APUSH Chapter 41

Afghanistan

Afghanistan was a pricklier nettle to grasp. Obama had declared that the Afghan war was necessary to defeat Al Qaeda and prevent future terrorism. But Afghan jihadi (militant Islamic) fighters grew stronger against an Afghan government plagued by incompetence and corruption. More ominously, the Taliban and Al Qaeda found refuge across the border in unstable but nuclear-armed Pakistan, posing the danger of an expanded conflict there as well. Pressed by some to deepen the American commitment, and by others to seek a way out of the increasingly costly conflict, Obama chose to do both. In December 2009 he declared that American troops would begin withdrawing by 2011—but that in order to achieve that goal he was deploying an additional thirty thousand U.S. soldiers to combat the insurgency. Despite this deployment and a new counterinsurgency strategy, little political progress was made in forging an agreement with Taliban forces in Afghanistan and securing the country from terrorists, even as casualties mounted.

Democrats

After an intense round of primary elections, the embattled Democrats chose lanky and long-jawed Massachusetts senator John Kerry to represent their ticket. Kerry pushed progressive visions of government and counted on his Vietnam War record to counter charges that he would be weak in the face of terrorism.

Midterm Elections

As charges of dictatorial power-grabbing, cronyism, and incompetence mounted during Bush's second term, Republicans fell victim in the midterm elections of 2006 to the same anti-incumbency sentiment they had ridden to power twelve years earlier. Democrats narrowly regained control of both houses of Congress for the first time since they had lost them to the Gingrich revolution of 1994. California Democrat Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House.

Inequality

Between 1968 and 2012, the share of the nation's income that flowed to the top 20 percent of its households swelled from 40 percent to 51 percent. Even more striking was the remarkable increase in inequality among those top earners. The top 5 percent of income earners saw their share of the national income grow from about 15 percent in 1968 to 22.3 percent in 2012. And as for the top 1 percent so frequently targeted in the Occupy movement's rhetoric, their share of national income rose from 8.4 percent in 1968 to a whopping 19.3 percent in 2012. Widening inequality could be measured in other ways as well. In 1965, chief executives typically earned 20 times as much as the average worker in their corporations; in 2012, they earned 273 times as much. Some 46.5 million people remained mired in poverty in 2012, or 15 percent of all Americans—up from 11.3 percent in 1973 (approximately 9.7 percent of non-Latino whites, 27.2 percent of African Americans, 25.6 percent of Latinos, and 11.7 percent of Asians).

Obama's Reaction

Candidate Obama seized the political opportunity presented by the mounting economic crisis and declared that electing McCain would amount to a "third Bush term" and lead to further financial turmoil. Obama called for reviving the faltering economy with bold public investments in alternative energy and infrastructure repair. McCain derided such ideas as "socialism."

American's Reaction

Catastrophic terrorism posed an unprecedented challenge to the United States. The events of that murderous September morning reanimated American patriotism, but they also brought a long chapter in American history to a dramatic climax. All but unique among modern peoples, Americans for nearly two centuries had been spared from foreign attack on their homeland. That unusual degree of virtually cost-free national security had undergirded the values of openness and individual freedom that defined the distinctive character of American society. Now American security and American liberty alike were dangerously imperiled.

The Politics of Inequality-Economic Debates

Chronically high unemployment and stubbornly anemic economic growth after the 2008 financial meltdown helped sharpen a national debate over class, inequality, and the role of government in the economy. The financial sector provided a particularly rich target for many Americans' ire. Financiers' soaring incomes helped to drive the surge in the richest Americans' income share. Even with new rules in place, regulators seemed mismatched against Wall Street's outsized political clout.

Obamacare

Even while pursuing economic recovery, President Obama also sought to achieve the long-sought liberal goal of health-care reform. When attempts to enlist Republican support bogged down in congressional haggling, he had to rely on Democrats alone to pass a landmark health bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, in March 2010. The new health-care law (popularly known as "Obamacare") mandated all Americans to purchase health insurance starting in 2014, required states to establish "exchanges" whereby individuals and small businesses could purchase health-care insurance at competitive rates, prohibited insurers from denying coverage to anyone with a preexisting medical condition, and allowed children up to the age of twenty-six to remain covered by their parents' health plans. It also provided subsidies to those below certain income thresholds to help pay for private insurance while funding a major expansion of public Medicaid insurance for poorer Americans. The price of the bill was estimated at $940 billion over ten years, but experts also predicted that the bill's cost-cutting measures would reduce the federal deficit by more than $1 trillion over twenty years.

