Obama presidency the focus of Hofstra University conference

Barack Obama clinched the presidency in 2008 and knocked down the racial barrier to the nation’s highest office — vowing to unite Red and Blue America and enact once-in-a-generation policy shifts: universal health care, closing the military detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, creating a path to citizenship for immigrants living illegally in the United States.

“Yes, we can,” Obama promised.

It didn’t all go as planned.

A conference that began Wednesday and continues Thursday and Friday at Hofstra University examines the Obama presidency — what went right, what went wrong and the 44th chief executive’s legacy.

“Obama’s road to the White House was unexpected. His victory marked a historic moment in American politics — the election of the nation’s first African American president," said Meena Bose, Hofstra’s executive dean for public policy and public service programs, who's head of the conference. "Obama was elected on a platform of moving beyond traditional political debates and differences to build unity — to move past red and blue divisions. But putting that into practice proved to be much more difficult than anticipated."

Bose, also a Hofstra political-science professor, added: “And so I think that the Obama presidency really illustrates the promise of hope for change in America, as well as the difficulty of achieving that change.”

Among those speaking at the conference — “The Barack Obama Presidency: Hope and Change” — are administration alumni, academics and journalists: former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett; former White House chief of staff and U.S. treasury secretary Jacob Lew; former White House director of legislative affairs Philip Schiliro; presidential historian Douglas Brinkley; former U.S. Rep. Steve Israel; former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes; and Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama's chief of staff from 2011 to 2017.

The conference is Hofstra’s 13th on presidents. Previous such conferences have covered every chief executive since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton came to the conferences about themselves, Bose said; Obama isn’t expected to. 

The Obama conference was supposed to be in 2021, but the coronavirus pandemic forced a postponement.

Obama’s campaign promises yielded mixed results: He kept a promise to order the killing of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But Obama didn't keep his promise to bring U.S. troops home from two major wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving office with U.S. forces still involved those conflicts. He promised single-payer health care but signed Obamacare, the nation's biggest expansion of health insurance since Medicaid and Medicare in 1965. Guantánamo Bay remains open. And no path to citizenship was created; he did enact, by executive action, a contested program to legalize the immigration status of foreign-born immigrants who were brought here illegally as children.

Among the Hofstra faculty scheduled to present is Alan J. Singer, an education professor, historian and former high school social science teacher.

Singer will be speaking about Obama’s education policy, as carried out largely by his secretary of education, Arne Duncan.

“In many ways, the Obama-Duncan educational record was a continuation of initiatives that began during the Bush presidency — the Common Core testing, the focus on data to evaluate teachers and schools and districts,” Singer said.

Nevertheless, Singer said, Obama’s policy modified expectations set out during the Bush years, and provided grants to districts “as a carrot to get them to adopt the testing policies,” said Singer, a critic of the Obama administration’s focus on testing.