What should president obama do

Partisan divisions in assessments of presidential performance, for example, are wider now than at any point going back more than six decades, and this growing gap is largely the result of increasing disapproval of the chief executive from the opposition party.

Notes: Data from Eisenhower through George H. Bush from Gallup. Because some earlier data did not include partisan leaning, Republicans and Democrats in this graphic do not include leaners. Source: Survey conducted Nov. Today, more issues cleave along partisan lines than at any point since surveys began to track public opinion. Beginning around , however, they began to diverge. And the gap has only grown wider since then: Democrats today are more than twice as likely as Republicans to say that immigrants strengthen the country.

Gun control has long been a partisan issue, with Democrats considerably more likely than Republicans to say it is more important to control gun ownership than protect gun rights. But what was a percentage-point gap between supporters of Obama and John McCain on this question in surged to a historic point gap between Clinton and Trump supporters in Climate change marks another area where the parties are deeply divided.

Wide partisan divides stretch from the causes and cures for climate change to trust in climate scientists and their research. This compares with more than half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Americans felt disillusioned with the way Washington responded to the financial meltdown of Against a backdrop of global terrorism — including several attacks on American soil — Americans also became less confident in the ability of their government to handle threats.

Americans also had serious concerns about privacy, though the government was not the sole focus of skepticism in this respect. During the Obama years, Americans were highly skeptical their personal information would remain private and secure, regardless of whether it was the government or the private sector that collected it.

In a survey, fewer than one-in-ten Americans said they were very confident that each of 11 separate entities — ranging from credit card companies to email providers — would keep their records private and secure.

In Germany, favorability of the U. In the United Kingdom, confidence in the U. The Obama bump was most dramatic in Western Europe, but was also evident in virtually every country surveyed between and But the U. Russian views of the U. Meanwhile, certain U. Americans, meanwhile, have become less certain of their place in the world. The share of Americans who say it would be better if the U. Roughly half of Americans say U. About half of Americans say the U.

If demographic changes are slow, technological changes can be swift. In the new millennium, major technology revolutions have occurred in broadband connectivity, social media use and mobile adoption. With the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other apps, social media use climbed to about three-quarters of online adults by Obama also helped usher in the rise of digital video in politics, sharing his weekly address through the White House YouTube channel. By the end of his second term, YouTube had become a media behemoth with over a billion users.

The rise of digital tools and social platforms has also helped bring about profound changes in the U. Americans today access information, get news and engage with politicians in new and different ways than in — a trend underscored by the political success of Trump, whose frequent use of Twitter to communicate directly with supporters and detractors was one of the defining narratives of his campaign to succeed Obama. In , more U. Cable TV, by contrast, remained among the most helpful sources for all other adults.

In , relatively few Americans said they got their news through social media or via a smartphone or other mobile device. By , six-in-ten Americans said they got their news through social media and seven-in-ten said they accessed it through a mobile device. Print newspapers continued a long-term decline, with sharp cuts in newspaper staffing and a severe dip in average circulation. Likewise, Obama and his allies insist that our national approach to energy and the environment must be based on the recognition that we are embedded in an intricate system of ecological linkages.

In Obama's view, we have recklessly spewed carbon into the atmosphere because of poor decisions about housing, transportation, and electricity use — ignoring the web that ties them all together.

Here, too, the answer is a system of energy supply that brings to bear the latest scientific research: A proposed "cap-and-trade" program will establish standards for measuring and regulating the emission of carbon; and a nationally interlinked web for energy transmission will carry renewable energy from wherever it is produced to wherever it is needed, no matter the distance.

Our education system, too, is chaotic and disorganized, according to Obama. Too many states and localities are going in too many different directions, and Washington "has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline," as he put it to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Again, the president argues, the solution is a more uniform application of expert guidance and direction.

And that trajectory should be enabled by one overarching system, because "it's time to move beyond the idea that we need several different programs to address several different problems — we need one comprehensive policy that addresses our comprehensive challenges.

In one policy area after another — from transportation to science, urban policy to auto policy — Obama's formulation is virtually identical: selfishness or ideological rigidity has led us to look at the problem in isolated pieces rather than as an all-encompassing system; we must put aside parochialism to take the long systemic view; and when we finally formulate a uniform national policy supported by empirical and objective data rather than shallow, insular opinion, we will arrive at solutions that are not only more effective but less costly as well.

