stimulus bill called theAmerican Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It was the largest in history, but

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in the end not large enough to serve its purpose of restoring economicgrowth. The bill included cash distributions to the states, additional fundsfor food stamps, unemployment benefits, construction projects to renew thenation’s infrastructure (roads, bridges, levees, government buildings, andthe electricity grid), money for renewable-energy systems, and $212 billionin tax reductions for individuals and businesses. Yet the stimulus packagewas not robust enough to reverse the deepening recession. Moreover, con-gressional passage of the stimulus bill showed no evidence that Obama wassuccessful in implementing a “bipartisan” presidency. Only three SenateRepublicans voted for the bill. Not a single House Republican voted for it,and eleven House Democrats opposed it as well.

H E A LT H C A R E R E F O R M Obama compounded his error in underesti-mating the depth and complexity of the recession by choosing to emphasizecomprehensive health-care reform rather than concentrate on creating jobsand restoring prosperity. Obama explained that the nation’s health-care sys-tem was so broken that it was “bankrupting families, bankrupting busi-nesses, and bankrupting our government at the state and federal level.” Thepresident’s goal was to streamline the nation’s health-care system, makehealth insurance more affordable, and make health care accessible for every-one. Throughout 2009, White House staffers and congressional committeesworked through a maze of complicated issues before presenting to the Con-gress the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

The ten-year-long, $940 billion proposal (a thousand pages long!), modeledafter a Massachusetts health-care program enacted in 2006 under then–Republican governor Mitt Romney, included numerous provisions, the mostcontroversial of which was the so-called individual mandate, which requiredthat the uninsured must purchase an approved private insurance policy madeavailable through state agencies or pay a tax penalty. Employers who did notoffer health insurance would also have to pay higher taxes, and drug compa-nies as well as manufacturers of medical devices would have to pay annualgovernment fees. Everyone would pay higher Medicare payroll taxes to helpfund the changes. The individual mandate was designed to ensure that allAmericans had health insurance so as to reduce the skyrocketing costs of hospitals providing “charity care” for the 32 million uninsured Americans. But the idea of forcing people to buy health insurance flew in the face of the prin-ciple of individual freedom and personal responsibility. As a result, the health-care reform legislation became a highly partisan issue. Critics questioned notonly the individual mandate but also the administration’s projections that thenew program would reduce federal expenditures over the long haul.

Obama’s First Term • 1493

President Obama invested much of his time, energy, and political capitalin shepherding the legislation through the Congress. In December 2009, thePPACA received Senate approval, with all Democrats and two Independentsvoting for, and all Republicans voting against. In March 2010, the House ofRepresentatives narrowly approved the package, by a vote of 219–212, with34 Democrats and all 178 Republicans voting against the bill. Obama signedPPACA into law on March 23, 2010. Its major provisions would be imple-mented over a four-year transition period.

R E G U L AT I N G WA L L S T R E E T The unprecedented meltdown of thenation’s financial system beginning in 2008 prompted calls for overhaulingthe nation’s financial regulatory system. On July 21, 2010, Obama signed theWall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, also called Dodd–Frank after its two congressional sponsors. It was the most comprehensiveoverhaul of the financial system since the New Deal in the thirties. The 2,319-page law acknowledged the need to limit the amount of risk that Wall Streetinvestment banks could take with their clients’ money in order to generaterevenue for the bank and huge bonuses for themselves. The Dodd-Frank billalso called for government agencies to exercise greater oversight over highlyleverage and highly complex new financial instruments and protected con-sumers from unfair practices in loans and credit cards by establishing a newconsumer financial-protection agency. While allowing the mega-banks tocontinue rather than be broken up, the Dodd-Frank legislation also empow-ered government regulators to dismantle any financial firms, not just banks,that were failing. At the signing ceremony in the Ronald Reagan Building inWashington, D.C., Obama claimed that the new bill would “lift our econ-omy,” give “certainty to everybody” about the legitimacy of financial transac-tions, and end “tax-funded bailouts [of big businesses]—period” because itwould no longer allow corporations to become “too big to fail.”

