Is President Obama's real legacy Donald Trump? Mastio & Lawrence

David: Barack Obama is a good man. We are going to miss him. In the years since World War II, he is the only president other than George H. W. Bush whom I'd let marry one of my daughters. But you don’t judge a president by his character alone. You judge a president by the results, and Obama’s results can be summarized in two words: Donald Trump. 

Trump is the creation of the fear and uncertainty that Obama allowed to fester and swell for eight years. When Obama rattled off the list of his administration’s accomplishments at the beginning of his farewell address this week, instead of highlighting strength, he showcased shallow achievements.

He cited reversing a recession, rebooting the auto industry and a historic stretch of job creation. He neglected to mention eight unprecedented years of near-zero interest rates and a Federal Reserve policy that injected trillions of dollars in paper stimulus into the U.S. economy. It produced some good results, but it also gave us historically slow economic growth and paper-thin productivity gains, and it left us overdue for a recession at a time when the Federal Reserve does not have access to its most powerful policy tools to reverse a correction.

He cited Cuba relations, the Iran deal and the killing of Osama bin Laden on foreign policy — an irrelevancy that has yet to bear fruit, a source of fear for many Americans and one genuine accomplishment. He neglected to mention that the world is on a hair trigger for war in East Asia, a Middle East that is aflame and spreading terror throughout the West, and a resurgent Russia that invaded a country on the edge of NATO.

He cited marriage equality, which would be a historic victory if he had achieved it through the democracy he spent all night claiming to revere instead of through legal chicanery and blatant dishonesty. Many Americans look at the Supreme Court’s actions as the latest insanity from a culture that has spun out of control.

And he cited 20 million newly insured, most of them not through real reform but from a simple expansion of Medicaid spending that many Americans doubt we can afford.

All that he has achieved could disappear in a few months, and the scary cultural and economic trends that many Americans fear remain. “America is a better and a stronger place than it was when we started,” the president said in his farewell address Tuesday. If Americans agreed with him, his legacy would not be a man whose road to the White House was paved with the fears he left unaddressed.  

Jill: Your take reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s response when Trump said she had been ruining the economy for 30 years and trying to destroy the Islamic State terrorist group for her entire adult life: “I have a feeling that by the end of the evening, I will be blamed for everything that's ever happened."

The world is on a hair trigger, the Middle East aflame, Russia is on the move, and it’s all Obama's fault? What should he have done? Another dozen-year war? Another futile round of nation-building? Another reason for terrorists to hate us? All at astronomical cost and likely tragedy? He was elected twice expressly to avoid all that, even as the destabilizing consequences of George W. Bush’s adventurism echoed all around us. I never saw any good options for Obama or America. I do see praiseworthy diplomatic achievements in the Cuba opening, the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement, and the iron discipline to avoid more quagmires. 

I don’t blame a national epidemic of fear and uncertainty for Trump. I blame Russia, the FBI, the Clinton campaign, U.S. voters who decided to take a flyer and — you’ll love this — Obama’s reserve, even timidity.

He could have been a much better salesman for policy achievements that, unlike you, many of us view as historic. Exhibit A is the point you raise, that many Americans think we can’t afford an expansion of Medicaid to cover their fellow Americans. I don’t know if that’s what people think. But it’s a fact that countries with far less wealth than ours manage to insure all their citizens. Of course we can afford it. To paraphrase George H.W. Bush, we have the wallet, we just need the will.

Sadly, even if Obama had been a salesman on the order of Trump, he would have been speaking into a void. Democrats ran from their own health reform law despite the popularity of most of its components, and donors never financed the saturation ad campaigns that might have made clear what the law did. There was no daily, months-long America-held-hostage offensive for Merrick Garland, Obama’s doomed Supreme Court nominee. Obama was too polite, too restrained, too calm. He was polite about Garland. He was polite when he could have and should have sounded a massive alarm about Russian attempts to swing the election to Trump.