This is the mantra of the policy presidency. And overseeing each of these policy areas will be a "czar," attuned to the big picture. This key presidential aide — almost invariably a policy expert rather than a political figure — will coordinate the activities of the various departments through which the intricate policy web is woven, and focus the latest expert advice and counsel on his particular segment of the problem of the whole.

How will the Obama policy-approach presidency fare? We can find a clue in the unrest stirred by his growing list of "czars. These cavils are unlikely to prompt serious action, but they do remind us of the persistence of our constitutional system of checks and balances and of a Senate jealous of its prerogatives.

And that points to a central vulnerability of the policy-approach presidency. To be successful by its own definition, each of its policies must necessarily be rational, coherent, and all-encompassing, whether the issue is health care, energy, or education. And yet, as the early Progressives knew all too well, critical elements of the constitutional system — the executive cabinet, federal decentralization, the separation of powers, and the extended commercial republic — serve to shred and fragment policy proposals as they make their way from the minds of their expert designers through departmental bureaucracy and legislative committees not to mention their hearings in the court of public opinion.

Once enacted, the execution of policy is similarly trammeled by our political system's fragmented dispersal of administrative authority. The result is often policy that is irrational, incoherent, and partial. Policies not designed to take account of that reality usually turn to mush in practice. This failure to heed the realities of our politics often first presents itself in the form of an overly ambitious agenda that ignores the nature of the legislative process.

Pressed to take on too much at once in pursuit of holistic reform, the system overheats quickly and easily. President Jimmy Carter discovered the risks of this approach when, as political scientist James Ceaser reminds us, he pursued his own version of a policy presidency. The Carter administration therefore generated a flood of elaborate and complex proposals covering energy, housing, welfare reform, income policy, families, neighborhoods, and urban affairs, among other issues.

To take urban affairs as an example, Carter's call for "A New Partnership" insisted that we "must carefully plan the total range of Federal, State, and local actions" in urban areas. To accomplish this, the partnership laid out, as urban planner Charles Orlebeke put it, an "elaborate edifice" of seven governing principles, four goals, ten policies, and 38 strategies for implementation.

Carter promised to "work with, encourage, support and stimulate every other level of government plus the private sector and neighborhood groups — all at the same time with equal fervor. The administration's "complex and ambitious program seemed to confuse the public and ultimately to paralyze the operation of government," Ceaser notes, leaving it little to show for all its technocratic bustle. By contrast, Carter's successor Ronald Reagan deliberately limited his proposals to Congress to one or two top priority items at a time, having learned precisely this lesson from Carter's failures.

Obama has taken his stand with the comprehensive approach, noting repeatedly that while there are "some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time," in fact "we don't have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.

He insists that, following the intractable interconnectedness of the pieces of his recovery plan, all the areas of concern must be covered immediately, simultaneously, and in a coordinated fashion. The comprehensive policies themselves must all fit into a larger comprehensive policy.

Only thereby will they cohere into a uniform and truly comprehensive "new foundation" for the revival of the economy. But as Obama's proposals begin their journeys through the requisite institutional hoops, they will inevitably begin to lose their coherence and uniformity. A policy czar may entertain a single, overarching vision, but the various and often conflicting cabinet secretaries under his supervision, along with their vast attendant bureaucracies, may have very different interpretations of that vision and of how it is to be implemented.

The Obama agenda is particularly vulnerable to congressional distortions of executive intentions, owing to what might be an over-corrective reaction to the lessons of President Bill Clinton's health-care reform proposal — which died without a congressional vote in The Clinton administration, too, embraced a version of the policy approach, believing that health-care reform could be accomplished only by addressing all the pieces within a coherent and unified system.

Clinton, too, argued that the nation's economic recovery from the recession of the early s depended on it. His Task Force on Health Care Reform brought together more than experts from all relevant federal departments, legislative staffs, governors' offices, and universities to produce a massive, 1,page proposal. It covered every conceivable aspect of health care — down to establishing limits on the number of specialists that medical schools could produce.

Yet as the New York Times 's Matt Bai has observed, "Ever jealous of its prerogative, Congress took a long look, yawned and kicked the whole plan to the gutter, where it soon washed away for good — along with much of Clinton's ambition for his presidency. On the surface, Obama seems to have absorbed the moral of that failure. He has begun the process of revamping health care and environmental policy by proclaiming general principles that any plan must feature, while leaving the specifics of the programs to Congress.