WA R S I N I R AQ A N D A F G H A N I S TA N President Obama had moresuccess in dealing with foreign affairs than in reviving the economy, in partbecause he appointed able people such as Hillary Clinton as secretary of stateand Robert Gates as secretary of defense. Obama wanted to “changethe trajectory of American foreign policy in a way that would end the war inIraq, refocus on defeating our primary enemy, al Qaeda, strengthen ouralliances and our leadership.” His foremost concern was to rein in what hebelieved was the overextension of American power and prestige abroad. Whatjournalists came to call the Obama Doctrine stressed that the United Statescould not afford to be the world’s only policeman. As Obama explained, the

1494 • AMERICA IN A NEW MILLENNIUM (CH. 34)

United States has limited “resources and capacity.” It was imperative to adopta multilateral approach to world crises so as to reduce America’s investmentin massive foreign commitments and interventions. Obama sought to mobi-lize collective action against tyranny and terrorism rather than continue to goit alone. And he was remarkably successful in doing so.

The Obama Doctrine grew out of the fact that the president inheritedtwo enormously expensive wars, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan. OnFebruary 27, 2009, Obama announced that all U.S. combat troops would bewithdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2011. Until then, a “transitional force” ofthirty-five thousand to fifty thousand troops would assist Iraqi security forces,protect Americans, and fight terrorism. True to his word, the last U.S. troopsleft Iraq in December 2011. Their exit marked the end of a bitterly divisive warthat had raged for nearly nine years and left Iraq shattered, with troublingquestions lingering over whether the newly democratic Arab nation would beself-sustaining as well as a steadfast U.S. ally amid chronic sectarian clashes ina turbulent region. The U.S. intervention in Iraq had cost over four thousand

Obama’s First Term • 1495

Home from Iraq

American troops returned from Iraq to more somber, humbler homecomings thanthe great fanfare that rounded off previous wars.

American lives, over one hundred thousand Iraqi lives, and $800 billion.Whether it was worth such an investment remained to be seen.

At the same time that he was reducing U.S. military involvement inIraq, President Obama dispatched twenty-one thousand additional troopsto Afghanistan, which he called “ground zero” in the continuing battleagainst global terrorism. The goal in Afghanistan was to “disrupt, dismantle,and defeat al Qaeda” at its Afghan base through a revitalized effort to assaultthe Taliban. When President Bush escalated U.S. military involvement inAfghanistan, the situation in the war-torn tribal land resembled the predica-ment the United States had found itself in during the Vietnam War: an indefensible border region harboring enemy sanctuaries; American relianceon a corrupt partner government; and the necessity of fighting a war ofcounterinsurgency—the most difficult type of conflict because there was noeasy distinction between civilians and the insurgents. Yet by the summer of2011, it appeared that the American strategy was working. President Obamaannounced that the “tide of war was receding” and that the United Stateshad largely achieved its goals in Afghanistan, setting in motion a substantialwithdrawal of U.S. forces beginning in 2011 and lasting until 2014. As wastrue in Iraq, Obama stressed that the Afghans must determine the future sta-bility of Afghanistan. “We will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place,”he said. “We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely.That is the responsibility of the Afghan government.”

T H E D E AT H O F O S A M A B I N L A D E N At the same time that Obamawas ending the U.S. role in Iraq and Afghanistan, he focused additionalresources on counterterrorism, expanding the use of special operationsforces and remote-controlled drones to assault the senior leaders of alQaeda, almost all of whom operated out of Pakistan. The crowning achieve-ment of Obama’s efforts was the discovery, at long last, of Osama bin Laden’shideout. Ever since the attacks of 9/11, bin Laden had eluded an intensemanhunt after crossing the Afghan border into Pakistan. His luck ran out inAugust 2011, however, when U.S. intelligence officials discovered bin Laden’ssanctuary in a walled residential compound outside of Abbottabad, Pak-istan. On May 1, 2011, President Obama authorized a daring night raid by aU.S. Navy SEAL team of two dozen specially trained commandos trans-ported by helicopters from Afghanistan. After a brief firefight, caught onvideotape and fed live by a satellite link to the White House situation room,the Navy SEAL team killed bin Laden and transported his body to an aircraftcarrier in the Arabian Sea, where it was washed, wrapped in a white sheet,and dropped overboard. There were no American casualties. Ten years ear-lier, bin Laden had told a reporter that he “loves death. The Americans