Cracking Down

Heavy majorities in both houses of Congress nevertheless passed a resolution in October 2002 authorizing the president to employ armed force to defend against Iraqi threats to America's national security and to enforce United Nations resolutions regarding Iraq. A month later the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to give Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations." There followed a months-long cat-and-mouse game. U.N. weapons inspectors returned to Iraq. Saddam once again harassed and blocked them. No weapons of mass destruction were found. The inspectors asked for more time. The United Nations declined to authorize the use of force to compel compliance. In this tense and confusing atmosphere, Bush, with Britain his only major ally, launched the long-anticipated invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003. Saddam Hussein's vaunted military machine collapsed almost immediately. In less than a month, Baghdad had fallen and Saddam had been driven from power and hounded into hiding. (He was found and arrested some nine months later and executed in 2006.) From the deck of a U.S. air-craft carrier off the California coast, speaking beneath a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished," Bush triumphantly announced on May 1, 2003, that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended".

Divisions and Changes- Bush

In 2000 George W. Bush won a bitterly contested presidential election that left the nation more rancorously divided than ever, until the spectacular terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, called forth, at least temporarily, a resurgent sense of national unity. Bush responded to the 9/11 attacks by invading the terrorist haven of Afghanistan. And then, controversially claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and had ties to terrorists, Bush proceeded to invade Iraq as well. After the failure to find WMD and with over four thousand American battle deaths in the prolonged Iraq War, a war-weary country, nostalgic for the prosperity and peace of the 1990s, made history by electing the first African American president, Barack Obama.

Bush's Reaction

In contrast to the infamous 1929 crash that heralded the onset of the Great Depression, it took days, not years, for a terrified Bush administration to intervene on a gigantic scale. The federal government nationalized the country's two biggest mortgage companies, the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae") and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation ("Freddie Mac"), and effectively took over the world's biggest insurance company, the American International Group (AIG). Treasury secretary Henry Paulson next persuaded Congress to create the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), authorizing a whopping $700 billion to buy "toxic" assets and inject cash directly into the nation's biggest banks and corporations. Despite public outrage over TARP's original cost, estimates are that after loans are repaid it will have cost taxpayers about $21 billion—arguably a bargain price to pay for rescuing the nation's financial and business system and staving off a repeat of the Great Depression.

Result

In spite of increased public misgivings about the war in Iraq, Bush nailed down a decisive victory in November 2004. He received the first popular vote majority by a presidential candidate in more than a decade—60,639,281 to 57,355,978—and won the Electoral College, 286 to 252, if by only one state (Ohio). This time his victory was clear, constitutional, and uncontested.

1996 Defense of Marriage Act

Later the same year, a narrow liberal majority on the Court declared unconstitutional the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which had denied federal benefits to same-sex couples in states where gay marriage was legal. Though not explicitly declaring a blanket right to same-sex marriage in all states, the strongly worded decision provided a galvanizing spur to the legalization of gay marriage in more and more states. Following on the heels of the repeal of the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, the decision capped a momentous period of legal advancement for gay and lesbian Americans amidst a broader cultural acceptance of homosexuality.

Second-Term Stalemate- Partisanship

Obama had expressed hope that a victory over Mitt Romney might "break the fever" of intractable opposition afflicting congressional Republicans. But with the partisan balance of power largely unchanged by the election and deep-seated ideological disagreements still defining the partisan divide, such a hope proved wishful thinking. The first year of the president's second term was defined by legislative gridlock and a new period of white-knuckle budget brinksmanship with the John Boehner-led House.

America's Future

Much history remained to be made as the country entered its third century of nationhood. The great social experiment of American democracy was far from completed as the United States faced its future. Astonishing breakthroughs in science and technology, especially in genetics, bioengineering, and communications, presented Americans with stunning opportunities as well as wrenching ethical choices. Global climate change made the responsible stewardship of a fragile planet more urgent than ever. Inequality and prejudice continued to challenge Americans to close the gap between their most hallowed values and the stark realities of society in the twenty-first-century United States. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, violently heralded a new era of fear and anxiety. And the severe economic crisis that convulsed the nation and the world in 2008 demonstrated that free-market capitalism could still produce abundant misery as well as material abundance.