But it remains to be seen whether a Congress reflecting a vast array of contending geographic and economic interests can produce the sort of internally consistent and comprehensive proposal that the policy approach considers essential for success.

Obama has articulated criteria for measuring the value of a plan that are out of line with his decision to leave the plan's construction to Congress. In reality, the Clinton and Obama models are not all that different. Sooner or later, one way or another, the exquisite workings of policy experts must be subjected to the brute judgment of elected officials, who have not lost their quaint if inefficient attachments to the varied desires, needs, and interests of their constituents.

The sheer intellectual coherence of a plan does not protect it from the need to justify itself to the American constitutional system. The policy approach has not overcome democratic politics, and so remains a profoundly problematic way to try to govern our democracy. Progressivism was initially attracted to social science precisely because it would permit us to avoid or transcend political conflict grounded in irresolvable economic and moral differences.

Meticulous empirical research that assembled all available data about a given problem would, Progressives believed, provide a solid, indisputable, shared ground for subsequent deliberation.

Indeed, social-science data would be so compelling that the solution to the problem would likely emerge from its own scientifically rigorous description. It's not just that facts would be more important than values: Facts would suggest the most plausible values. Or, as the American pragmatists believed, what works best to help us grasp and shape reality becomes the moral good. We find traces of this thinking in The Audacity of Hope. It also aims to quell the shrill exchange of equal because equally baseless opinions that, in his view, has come to characterize American politics.

Where available — and Obama intends to multiply the situations where they are available — pure non-political facts will provide the grounds for the resolution of policy questions, fulfilling Progressivism's faith in the natural and social sciences.

But what then to say about the increasing use of social-science data by conservative scholars, who seem to use it to provoke and sustain, rather than to ameliorate, partisan conflict with Progressive reformers? Some liberals simply insist that what conservative scholars produce is inferior or false social science, because it is produced in service of ideology rather than objective truth.

Eric Wanner, former president of the liberal Russell Sage Foundation, insists that "the AEIs and the Heritages of the world represent the inversion of the Progressive faith that social science should shape social policy. But the notion that there is true and false social science relies on our ability to locate a fixed and universally accepted standard according to which we can say that some conclusions are beyond dispute because they are empirically true.

Certainly that was the initial Progressive vision for social science. Yet the policy and social sciences have come nowhere close to such a standard in assessing society. In , Edward Banfield wrote that the "persistent efforts of reformers to do away with politics and to put social science and other expertise in its place are not to be accounted for by the existence of a body of knowledge about how to solve social problems," because no such body exists. Indeed, he continued, "there are few social science theories or findings that could be of much help to a policy maker.

Ten years later, Ronald Brunner noted in Policy Sciences that it was difficult to assess the usefulness of the policy movement, because its "various parts tend to differ in their judgments of the relevant standards, data, and inferences to be drawn from them, whenever their judgments are made explicit"; nonetheless, the policy approach's "results typically have fallen short of the aspirations for rational, objective analysis.

Mr Obama's financial reform legislation also could be poised for weakening, as it was frequently the target of Mr Trump's anti-regulation ire. Although conservatives liked to criticise Mr Obama's efforts to bolster US companies as "picking winners and losers", early evidence Carrier, Ford Motors, etc indicates that's one tradition Mr Trump appears likely to continue, albeit with a sharper edge for businesses that don't comply to his wishes.

Mr Obama will leave the White House with two prominent feathers in his foreign policy cap - the Iran nuclear deal and normalised relations with Cuba. Say what you will about the merits of the accomplishments and many have , they represent a notable thawing in relations between the US and two long-time antagonists. He also oversaw the drawdown of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan - fulfilling a key campaign promise.

Elsewhere, however, the president's international policy has been characterised by strained relations and festering problems. His planned "reset" of US-Russian relations upon taking office was followed by the nation's Ukrainian intervention and allegations of meddling in the US presidential election.

The Arab Spring uprisings that began in spread unrest throughout the Middle East, culminating in a Syrian Civil War that facilitated the rise of the so-called Islamic State and a devastating refugee crisis that has roiled European politics. North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons programme seemingly undeterred, and Mr Obama's plans for an "Asian pivot" in US foreign policy have done little to keep Chinese regional ambitions in check.