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love life. I will engage them and fight. If I am to die, I would like to be killedby the bullet.” The U.S. Special Forces assault team granted his wish. Thenews that the mastermind of global terrorism had been killed sparkedworldwide celebrations. Violent Islamism no longer seemed inevitable orindomitable.

T H E “A R A B AWA K E N I N G ” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weresimply the latest evidence of the massive investment that the United Stateshad made in the stability of the Middle East and North Africa since the firstArab oil embargo in the 1970s. The security of Israel and ensuring Americanaccess to the region’s vast oil reserves made the Middle East strategicallyimportant—and volatile. After 9/11, America’s focus on the turbulent Mid-dle East became an obsession. The invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraqin 2003 displaced and decimated al Qaeda and helped to prevent any moremajor attacks on U.S. soil. But the deepening involvement in the region alsodrained America’s budget (costing well over a trillion dollars), created dis-sension at home, and emboldened enemies such as Iran and Syria to becomeeven more aggressive in their provocations.

In late 2010 and early 2011, however, something remarkable and unex-pected occurred: spontaneous democratic uprisings emerged throughoutmuch of the Arab world, as long-oppressed peoples rose up against generations-old authoritarian regimes. The idealistic rebels demanded basic libertiessuch as meaningful voting rights, a credible judicial system, and freedom ofthe press. One by one, corrupt Arab tyrants were forced out of power by anew generation of young idealists inspired by democratic ideals and con-nected by social media on the Internet. They did not simply demand change;they embodied it, putting their lives on the line.

The Arab Awakening began in mid-December 2010 in Tunisia, on thecoast of North Africa. Like much of the Arab world, Tunisia was a chroni-cally poor nation suffering from high unemployment, runaway inflation,political corruption, and authoritarian rule. On December 17, MohamedBouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor distraught over rough policetreatment, set himself on fire in a public square. His suicidal act was like astone thrown into a pond whose ripples quickly spread outward. It sparkedwaves of pro-democracy demonstrations across Tunisia that forced the pres-ident, who had been in power for twenty-three years, to step down when hisown security forces refused orders to shoot protesters. An interim governmentthereafter allowed democratic elections.

Rippling waves of unrest sparked by the Tunisian “Burning Man” soonrolled across Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Oman, Yemen, Libya,Saudi Arabia, and Syria. The people’s insistence on exercising their basic

Obama’s First Term • 1497

rights as citizens, the marchesand rallies in the streets andparks, and the sudden comingto voice of the voiceless weretangible signs of an old ordercrumbling. In Egypt, the Arabworld’s most populous coun-try, several thousand protestersled by university students con-verged in the streets of teemingCairo in late January, 2011.They demanded the end of thelong rule of strongman Presi-dent Hosni Moubarak, astaunch American ally who hadtreated his own people withcontempt. The boldness of theyouthful rebels was contagious.Within a few days, hundreds ofthousands of demonstratorsrepresenting all walks of lifeconverged on Tahrir Square,where many of them en camped

for eighteen days, singing songs, holding candlelight vigils, and waving flagsin the face of a brutal crackdown by security forces. Violence erupted whenMoubarak’s supporters attacked the protesters. The government tried to cutoff access to social communications—mobile telephones, text-messaging,and the Internet—but its success was limited. Desperate to stay in power,Moubarak replaced his entire cabinet, but it was not enough to quell the anti-government movement. On February 11, 2011, Moubarak resigned, cedingcontrol to the military leadership. On March 4, a civilian was appointedprime minister, and elections were promised within a year.