Obama and the National Security Agency

Obama faced criticism in his second term for explosive revelations that his administration had approved sweeping National Security Agency (NSA) spying operations covering both domestic and international telephone and Internet communications. The revelations sparked anew impassioned debates over the tradeoff between security and civil liberties. They also served as a vivid reminder to Americans of the transformative impact of the Internet on their daily lives—and of the potential threats to privacy that the Internet enabled. First created by the government for Cold War intelligence sharing, the World Wide Web had spread like wildfire through American homes, schools, and offices starting in the mid-1990s. The percentage of households with Internet access skyrocketed from 18 percent in 1997 to about 75 percent in 2012. Fulfilling the promises of its early boosters, the Internet seemed to have a democratizing effect, spreading power and information among more and more people while upending the worlds of traditional media, business, and politics. But the growing centrality of the electronic online world to Americans' everyday lives also served to increase their vulnerability to potentially unwanted intrusions—from businesses, governments, and criminals alike.

Antiterrorism

Obama also came under pressure to honor his promise to roll back Bush-era antiterrorism policies. His administration did issue executive orders banning water-boarding and other practices that were widely considered to constitute torture. The president also tried to shut down the controversial military detention center in Guantánamo Bay. But Congress blocked his efforts, and dozens of prisoners captured in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks continued to languish in Guantánamo with little prospect of release.

Obama's Reaction

Obama strongly counterpunched against the deepening crisis. In his first hundred days he pushed through a series of major initiatives that included a new round of help for troubled banks, tax and mortgage relief, and a hugs "stimulus" bill the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act- that contained nearly a trillion dollars of tax cuts, as well as new spending for jobs, infrastructure projects, and relief to state and local governments. The government also shored up bankrupt automakers General Motors and Chrysler, as well as threatened banks and insurance companies. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office later estimated that those measures saved up to 3 million jobs, helping substantially to arrest the economy's freefall.

Bush's Response

President Bush responded with a sober and stirring address to Congress nine days later. His solemn demeanor and the gravity of the situation helped to dissipate the cloud of illegitimacy that had shadowed his presidency since the disputed election of 2000. While emphasizing his respect for the Islamic religion and Muslim people, he identified the principal enemy as Osama bin Laden, head of the shadowy terrorist network Al Qaeda. Since 1998 bin Laden had taken refuge in landlocked Afghanistan, ruled by Islamic Fundamentalists called the Taliban. (Ironically, the United States had indirectly helped bring the Taliban to power by supporting religious rebels resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.) Bin Laden drew on popular Muslim opposition to Washington's policies in the Middle East, including both the American military presence there and its unwavering support of Israel. He also benefited from broader, worldwide resentment of America's enormous economic, military, and cultural power. Ironically, America's most conspicuous strengths had made it a conspicuous target.

Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act

Scarcely pausing, Obama soon followed his healthcare success with the 2010 Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which pointed the way to a major overhaul of the nation's financial regulatory system. The act aimed to curb the risky, high-flying practices that had contributed to the debacle of 2008 with new controls on banks, investment houses, and stock markets, and with new truth-in-lending rules to protect consumers.

Obama's Background

Son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama had a cosmopolitan background well suited to the age of globalization. He promised gridlock-weary voters a "postpartisan" politics that would end the divisive battles of the Bush years. To strengthen his national security credentials, he picked foreign-policy-savvy Delaware senator Joseph Biden as his running mate.

Shelby County v. Holder

The Supreme Court waded further into politically charged waters in two landmark decisions in 2013. In Shelby County v. Holder, a narrow conservative majority declared unconstitutional Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which set a formula for determining which states—namely, those with a history of racial discrimination—were required to seek federal clearance for any changes to voting laws. The 2012 elections had occasioned controversy over state-level anti-voter-fraud laws featuring strict voter identification requirements and limited registration periods, which critics charged unfairly penalized minority, poor, and young voters. The Supreme Court's Shelby decision intensified the debate over voting rights in the twenty-first century.

America as a Model

The history of American society also seemed to have increased global significance as the third millennium of the Christian era opened. Americans were a pluralistic people who had struggled for centuries to offer opportunity, tolerance, and justice to many different religious, ethnic, and racial groups. Their historical trials and triumphs could offer valuable lessons to the rapidly internationalizing planetary society that was emerging at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Immigration

The president also took (faulty) aim at the contentious issue of immigration reform. Anti-immigrant pundits and politicians—many in Bush's party— leveled the old charges that illegal immigrants were usurping American tax dollars, jobs, and privileges. Immigrant sympathizers argued that undocumented aliens had to be legalized so that they could receive the same protections as other workers. Bush worked with a bipartisan group of legislators on a proposed law to establish a guest-worker program for undocumented workers and to create a path to citizenship, albeit after paying a fine. Nativist forces condemned the plan as "amnesty." Business interests protested that employers would be overburdened with verifying the right to work. And immigrant rights advocates charged that the program would create "second-class citizens." In the end, the compromise bill pleased no one and died an ignominious political death.