Responsibility for this global unrest can't all be laid at Mr Obama's feet, of course, but it's a mark on his permanent record nonetheless.

Trump-ability: Mr Trump has criticised the Iranian nuclear deal, although unlike some other Republicans he hasn't vowed to abandon it entirely. He may find renegotiating the multi-party agreement more difficult than he might think. As for Cuba, he has the executive authority to roll back all of Mr Obama's diplomatic overtures to the communist island, including relaxed sanctions and travel restrictions - although he's kept his options open so far.

The president-elect also seems more likely to favour closer relations to Israel and a renewed attempt at improving relations with Russia a re-reset. In Syria, he has criticised Mr Obama's actions but hasn't advocated a coherent counter-policy, so there's no telling how - or if - he'll change course.

One thing is for certain, however. At least rhetorically the Trump administration will be a marked departure from Mr Obama's internationalist foreign policy, which leaned heavily on co-operation and co-ordination with allies. The long-term trend of declining crime rates continued over the past eight years, although a number of large cities have seen a recent uptick in their murder rates.

While public safety was a campaign issue, much of Mr Obama's efforts while president were directed at criminal justice reform. In he signed a law that brought the mandatory minimum prison time for crack cocaine possession - which disproportionately involves black drug offenders - more in line with powder cocaine sentences.

In January , Mr Obama took a series of executive actions to limit the use of solitary confinement in federal prisons and provide greater treatment for inmates with mental health issues.

He has also used his presidential power to commute the sentences of more than 1, non-violent drug offenders and supported a Justice Department policy that resulted in the early release of about 6, individuals.

Although Mr Obama has backed bipartisan sentencing reform legislation in Congress, the presidential election - and Mr Trump's tough-on-crime rhetoric - has been attributed with frustrating those efforts.

Gun control wasn't a top priority for Mr Obama when he took office, but in the early months of his second term - after the mass shooting of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut - Mr Obama made a strong push for greater restrictions on some types of military-style semi-automatic rifles and more thorough background checks for firearm purchases.

Those efforts ran head-on into the National Rifle Association's formidable lobbying power, however, and aside from a few executive actions, no new policies were enacted. In , Mr Obama told the BBC that his failure in this area was his greatest frustration as president. Presidential grade: B-. Trump-ability: Given that Mr Trump regularly painted a bleak picture of crime levels in the US, lamented that law enforcement was too constrained by "political correctness" and opined that prison inmates were being treated too well, it's safe to say he will pursue a decidedly different course on public safety than Mr Obama.

Sentencing reform - in limbo for the past year - will be an exceedingly low priority for Republicans in Congress now, and Mr Obama's gun-control executive actions are likely to face the chopping block. There was a point, shortly after Mr Obama's re-election in , where comprehensive immigration reform seemed inevitable.

The president and his fellow Democrats were in favour, and rattled Republicans saw granting permanent residency to some undocumented workers and streamlining the US immigration system as a means to curry favour with the growing bloc of Hispanic voters. A grass-roots revolt within the Republican Party derailed those plans, prompting Mr Obama to take a series of executive actions providing normalised status to undocumented immigrants who entered the US as children and the immigrant families of US citizens and permanent residents.

The latter policy has since been suspended during a protracted legal battle over its constitutionality. While these efforts attracted widespread praise from pro-immigration activists and Hispanic groups, the Obama administration's policy of increasing removal of other undocumented immigrants has prompted some to call him the "deporter in chief".

From to , the Obama administration deported more than 2. Presidential grade: B. Trump-ability: Mr Trump may very well drop the US defence of the portion of Mr Obama's immigration action that's currently under legal challenge. He could also unilaterally resume deportation of others given normalised status by Mr Obama's executive efforts, although that will be more controversial.

The president-elect has pledged to deport more than three million undocumented immigrants currently living in the US - including visitors who have overstayed their visas - although given Mr Obama's track record it may be a difference of extent, not substance. At one point, Mr Trump was pledging to remove everyone not lawfully in the US - more than 11 million by most estimates - which would be a marked departure not just from Mr Obama's policies but those of every modern US president.

Whatever his other successes during his time in office, Mr Obama's presidency was a beating for the Democratic Party. In , when Mr Obama was swept to power, Democrats had large majorities in the US Congress and control of 29 of 50 governorships.