As the so-called Arab Awakening flared up in other parts of the region, someof the rebellions grew violent, some were brutally smashed (Syria), and someachieved substantial political changes. The remarkable uprisings heralded anew era in the history of the Middle East struggling to be born. Arabs had sud-denly lost their fear—not just their fear of violent rulers, but also their fear thatthey were not capable of democratic government. By the millions, they demon-strated with their actions that they would no longer passively accept the old wayof being governed.

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Arab Awakening

Thousands of protestors converge in Cairo’sTahrir Square to call for an end to Moubarak’srule.

L I B YA O U S T S G A D DA F I The pro-democracy turmoil in North Africaquickly spread to oil-rich Libya, long governed by the zany dictator ColonelMuammar Gaddafi, the Arab world’s most violent despot. Anti-governmentdemonstrations began on February 15, 2011, prompting Gaddafi to orderLibyan soldiers and foreign mercenaries to suppress the rebellious “rats,” firstwith rubber bullets, then with live ammunition, including artillery and war-planes. The soaring casualties spurred condemnations of Gaddafi’s brutalitiesfrom around the world, including the United States. By the end of February,what began as a peaceful pro-democratic uprising had turned into a full-scalecivil war in which the poorly organized, scantily armed rebels faced anentrenched regime willing to do anything to retain its stranglehold over thenation. On March 17, the UN Security Council authorized a no-fly zone overLibya designed to prevent Gaddafi’s use of warplanes against the civilian rebels.

President Obama handled the Libyan uprising with patience and ingenu-ity. Eager to avoid the mistakes made in the Iraq War, he insisted on severalconditions being met before involving U.S. forces in Libya. First, the pro-democratic rebel force needed to request American assistance. Second, anyUN coalition must include Arab nations as well as the United States and itsEuropean allies. Third, the United States would commit warplanes and cruisemissiles but not ground forces; it could not afford a third major war in theregion. On March 19, those conditions were met. With the Arab League’ssupport, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom intervened inLibya with a bombing campaign against pro-Gaddafi forces. One rebel leadercalled the Allied air strikes “a gift from God.” For seven months, intensefighting raged back and forth across northern Libya. Slowly, the ragtag Libyanrebels gained confidence and coordination. What most observers believedwas impossible—the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime—began to take hold.In late August, anti-Gaddafi forces, accompanied by television crews, capturedthe capital of Tripoli, scattering Gaddafi’s government and marking the end ofhis forty-two-year dictatorship. On October 20, rebel fighters captured andkilled Gaddafi in his hometown of Sirt.

The Obama administration believed that the root cause of Islamist terrorismwas not religion but the absence of Arab democracy. Promoting democracy inthe region represented a profound change in American policy. Since the end ofthe Second World War, U.S. leaders had tended to prize stability in the Arabnations, even if it meant propping up tyrants. Under President Obama, theUnited States did an about-face and supported the Arab Awakening’s crusadefor democratic change and human rights. Yet while the Arab Awakening hadensured that the political process in many countries would be more open anddynamic, it did not necessarily bring stability to the turbulent region. The Arab

Obama’s First Term • 1499

political stage had suddenly been repopulated with a new cast of characters act-ing out the first scene of an unfolding drama promoting pluralism and toler-ance. “You have to understand,” said a Syrian rebel, “that this is not a bunch ofdifferent revolutions. This is one big revolution for all the Arabs. It will not stopuntil it reaches everywhere.”