Iraq

The president sought to wind down the Iraq War while leaving behind a reasonably stable country. Shortly after taking office, Obama announced that American combat operations in Iraq would end in summer 2010 and that all American combat troops would be withdrawn by 2011. Despite continuing violence and the agonizingly slow birth of a viable Iraqi government, the deadline for ending American-led operations was met, with the last combat forces removed from the country in December 2011. All told, nearly five thousand Americans—and vastly greater numbers of Iraqis—had perished in the years of the invasion and occupation.

How America Compared to the Rest of the World

These figures offered a depressing indictment of the inequities afflicting an affluent and allegedly egalitarian republic. A similar trend toward inequality was evident in many industrial societies, but it was most pronounced in the United States. In the new century, Americans on average were no longer the world's wealthiest people, as they had been in the quarter-century after World War II. Citizens of several other countries enjoyed higher average per capita incomes, and many nations boasted more equitable distributions of wealth.

Greying America

These seemingly endless rounds of politically induced budget crises and governance-through-showdown raised alarming questions about the very capacity of the American political system to function in times of divided government and ideologically sorted parties. But they also rendered all the more unlikely any grand compromise to restore the country's long-term fiscal balance in the face of a rapidly aging population. Over 13 percent of Americans were over sixty-five in 2012, and projections were that one of every five people would be in the "sunset years" by 2050. This greying of America brought fiscal strains, especially on the Social Security and Medicare systems. As the huge wave of post-World War II baby boomers entered retirement age, those programs' long-term "unfunded liability"—the difference between what the government had promised to pay to the elderly and the taxes it expected to take in over the next seventy-five years—reached $9.6 trillion. But the electoral power of older Americans, the Republicans' no-new-taxes orthodoxy, and the intractability of partisan warfare in government made addressing this imbalance ever more challenging.

Obama's Victory

Unsettled by the galloping economic calamity, voters delivered a historic victory to Barack Obama. He garnered 53 percent of the popular vote, prevailing even in such traditional Republican strongholds as Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado, and won the Electoral College 365 to 173. Democrats also enlarged their majorities in the House and the Senate. The coalition driving Obama's victory reflected important, long-term demographic developments reshaping American politics. He drew support from the same groups—youths, educated professionals, and racial and ethnic minorities—that had served as the coalition behind George McGovern's ill-fated Democratic candidacy in 1972. But thanks to the increased preponderance of educated and minority voters in the mass electorate, what was once a marginal coalition had become a formidable political force by 2008. Obama's election opened a new chapter in the long-vexed history of American race relations. It also confronted the nation's first African American president with the daunting challenge of governing a country embroiled in two wars even as it sank into the deepest economic abyss since the 1930s.

The American Prospect- America: Old and New

Well beyond its two-hundredth birthday as the twenty-first century's second decade unspooled, the United States was both an old and a new nation. It boasted one of the longest uninterrupted traditions of democratic government of any country on earth. Indeed, it had pioneered the techniques of mass democracy and was, in that sense, the oldest modern polity. As one of the earliest countries to industrialize, America had also dwelt in the modern economic era longer than most nations. But the Republic was in many ways still youthful as well. Innovation, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking—all characteristics of youth—were honored national values.

Military Campaign

When the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, Bush ordered a massive military campaign against Afghanistan. Within three months American and Afghan rebel forces had overthrown the Taliban but failed to find bin Laden, and Americans continued to live in fear of future attacks. Confronted with this unconventional, diffuse menace, antiterrorism experts called for a new kind of "asymmetrical warfare," employing not just traditional military muscle but also counterinsurgency tactics like innovative intelligence gathering, training of local police forces, economic reprisals, infiltration of suspected organizations, and even assassinations.

The Presidential Election of 2008- Democrats

With neither the sitting president nor vice president running, the 2008 election was truly "open" for the first time in eighty years. The Democratic race soon tightened into a fiercely fought contest between the forty-six-year-old, first-term Illinois senator Barack Obama and the pre-campaign favorite, former First Lady and sitting New York senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Obama narrowly prevailed, surviving Clinton's attacks on his inexperience.

Back to Backlash- Critics

Yet, in a polarized political era, Obama had unusual difficulty reaping the political rewards of these legislative achievements. Because his measures only halted but did not reverse the economy's decline, critics on the left condemned him as too timid. Because federal budget deficits ballooned dramatically on his watch (thanks not only to his own initiatives but also to the Bush-era tax cuts combined with declining tax revenues in the midst of the downturn), critics on the right excoriated him as a big-government spendthrift.

