Knowing a President by the Fights He Picks

Well.

If you are tabulating Barack Obama’s legacy in American politics, you will note some fundamental changes he ushered in: He expanded the boundaries of majoritarianism by destroying the filibuster and dramatically expanding the welfare state on a party-line vote. After being rebuked by voters and losing control of the House, he enlarged executive power to an almost cartoonish degree. And all along the way he encouraged lawlessness by picking and choosing the laws to be enforced, rather than going to the trouble of repealing or changing laws with which he disagreed. This runs the risk of reducing America to a banana republic, where the laws are whatever the current jefe says they are, at the moment.

Yet of all the changes the Obama years introduced to American politics, the most destructive may turn out to be his eager embrace of identity politics.

One of the ironies of Obama’s political career is that he came to prominence by giving a speech smoothing over and minimizing political differences. In his 2004 speech at the Democratic convention in Boston, Obama insisted that, at heart, we Americans are all pretty much alike, holding similar beliefs and wanting the same things for our nation.

But from the moment he was sworn in (literally from that moment—his 2009 Inaugural Address was extraordinarily divisive), President Obama went out of his way to pit groups of Americans against one another.

First, there was his decision to send his Justice Department after the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School, in Redford, Michigan. The school had fired a “called” teacher and was sued by Obama’s EEOC on the grounds that churches could only apply the ministerial exception to hiring and firing rules—that is, the exception guaranteed by the Constitution’s provision for freedom of religion—to people whose duties were solely ministerial.

It’s difficult to overstate how radical this position was. Consider that even Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would join the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion against the EEOC, calling its interpretation “extreme.” (At oral arguments, Justice Elena Kagan called the government’s contention “amazing.”)

What looked at first like a one-off mistake turned out to be a pattern. Obama used his Health and Human Services Department to insist that all employers were required, under Obama-care, to provide coverage for contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization—even religious employers like the Little Sisters of the Poor.

It’s important to understand that this was a purely administrative—not a legal—decision. The entire Rube Goldberg machinery of Obama-care is run on exemptions and waivers and delays, where the text of the Affordable Care Act says one thing and Obama’s administration simply decides to do another. But in the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor, Obama actively decided to prosecute the nuns and break them on the rock of contraception and abortifacient coverage. It was a war of choice.

As with Hosanna-Tabor, Obama ultimately lost the battle—the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the president. But he won the war, because his persecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor was part of the broader strategy of his 2012 reelection campaign, which was predicated in part on the idea that Republicans were waging a “war on women.”

And it worked: Obama ran up huge margins among unmarried women, to go along with his historic margins among African Americans, millennials, and Hispanics. The lesson of 2012 was that, as distasteful as it might be, identity politics works.

There was more. In the run-up to the 2012 election, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security issued a directive forbidding Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from deporting certain illegal immigrants under the age of 30. That was his way of circumventing the reforms in the DREAM Act that he couldn’t achieve legislatively. Two weeks after the 2014 midterm election, Obama went further, declaring—again by executive fiat—amnesty for roughly 3.5 million illegal immigrants.

At every turn, you could see Obama seeking to reinforce the idea that his supporters were locked in a struggle against the Other. On June 26, 2015, after the Supreme Court created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage with the Obergefell ruling, Obama had the White House illuminated in rainbow colors. Why did he do it? Obama had campaigned against same-sex marriage in 2008. He did it because turning the White House into a symbol of support for same-sex marriage was spiking the football—a way not to convert persuadable citizens, but to emphasize to his supporters that this was a victory for Us against Them.

And then there were the bathrooms. In May of last year, the Obama administration issued a joint letter from the departments of Education and Justice saying that all public schools must allow students to use whatever bathroom facilities they choose—or risk losing their federal funding. Again, there was no practical reason for Obama’s edict. It was a solution in search of a problem—and one that promised to create conflict rather than quell it. It was a cynical way to try to highlight political divisions along the lines of personal identity.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t cynical. This may be how Obama genuinely views the world. The first time Obama showed his instincts for identity politics came in April 2008, after the Pennsylvania primary, which he had lost to Hillary Clinton by 10 points. In what would turn out to be a nearly perfect preview of his presidency, Obama told an audience in San Francisco:

It turns out that the bitter clingers were paying attention. Because in 2016, they figured out how to make identity politics work for them.

Over the last eight years, Repub-licans warned, repeatedly, that the Obama mode of governance would be harmful to the body politic. Now Democrats face Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, a president with a seemingly unlimited view of executive power, and a movement that has found a way to harness the power of identity politics for its own side.

Barack Obama truly was the transformational president he sought to be. Perhaps, at some point, Democrats will want to have a conversation with him about that.

Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.