T H E T E A PA RT Y At the same time that Arabs were rebelling againstentrenched political elites, grassroots rebellions were occurring in the UnitedStates as well. No sooner was Obama sworn in than limited-government con-servatives frustrated by his election began mobilizing to thwart any renewalof “tax-and-spend” liberalism. In January 2009, a New York stock tradernamed Graham Makohoniuk sent out an e-mail message urging people tosend tea bags to the Senate and House of Representatives. He fastened on teabags to symbolize the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773 during which out-raged American colonists protested against British tax policies. The e-mailmessage “went viral” among anti-tax libertarians and conservatives across thenation. Within days, thousands of tea bags poured into congressional offices.Within weeks, the efforts of angry activists coalesced into a decentralizednationwide protest movement soon labeled “the Tea Party.” It had neither anational headquarters nor an official governing body; nor was there a formalprocess for joining the grassroots movement. Within a year or so, there wereabout a thousand Tea Party groups spread across the fifty states. “The GOP isvery worried,” noted a political scientist. “It’s very hard to deal with the TeaParty movement. It’s like fighting guerrilla warfare with them.”

The Tea Party is at once a mood, an attitude, and an ideology, an eruption oflibertarians, mostly white, male, middle-class Republicans over the age of forty-five, boiling mad at a political system that they believe has grown dependent onspending their taxes. The overarching aim of the Tea Party is to transform theRepublican party into a vehicle of conservative ideology and eliminate all thosewho resist the true faith. More immediately, the “tea parties” rallied againstPresident Obama’s health-care initiative and economic stimulus package, argu-ing that they verged on socialism in their efforts to bail out corporate Americaand distressed homeowners. On April 15, 2009, the Internal Revenue tax-filingdeadline, Tea Party demonstrations occurred in 750 cities.

What began as a scattering of anti-tax protests crystallized into a powerfulanti-government movement promoting fiscal conservatism at the local, state,and national levels. Like Ronald Reagan, the Tea Party saw government as theproblem, not the solution. As candidates began to campaign for the 2010 con-gressional elections, the Tea Party mobilized to influence the results, not byforming a third political party but by trying to take over the leadership of theRepublican party. Members of the Tea Party were as frustrated by the old-line

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Republican establishment (RINOs—Republicans in Name Only) as they weredisgusted by liberal Democrats. As a Virginia Tea Party candidate claimed, “Idon’t think there’d be a Tea Party if the Republican Party had been a party oflimited government in the first part of this decade.” The Tea Party memberswere not seeking simply to rebuild the Republican party; they wanted to takeover a “decaying” Republican party and restore its anti-tax focus. Democrats,including President Obama, initially dismissed the Tea Party as a fringe groupof extremists, but the 2010 election results proved them wrong.

C O N S E RVAT I V E R E S U R G E N C E Barack Obama had campaigned in2008 on the promise of bringing dramatic change to the federal government.“Yes, we can” was his echoing campaign slogan. In the fall of 2010, however,many of the same voters who had embraced Obama’s promises in 2008 nowanswered, “Oh, no you don’t!” Democratic House and Senate candidates(as well a moderate Republicans), including many long-serving leaders, weredefeated in droves as insurgent conservatives recaptured control of the Houseof Representatives (gaining sixty-three seats) and won a near majority in the Senate. Republicans also took control of both the governorships and thelegislatures in twelve states; ten states were already Republican-controlled.It was the most lopsided midterm election since 1938. A humbled Obama,

Obama’s First Term • 1501

The Tea Party Movement

Tea Party supporters gather outside the New Hampshire Statehouse for a tax dayrally.

who in a fit of hubris had earlier claimed that his first two years were compa-rable to the achievements of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, andLyndon B. Johnson, called it a “shellacking” reminiscent of what Congres-sional Republicans had experienced in 2006. One of his aides was more apoc-alyptic: he called the election an “inflection point,” suggesting that the rest ofthe president’s first term would be contentious; stalemate would trumpchange as the new “Tea Party” Republicans strove to rebuke Obama at everyturn. Exit polls on election day showed widespread frustration about Obama’shandling of the slumping economy. Recovery and jobs growth remained elu-sive. Voters said that Obama and the Democrats had tried to do too much toofast—bailing out huge banks and automobile companies, spending nearly atrillion dollars on various pet projects designed to stimulate the flaccid econ-omy, and reorganizing the national health-care system. Republican candi-dates were carried into office on a wave of discontent fomented by the TeaParty movement that demanded ideological purity from its candidates.“We’ve come to take our government back,” declared one Republican con-gressional winner. Thereafter, Obama and the Republican-dominated Con-gress engaged in a strident sparring match, each side refusing to accommodatethe other as the incessant partisan bickering postponed meaningful action onthe languishing economy and the runaway federal budget deficit.