Conflict

But as president, Bush soon proved to be more of a divider than a uniter, less a "compassionate conservative" than a crusading ideologue. Religious tradition- alists cheered, but liberals jeered, when he withdrew American support from international health programs that sanctioned abortion, advocated federally financed faith-based social-welfare initiatives, and sharply limited government-sponsored research on embryonic stem cells, which many scientists believed held the key to conquering diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

2014 Midterms

A president's party usually suffers setbacks in midterm elections, and 2014 proved no exception. Republicans expanded their majority in the House and gained control of the Senate for the first time since 2006. Many observers attributed those results not to blossoming affection for Republicans, but to deep disillusionment with the Democratic administration. Three possibilities seemed to emerge from the election's results: that a new spirit of compromise would (somewhat miraculously) take hold in both Congress and the White House; that a frustrated president would use his executive authority to bypass Congress to take whatever initiative he could in areas like environmental policy, immigration, and international affairs; or that he would content himself with defining issues with no hope of passage as a way to stake out his party's core values in the run-up to the presidential election in 2016.

Romney

After a long, feisty primary season featuring an unusually large and argumentative array of candidates, the Republican party nominated former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and ultraconservative Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as their presidential and vice-presidential nominees. Romney, the first Mormon presidential candidate of a major party in American history, had made his career in management consulting and private equity investing before entering politics. His record as governor of liberal Massachusetts was decidedly moderate, but he secured the GOP's presidential nomination in 2012 by hewing to a much more conservative line, promising to repeal both the Affordable Care Act and the Wall Street Reform Act, cut domestic spending, and slash taxes. Republicans attacked Obama, because of his concern about inequality, as a perpetrator of "class warfare."

Withdrawl

Almost from their arrival, American forces began preparing to withdraw. In the summer of 2004, the American military ceded political power and limited sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government. A series of national elections followed in 2005, with millions of Iraqis voting for a national assembly to draft a constitution and, later, for parliamentary representatives and a president. But under the seeming stability of Iraq's new democratic government lay deep, violent tensions. Sunni Muslims, the minority that had held power under Saddam Hussein, feared reprisals and repressions under a majority Shia government. Unsuccessful at the ballot box, many Sunnis turned to bombings and political assassinations.

New Directions in Foreign Policy- Obama in The Middle East

Along with economic problems, Obama also inherited America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a raft of other foreign-policy headaches. Seeking to chart a more tempered and pragmatic course after the neoconservative ventures of the Bush years, Obama assembled a foreign-policy team that not only included veterans of the Clinton administration but was headed by former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. Obama sought to utilize his own global popularity in efforts to repair frayed alliances, forge new arms-control agreements, and engage the citizenry of regional hotbeds of anti-Americanism like the Middle East. His personal and symbolic appeal to many foreign observers was vividly conveyed in 2009 when—to the surprise of many including himself—he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

America's World Influence

America's twenty-first century had begun much like the twentieth, as society continued to be rejuvenated by fresh waves of immigrants, full of energy and ambition. The U.S. economy, despite the impact of the "Great Recession," remained an important engine of world economic growth. American inventions—especially computer and communications technologies—continued to transform the face of global society. Consumers from Berlin to Beijing seemed to worship the icons of American culture—downing soft drinks and donning blue jeans, watching Hollywood films and television series, listening to rock or country music, even adopting indigenous American sports like baseball and basketball. In the realm of consumerism, American products appeared to have Coca-Colonized the globe.

Reelecting George W. Bush- Division

Americans had rarely been as divided as they were in the first years of the twenty-first century. Civil libertarians worried that the government was trampling on personal freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism. Revelations in 2002 about flagrant corporate fraud fed rampant popular disillusion with the business community. Cultural tensions brewed over the rights of gay and lesbian Americans when leaders in San Francisco and Massachusetts permitted same-sex couples to marry in 2004. Affirmative action continued to spark sharp debate, as the Supreme Court permitted some preferential treatment in admitting minority undergraduate and law students to the University of Michigan in 2003.

Bush's Campaign

Amid these divisions George W. Bush positioned himself to run for reelection. He proclaimed that his tax cuts had spurred economic growth. Targeting what he called "the soft bigotry of low expectations," he championed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which mandated sanctions against schools that failed to meet federal performance standards. He played to cultural conservatives in opposing stem cell research and called for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. But most of all, he promoted himself as a stalwart leader in wartime, warning the country not to "change horses midstream."

Terrorists

Amid this chaos, jihadist terrorists from around the region flooded into Iraq, often fueling the intra-Iraqi conflicts to further their own radical Islamist vision. Although Al Qaeda had had no link to Iraq under Saddam, as Bush had falsely alleged, the organization certainly moved in afterward.

