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Getty Images, Pete Souza
represented the biggest road-building
programme the world had seen.
Now the US is widely seen as in need
of much more infrastructure
investment, ranking below many
other advanced countries in the
World Economic Forum’s annual
competitiveness league table: below
ANALYSIS
THE INVESTOR
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Under Obama, the US
has becomemore
committed to tackling
climate change
Japan, Germany, France and the UK
6
.
It would be unfair to be too
critical. Obamacare, despite its faults,
is in place, and his successors, for
all their rhetoric, will not rush to
dismantle it. It looks like a lasting
legacy, and there are others. Under
Obama, the US has become more
committed to tackling climate change.
Economic relations with China –
despite clashes on steel imports – have
improved. China is no longer accused of
currency manipulation.
But if there is a lesson from the
Obama presidency, it is that presidents
are most successful when they go
with the flow, and that means working
alongside Congress rather than
constantly doing battle with it. In 2008,
on winning the presidency, Obama
paid tribute to the ‘brave Americans
waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the
mountains of Afghanistan to risk their
lives for us.’
All but a small number of those
American soldiers have been brought
back home. Bringing home the troops
from foreign wars he did not initiate
has been an achievement of the Obama
presidency. Critics would say that it has
been accompanied by a more general
foreign policy disengagement by
the US under Obama, which has
played into the hands of Russia’s
Vladimir Putin and allowed a brutal
civil war in Syria to go unchecked.
Whether things will be any different
under the next occupant of the Oval
Office remains to be seen.
1
www.obamacarefacts.com, June 2016
2
www.useconomy.about.com, Feb 2016
3 www.bea.gov, 2016
4
www.bbc.co.uk/news,August 2011
5
www.bbc.co.uk,August 2011
6
http://reports.weforum.org, May 2016
His supporters say
‘Obamacare’ will be
the president’s lasting
political legacy
healed.The Obama economic legacy
was, perhaps, unintentionally creating
a climate in which those who pledged
to shake up the system – Donald
Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders
on the left – won high levels of support.
The president may have steered
America out of the financial crisis but
he has received few plaudits for his
economic legacy.
The Obama stimulus has yet to make
a significant impact on investment in US
infrastructure. Once its infrastructure
was the envy of the world, as when
the interstate highways programme
was begun under President Dwight
D Eisenhower in the 1950s and
Balance sheet
The leaders of the US and China both
wield considerable power, but both are restricted by
their very different forms of government.