O C C U P Y WA L L S T R E E T The emergence of the Tea Party illustrated thegrowing ideological extremism of twenty-first-century politics. On the leftwing of the political spectrum, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement,founded in the fall of 2011, represented the radical alternative to the Tea Party.In the spring of 2011 Kalle Lasn, the founding editor of Adbusters, an anti-consumerism magazine published in Vancouver, Canada, decided to pro-mote a grassroots uprising against a capitalist system that was promotingmindless materialism and growing economic and social inequality. WhatAmerica most needed, Lasn believed, was a focused conversation aboutgrowing income inequality, diminishing opportunities for upward socialmobility, runaway corporate greed as well as the distorting impact of corpo-rate donations to political campaigns, and economic fairness—all issues thathad been exacerbated by the government “bailouts” of huge banks and cor-porations weakened by the Great Recession. As the Pew Research Centerreported, the conflict between rich and poor had become “the greatestsource of tension in American society.”

Lasn began circulating through his magazine and online networks a postershowing a ballerina perched atop the famous “Charging Bull” sculpture onWall Street. The caption read: “What Is Our Demand? Occupy Wall Street.

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Bring tent.” The call to arms quickly circulated over the Internet, and anotherdecentralized grassroots movement was born. Within a few days OWS hadlaunched an anarchical website, OccupyWallSt.org, and moved the headquar-ters for the anti-capitalist uprising from Vancouver to New York City. Dozens,then hundreds, then thousands of people, mostly young adults, many of themunemployed, converged on Zuccotti Park in southern Manhattan in a kind ofspontaneous democracy. They formed tent villages and gathered in groupsto “occupy” Wall Street to protest corrupt banks and brokerage houseswhose “fraudsters,” they claimed, had caused the 2008 economic crash andforced the severe government cutbacks in social welfare programs. OWScharged that most of the nation’s financiers at the heart of the Great Reces-sion had not been prosecuted or even disciplined. The biggest banks werelarger than ever, and huge bonuses were being paid to staff members.

The protesting “occupiers” drafted a “Declaration of the Occupation” thatserved as the manifesto of a decentralized movement dedicated to under-mining the disproportionate political and economic power exercised by theWall Street power brokers. OWS demanded that corporate donations to

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Occupy Wall Street

The grassroots movement expanded rapidly from rallies in Zuccotti Park, Manhat-tan, (left) into massive marches on financial districts nationwide. Right, thousandsof protesters storm downtown Los Angeles.

political candidates cease and that elected officials focus on helping peoplerather than bailing out big business. Economic data showed that for decadesthe super-rich had been garnering a growing percentage of national wealthat the expense of the working and middle classes. In 1980, the richest onepercent of Americans controlled ten percent of all personal income; by 2012,the top one percent amassed twenty-five percent of total income. Andthe people hurt most by the Great Recession were those at the bottom of the income scale. By 2010, there were 46.2 million Americans living belowthe U.S. poverty line, an all-time record. The OWS protesters were deter-mined to reverse such economic and social trends. They described them-selves as the voice of the 99 percent of Americans who were being victimizedby the 1 percent of the wealthiest and most politically connected Americans.As one of the protesters proclaimed, “everyone can see that the [capitalist]system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed hastrashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well.”