Obama's Campaign

Armed with an unprecedented war chest of nearly $700 million, mostly raised from small donors via the Internet, Obama seized the advantage in both the "air war" (television) and the "ground war" (door-to-door campaigning by his legions of volunteers). His poise and gravitas in televised debates favorably impressed many voters, and his campaign slogan, "Yes we can," excited widespread hope and enthusiasm. Then, just six weeks before election day, a sudden economic maelstrom gave his campaign a buoyant boost.

Gridlock Grinds On- Disapproval of Obama

As the 2014 midterm elections approached, Republicans sought to cash in on President Obama's fading popularity. Polls showed his job approval sinking to nearly 40 percent. Even candidates from his own party kept their distance from him on the campaign trail. Public frustration with an economic recovery that lit up the stock market but failed to boost most household incomes fed discontent with the president's party, as did the stubborn unpopularity in some quarters of the Affordable Care Act, the signature achievement of Obama's first term. A rash of troubles abroad also plagued the president and his party alike, including a frightening outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa, and confusion over how to prevent its spread into the United States. The unexpected emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a ferocious jihadist movement alarming in its brutality and in its territorial advance, cast doubts on the president's foreign policy skills, and further discredited his party's candidates.

2010's New Congress

As the Great Recession continued to weigh heavily upon the land, Obama's approval ratings steadily slipped, and his party slid downhill with him. In the midterm elections of 2010, Republicans gained six seats in the Senate and a whopping sixty-three seats in the House, enough to give them majority control of the lower chamber when the new Congress convened in 2011. President Obama glumly acknowledged his party's "shellacking," but then surprisingly proceeded to wring several major accomplishments out of the post-election "lame duck" session in December 2010, including an $858 billion package that extended unemployment benefits as well as the Bush-era tax cuts, the repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy toward gays in the military, and a renewed nuclear arms reduction treaty (New START, or Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) with Russia. But legislative productivity came to an end in the new Congress, as partisans closed their ranks ever tighter.

Bush Begins- Background

As the son of the forty-first president ("41"), George W. Bush ("43") became the first presidential offspring since John Quincy Adams to reach the White House. Raised largely in Texas, the younger Bush publicly distanced himself from his family's privileged New England heritage and affected the chummy manner of a self-made good ol' boy—though he held degrees from Yale and Harvard. He promised to bring to Washington the conciliatory skills he had honed as the Republican governor of Texas, where he had worked well with the Democratic majority in the state's legislature.

The Making of History

But men and women make history only within the framework bequeathed to them by earlier generations. For better or worse, they march forward along time's path bearing the burdens of the past. Knowing when they have come to a truly new turn in the road, when they can lay part of their burden down and when they cannot, or should not—all this constitutes the sort of wisdom that only historical understanding can engender. As Americans confront the unending challenges of the twenty-first-century world, they would do well to remember Woodrow Wilson's admonition of 1893, long before he became president. "Democratic Institutions are never done; they are like living tissue, always a-making. It is a strenuous thing, this of living the life of a free people."

Back on Track

By the summer of 2009, the worst of the panic was over, and the economy began to expand once more, though painfully slowly. Economists tempered their comparisons with the Great Depression and gave the less frightening label "Great Recession" to the turmoil. But the economy had been badly wounded and continued to suffer. Hopes for a rapid recovery proved false, and the first steps toward growth were feeble and faltering. The unemployment rate stayed stuck above 9 percent. As millions of Americans lost jobs and homes, and many more succumbed to anxiety and fear, the effects of the Great Recession wormed their way deeply into the American psyche and would not be quickly dislodged. Psychology and economics intersected, as newly anxious consumers cut back on spending, further burdening an already sluggish recovery.

Scandal

Every second-term president since the 1960s had seen scandal mar his later years in office, and the Bush White House was no exception. In the fall of 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was convicted of perjury in an investigation into the source of a leak that had exposed the identity of an undercover CIA agent as political retaliation against her antiwar husband. Then in December of that year, journalists discovered that the government was conducting illegal wiretap surveillance on American citizens inside the United States in violation of federal law. Perhaps the most tragic and avoidable of Bush's missteps came in the botched response to the deadly Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, flooding 80 percent of the historic city and causing over 1,300 deaths and $150 billion in damages. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) proved pathetically inept in New Orleans, and Bush came in for still more criticism. A consensus began to build that Bush was a genial personality but an impetuous, unreflective, and frequently feckless leader, a president in over his head in a sea of complex problems that he seemed incapable of mastering.

