Finally, the Obama I fell in love with

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/17/obama-love-reforms

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Week by week, as he gets closer to the finish line, it’s becoming clearer that Barack Obama is more of the president I hoped he could be back when I was blindly in love with him. This has felt especially true as he’s been taking on violence in many forms, countering a lame duck narrative by battling for peace, from Iran to incarceration to the intimate violence of rape.

The year before I became a professional journalist, I was so hard up for him that I spent the autumn of 2008 living in dinky Doylestown, Pennsylvania and volunteering on his campaign. In wanting to do everything I could to ensure Obama was our first black president, and because of the Electoral College, living among that town’s 8,337 swing residents was more important than being among New York City’s millions of reliably democratic votes.

I was fascinated by Obama’s story as a black and mixed American, of course. But I was also deeply hoping he’d govern for LGBT rights and against foreign military violence, after the ultra violent George W Bush years.

Somewhat naively, I was hoping Obama could help the United States become a less violent country.

I have felt no shortage of disillusionment with the Obama administration over the years; and history is certain to remember him as the drone president who failed (so far) to shutter Guantánamo. But as those 10 days in June showed last month, Obama also has a great tenacity in addressing (and occasionally even mitigating) certain forms of violence: the financial violence of being uninsured, the legal violence of homophobia and the state-sponsored racialized violence of the Confederate flag on government land.

And this month, Obama is swinging for the fences still, during a presidential period in which the commander-in-chief has historically been overshadowed by those seeking to replace him.

The Iran deal marks a shift in America’s approach to waging economic violence abroad in the form of sanctions. Consider that, in 2013, during the same week sabres were rattling to wage war with Syria, Obama somehow pivoted to beginning talks for peace with Iran. During the intervening 19 months, his administration also began to roll back the violence of the economic embargo with Cuba. While George W Bush ended his two terms trying to escalate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has dialed down those battlefronts overwhelmingly, while also trying to make sure diplomacy trumps the mass destruction of economic sanctions.

Regarding the violence of mass incarceration, Obama has gone where no sitting president has gone before - quite literally, in visiting a federal prison on Thursday. In addressing the NAACP on reducing incarceration and personally calling for the return of felons’ voting rights (he’d previously done so through Attorney General Eric Holder, long the president’s point man on race before he left the administration for a crude and shameful job), Obama boxed Bill Clinton into having to tell the NAACP that he was wrong in violently going on the lock-up war path in the 1990s. This will force Hillary to denounce Bill and face mass incarceration, something she’s already had to address (but without having to acknowledge Bill’s role as Incarcerator-in-chief).

Seeing the black president talk about incarceration, and how he could have wound up in a nine by ten foot cell with two other disenfranchised felons if his youth had led him down another path, will get Americans to understand the violence of incarceration in new ways. Many people who know intellectually that the US accounts for 5% of the world’s population – but houses a quarter of the world’s inmates. But hearing that message from the leader of the free world as he stands enclosed in prison walls will make that statistic resonate more deeply.

Obama has been much less cool and detached about matters of race of late, much more fiery than he was while first addressing Ferguson last summer. There has been less equivocation in his direct denouncements of the insidious ways racism plays out. He’s been similarly blunt lately when talking about the violence of sexual assault, saying Wednesday: “Any civilized country should have no tolerance for rape,” adding “If you give a woman – or a man, for that matter, without his or her knowledge – a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape.”

Obama has a long way to go on violence. He denounced the use of solitary confinement this week, but has previously defended its use for Chelsea Manning. He has more harshly perpetuated the violence of deportation than any other president. He has let the violent perpetrators of the Great Recession, which may have led to 10,000 suicides, go unpunished. When his drone fleet carries out its attacks, the US isn’t even sure who they are killing. And he has failed entirely in his whole hearted-attempts to rein in gun violence, and may not be able to close Guantánamo.

But on many fronts, Obama has been the opposite of his predecessor and of his bellicose opponent, John McCain. In ways, he has been trying to get us on a course that is less violent and more interested in diplomacy and in alternatives to incarceration, in a world where women, LGBT people and people of color are subjected to less systematic oppression. He wants the young black men of My Brother’s Keeper to know: “you matter.”

And from his words, Obama seems imbued in his penultimate year with a fierce urgency of now – much like he did when he was running for office.