The OWS protesters excelled at creative disruption. They tried to shutdown the New York Stock Exchange, held a sit-in at the nearby BrooklynBridge, and grappled with police. The vagueness (“We are our demands!”) ofa spontaneous grassroots “movement without demands” was initially avirtue, as the demonstrations attracted national media coverage. “We can’thold on to any authority,” one organizer explained. “We don’t want to.” Butsoon thousands more alienated people showed up, many of whom broughttheir own agendas to the effort. A “horizontal” movement with organizersand facilitators but no leaders at times morphed into a chaotic mob punctu-ated by antic good cheer and zaniness (organizers dressed up as Wall Streetexecutives, stuffed Monopoly “play” money in their mouths, etc.). At thesame time, however, the anarchic energies of OWS began to spread like avirus across the nation. Similar efforts calling for a “government accountableto the people, freed up from corporate influence” emerged in cities aroundthe globe; encampments of alienated activists sprang up in over a thousandtowns and cities. On December 6, 2011, President Obama echoed the OWSmovement when he deplored in a speech “the breathtaking greed of a few”and said that the effort to restore economic “fairness” was the “defining issueof our time.” Although the OWS demonstrations receded after many citiesordered police to arrest the protesters and dismantle the ramshackleencampments, by the end of 2011 the OWS effort to spark a national conver-sation about growing income inequality had succeeded. As the New YorkTimes announced, “The new progressive age has begun.”

P O L A R I Z E D P O L I T I C S American politics has always been chaotic,combative, and fractious; its raucous energy is one of its strengths. But the

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2010 election campaigns were spirited to the point of violence; polarizingpartisan rhetoric had never been fiercer. Obama’s pledge to be a bipartisanpresident fell victim to acidic battles between the two political parties. Theincreasingly dogmatic tone of American politics did not bode well for thosehoping for bipartisan leadership cooperation. As a House Republican pre-dicted in the aftermath of the 2010 elections, there would be “no compromiseon stopping runaway spending, deficits, and debt. There will be no compro-mise on repealing Obamacare.” The strident refusal to compromise became apoint of honor for both parties—and created a nightmarish stalemate for thenation, as the dysfunctional political system harmed an already sick economy.The gulf between the two parties had become a chasm. “American politiciansare intent,” said the editors of The Economist, “not on improving the coun-try’s competitiveness, but on gouging each other’s eyes out.”

Ideological purity became the watchword of modern conservatism as lib-ertarianism emerged as an appealing alternative to traditional conservatism.The libertarian wing of the conservative revolt was led by Texas CongressmanRon Paul, who not only disapproved of runaway federal spending on socialprograms but also on military defense. Paul disagreed with George W. Bush’sdecision to invade Iraq and upset religious conservatives by arguing thatflashpoint cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage should beaddressed on a state-by-state basis, not by the federal government.

By 2011, the conservative insurgency led by the Tea Party focused on therecord-breaking federal deficit and the tepid economic recovery (2011 homesales were the worst in history). The Tea Party faction in Congress theatricallybegan to practice a form of brinkmanship: they were willing to let the nationgo bankrupt rather than raise the debt-ceiling limit. What Tea Party membershated most was the willingness of Republicans over the years to compromisewith Democrats and thereby enable the federal government to keep growingand overspending its budgets. But if the Tea Party pushed too hard, it wouldfracture the Republican party. Some were not sure that was such a bad idea.“If the Republicans can’t come through with their promises,” a Rhode IslandTea Partier mused, “maybe the party needs to be blown up.”

The politics of impasse stalemated American government during 2011and 2012. Rather than work responsibly together to close the nation’s gapingbudget deficit, the two warring parties proved incapable of reaching a com-promise; they instead opted for the easy way out by applying temporary patchesthat would expire after the November 2012 elections. Those patches createda fiscal “cliff” at the end of 2012, whereby the tax cuts created by George W. Bushwould expire, as would a cut in payroll taxes. At the same time, a string ofacross-the-board federal budget cuts (called “sequesters”) would also auto-matically occur unless Congress acted. Rather than bridge their differences

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during 2011–2012, both sides preferred to fight it out during the presidentialelection campaign in hopes that the voters would signal a clear message.