Laws in the States

In 2010, legislators in Arizona, provoked by continuing immigrant flows over the state's long desert border with Mexico, passed a harsh anti-immigrant law requiring local police to detain people if there was "reasonable suspicion" that they were illegal. Critics complained that the law amounted to unfair "racial profiling" and that the state was unconstitutionally usurping federal responsibility for controlling immigration. Similar laws passed in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina before a Supreme Court decision in 2012 invalidated several of the Arizona law's provisions.

Republicans

In keeping with the country's anti-Bush mood, Republicans nominated long-time Arizona senator John McCain, aged seventy-two, a self-styled "maverick" and a Vietnam War hero who had endured years of torture as a prisoner of war. He had a record of supporting bipartisan legislation on such issues as normalizing relations with North Vietnam, campaign finance, and immigration reform. McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. The former beauty queen, small-town mayor, self-proclaimed "hockey-mom," and staunch abortion rights opponent had served only twenty-one months as Alaska's governor. As McCain hoped, the telegenic Palin galvanized the conservative Republican base. But when interview gaffes exposed her weak grasp of the issues, Palin became fodder for late-night television comedians and, polls showed, at least as much a liability as an asset to the Republican ticket.

Obama in the Whitehouse- Americans' Responsibility

Inspired by Barack Obama's vision of "hope," a vast and exuberant crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate his inauguration. Youthful energy was in the air, though in his inaugural address Obama struck a sober note by calling on Americans to "put away childish things" and embrace "a new era of responsibility." Obama's solemn tone was fitting. Even as he spoke, home construction was grinding to a halt, mortgage foreclosures were soaring, and countless businesses were shutting their doors. Most alarmingly, the economy was shedding a sickening 700,000 jobs a month. The unemployment rate climbed above 10 percent- the highest level since the early 1980s and perhaps heralding a return to the catastrophic joblessness of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Bush's Acusations

Itching for a fight, and egged on by hawkish Vice President Cheney and other "neoconservative" advisers, Bush accused the Iraqi regime of all manner of wrongdoing: oppressing its own people; frustrating the weapons inspectors; developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction ("WMD"); and supporting terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. Perhaps most controversially, Bush also suggested that a liberated, democratized Iraq might provide a beacon of hope to the Islamic world and thereby rebalance the political equation in the volatile Middle East. To skeptical observers, including America's usually reliable European allies, the very multiplicity of Bush's reasons for war cast doubt on his case, and his ambition to create a democracy in long-suffering Iraq, burdened with centuries of internecine conflict, seemed naively utopian. Secretary of State Colin Powell urged caution, warning of the long-term consequences for the United States of invading and occupying an unstable, religiously and culturally divided nation of 25 million people. "You break it, you own it," he told the president.

Progress in the Middle East

Meanwhile, American forces achieved a dramatic success in neighboring Pakistan in May 2011 when they concluded a ten-year manhunt by killing 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Though falling short of his goals in Afghanistan, Obama made good on his pledge to begin withdrawing troops in 2011. By the beginning of 2014, thirty-eight thousand American service members remained in the country, with a full withdrawal scheduled to be completed by the end of the year. In what proved to be one of the Obama administration's most controversial policies, troop deployments and ground operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere increasingly came to be replaced by aerial attacks from unmanned remotely piloted aircraft, popularly called "drones." The increasing intensity of U.S. drone attacks sparked both national and international outcries about this revolutionary new kind of warfare. Particularly controversial were attacks on U.S. citizens in places like Yemen. Even if they were known terrorists, critics charged, their constitutionally guaranteed right to trial by jury protected them from summary execution.

Fiscal Policy

The centerpiece of Bush's fiscal policy was a whopping $1.3 trillion tax cut, passed by Congress in May 2001. Followed by a second cut in 2003, and combined with a softening economy and the rising costs of military interventions overseas, these measures turned the federal budget surpluses of the late 1990s into yawning deficits, reaching more than $400 billion in 2004 and nearly $460 billion in 2008.

Terrorism Comes to America- 9/11

On September 11, 2001, the long era of America's impregnable national security violently ended. On a balmy late-summer morning, suicidal terrorists slammed two hijacked airliners, loaded with passengers and jet fuel, into the twin towers of New York City's World Trade Center. They flew a third plane into the military nerve center of the Pentagon, near Washington, D.C., killing 189 people. Heroic passengers forced a fourth hijacked aircraft to crash in rural Pennsylva- nia, killing all 44 aboard but depriving the terrorists of an additional weapon of mass destruction. As the two giant New York skyscrapers thunderously collapsed, some three thousand innocent victims perished, including people of many races and faiths from more than sixty countries, as well as hundreds of New York's police and fire department rescue workers. A stunned nation blossomed with flags, as grieving and outraged Americans struggled to express their sorrow and solidarity in the face of the catastrophic terrorism of 9/11.