He was even polite and upbeat in his farewell address. After all the GOP and Trump have done to thwart and insult him, he gave his successor a great gift by referring to him as a “freely elected president.” And he hushed the boos that provoked, even as new intelligence documents alleged Russia had been trying to compromise and cultivate Trump for five years.

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David: Obama took over after a president who made quite a number of mistakes and the president before that punted on problems that will be left to President Trump. (North Korea for one.) Of course it is not all Obama’s fault. But when you are the president, it is ALL your responsibility.

Obama did not stick to his promises to back us out of war abroad. He clumsily backed us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps doing more harm than good in the process. Now we’re intimately and violently involved in conflicts in Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere in Africa in an ever widening war against terrorism. Along the way, Obama abandoned the Bush torture policy but replaced it with a claim that he is authorized to sign the death warrants of Americans overseas. The torturer in chief was replaced by the judge, jury and executioner in chief. That is not progress.

Quite admirably, Obama spoke of the need to get outside of our self-imposed news bubbles and get to know the people we disagree with. He was right when he said we can’t demonize people if we are going to compromise with them as the Founding Fathers intended.

I just wish that guy was in charge for the past eight years. Nothing he did during his presidency is more responsible for this Trump moment than his demonization of Mitt Romney as an extreme racist recklessly bent on reigniting the Cold War with Russia. It might have won Obama the 2012 election, but it surely did as much violence to our shared reality as Trump’s unhinged 2016 campaign.

Obama also made some excuses for his record on race relations. I think he has made some important steps in addressing the legitimate concerns of Black Lives Matter activists that are shared by all decent Americans, but he also presided over a distressing decline in race relations. To judge by campus drama and social media, we are in the midst of the greatest wave of racism since the Ku Klux Klan terrorized the South.

Obama’s words acknowledging racial progress have always been the right ones, but his fundamental message has always been that race remains the largest impediment to success by African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities. His farewell address was no different as he struck down the straw men that white people need to get over the idea that racism ended in the 1960s. Nobody thinks that. We have just noticed that the Civil Rights Act passed more than a half-century ago and things have gotten better since.

He could have been a president who united an America proud that the African-American interracial child of an immigrant being elected president was a sign that the United States was ready for a new stage in race relations. Instead, he doubled down on using racial statistics to make government decisions and missed a huge opportunity to change things for the better. History will not take that lightly.  

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Jill: Your memory of 2012 is much different from mine. I recall Obama’s campaign against Romney as utterly conventional and within bounds. If anything, the racially tinged attacks were directed at Obama. He was the one who got called “the food stamp president” and endured the whole Trump-fueled birther scam to make people believe he wasn’t born in America. Whose supporters Romney dismissed as government-dependent moochers who'd never take responsibility for themselves.

And speaking of racism, if it’s true as you say that nobody thinks it ended in the 1960s, then why is there so much opposition to continued efforts to try to right past wrongs that still haunt the lives of black Americans? For instance, lingering legacies of housing, education and policing discrimination that require our attention and in some cases remedies? Why did North Carolina Republicans tailor their voting law to limit black turnout?

Race continues to be a huge impediment to economic progress and sometimes even to staying alive. Obama recognized that reality even as by his very presence in his office he inflamed prejudices and fears. This was another no-win dilemma for him. But I am optimistic that we did indeed cross a bridge of no return with his election. It’ll just take some time and perspective to settle in.

Maybe it’s already happening. Just in the hours before Obama’s address, these were the polls: Quinnipiac, with Obama at 55% approval and Trump at 37%. Gallup, with Obama at 56%. Pew Research, with Trump at 39%.

You are probably thinking, doesn't she have anything bad or even mildly disapproving to say about Obama? The truth is, I don't expect to ever agree more with a president of any party in my lifetime. He just thinks about policy and governing the same way I do, and is obviously in no way compatible with your way of seeing things. 

But the Trump reckoning is coming. At least on this we can agree.

David Mastio, a libertarian conservative, is the deputy editor of USA TODAY's Editorial Page. Jill Lawrence, a center-left liberal, is the commentary editor of USA TODAY. Follow them on Twitter @DavidMastio and @JillDLawrence.

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