B O L D D E C I S I O N S In May 2012 President Obama jumped headfirst intothe simmering cultural wars by courageously changing his longstanding posi-tion and announcing his support for the rights of gay couples to marry. Thathis statement came a day after the state of North Carolina legislature voted toban all rights for gay couples illustrated how incendiary the issue was aroundthe country. While asserting it was the “right” thing to do, Obama also knewthat endorsing gay marriage had political ramifications. The gay communitywould play an energetic role in the 2012 presidential election, and the youthvote, the under-30 electorate who of all the voting-age cohorts supported gaymarriage, would be equally crucial to Obama’s reelection chances. No soonerhad Obama made his pathbreaking announcement than polls showed thatAmerican voters split half and half on the charged issue, with Democrats andindependent voters constituting the majority of such support.

The following month, in June 2012, Obama again stunned the nation byissuing an executive order (soon labeled the DREAM Act) allowing undocu-mented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children toremain in the country as citizens. His unanticipated decision thrilled Latinosupporters who had lost heart over his failure to convince Congress to supporta more comprehensive reform of immigration laws. The nation’s changingdemographics bolstered Obama’s immigration initiatives. In 2005 Hispanicshad become the largest minority group in the nation, surpassing African Amer-icans. By 2012 the United States had more foreign-born and first-generationresidents than ever before, and each year 1 million more immigrants arrived.

T H E C O U RT RU L E S No sooner had Obama pushed his controversialhealth care plan through Congress in 2010 than opponents—state gover-nors, conservative organizations, businesses, and individual citizens, largelydivided along party lines—began challenging the constitutionality of thePatient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), which Republicanslabeled Obamacare. During the spring and summer of 2012, as the SupremeCourt deliberated over the merits of the PPACA, most observers expectedthe conservative justices to declare Obama’s most significant presidentialachievement unconstitutional. But that did not happen. On June 28, 2012,the Court issued its much-awaited decision in a case titled National Federa-tion of Independent Business v. Sebelius. The landmark 5-to-4 ruling surprised Court observers by declaring most of the new federal law constitu-tional. Even more surprising was that the deciding vote was cast by the chief

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justice, John G. Roberts, a philosophical conservative who had never beforevoted with the four “liberal” justices on the Court. Roberts upheld thePPACA’s “individual mandate,” requiring virtually every adult to buy privatehealth insurance or else pay a tax, arguing that it was within the Congress’spower to impose taxes as outlined in Article 1 of the Constitution. BecauseCongress had such authority, Justice Roberts declared, “it is not our role toforbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.” That would be up to thevoters who elect the members of Congress. Many conservatives, includingthe four dissenting justices, felt betrayed by Roberts’s unexpected ruling.The Court decision sent ripples through the 2012 presidential election cam-paign. The surprising verdict boosted Obama’s reelection chances, leadingthe New York Times to predict that the ruling “may secure Obama’s place inhistory.” Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachu-setts had signed a similar health care bill only to repudiate it once he decidedto run for president, promised to repeal the PPACA if elected.

As the November 2012 presidential election approached, it remained tobe seen whether President Obama could shift the focus of voters from thesluggish economy to cultural politics and social issues. Mitt Romney won theRepublican presidential nomination because he promised, as a former corporate executive, to accelerate economic growth. Romney sought todownplay volatile social issues, in part because of his inconsistent stances onhot-button topics such as abortion, gay marriage, and immigration reform.His shifting stances reflected a shift in the Republican strategy. Over the pastforty years, their conservative positions on social issues were vote-getters;now they feared that too much moralizing by the religious right ran the riskof alienating the independent voters who continue to be the decisive factorin presidential elections. The question for Romney was whether the still-powerful religious right would allow him to sidestep tough social issues; thequestion for Obama was whether he could sidestep his failure to restoreprosperity to an economy experiencing the slowest recession recovery sincethe 1930s.

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