Results

On election day, Obama won a decisive victory over Romney, with 65,915,796 popular and 332 electoral votes to Romney's 60,933,500 and 206 votes. Obama prevailed in all of the states he had won in 2008 with the exception of Indiana and North Carolina. Democrats managed to retain control of the Senate, but the House remained in GOP hands. Powerful demographic trends helped account for Obama's victory despite his difficulties in office and the opposition his policies had provoked. While just 39 percent of white voters supported him in 2012 compared to 43 percent in 2008, whites' overall share of the electorate had declined during those four years. And the multiracial coalition that supported Obama and the Democrats comprised several groups— including, most clearly, Latinos—that were growing in electoral importance.

Bush Takes the Offensive Against Iraq- 43 vs. Saddam Hussein

On only its second day in office, the Bush administration had warned that it would not tolerate Iraq's continued defiance of United Nations weapons inspections, mandated after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, after playing hide-and seek with the inspectors for years, expelled them from his country in 1998, inducing President Clinton, with congressional approval, to declare that Saddam's removal ("regime change") was an official goal of U.S. policy. But no sustained military action against Iraq had followed. Now, in the context of the new terrorist threat, the Bush administration focused on Iraq with a vengeance. In January 2002, mere months after the September 11 attacks, Bush claimed that Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, constituted an "axis of evil" that gravely menaced American security. Iran and North Korea were both known to be pursuing nuclear weapons programs, and Iran had long supported terrorist operations in the Middle East. But Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein, defeated but not destroyed by Bush's father in 1991, became the principal object of the new president's wrath. The elder Bush had carefully assembled a broad international coalition to fight the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In contrast, his son was brashly determined to break with long-standing American traditions and wage a preemptive war against Iraq—and to go it alone if necessary.

Conservation

On the environmental front, Bush pleased corporate chieftains but angered environmentalists through a slew of actions early in his tenure. His administration challenged scientific findings on groundwater contamination and made an abortive effort to block Clinton-era proposed standards for arsenic levels in drinking water. Bush also repudiated a major international effort to arrest the rate of global warming, the Kyoto Treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Criticism mounted when Bush allowed his hard-charging vice president, Dick Cheney, to hammer out his administration's energy policy in behind-closed-doors meetings with representatives of several giant oil companies. Cheney, dismissing conservation as a mere "sign of personal virtue," advocated aggressive expansion of domestic energy supplies, including new oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska's ecologically fragile north coast.

Owning Iraq- Violence

President Bush's words soon came back to haunt him. Neoconservative pundits in Washington had predicted that American soldiers would be greeted as liberators and that Saddam's ouster would lead to flowering democracy across the Middle East. In reality post-Saddam Iraq quickly devolved into a seething cauldron of violence. The country's largest ethnic groups, Sunni and Shia Muslims, clashed violently, especially in the capital city of Baghdad. Both groups attacked American forces, especially after the U.S. decision to disband the Iraqi army, which deprived Iraq of an effective indigenous police force. A locally grown insurgency quickly spread, and occupying Iraq became ever more perilous for American troops. Hatred for Americans only worsened with revelations in April 2004 that Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison had been tortured and humiliated by their American captors.

Bush's Bruising Second Term- Bush's Changes

Reelection, George W. Bush announced, gave him "political capital," which he intended to spend on an aggressive domestic agenda. The appointment of two new conservative Supreme Court justices (John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito, Jr.) upon the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor seemed to bode well for his ambitions. But Bush soon overplayed his hand. Attacking the core of New Deal liberalism, he proposed a radical program to privatize much of Social Security. A massive outcry led by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and other liberal groups reminded Americans how much they loved Social Security, warts and all. Bush's proposal faded away within six months of his reelection. The same fate befell a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, which had been a major "values" issue in the 2004 campaign.

What caused the widening income gap?

Some critics pointed to the tax and fiscal policies of the Reagan and both Bush (father and son) presidencies, which favored the wealthy. But deeper running historical currents probably played a more powerful role, as suggested by the similar trend lines in other industrialized societies. Among the most conspicuous causes were intensifying global economic competition; the shrinkage in high-paying manufacturing jobs for semiskilled and unskilled workers; the greater economic rewards commanded by educated workers in high-tech industries; the rise of the financial sector as a percentage of national GDP; the decline of unions; the growth of part-time and temporary work; the rising tide of relatively low-skill immigrants; and the increasing tendency of educated men and women to marry one another and both work, creating households with very high incomes. Educational opportunities also had a way of perpetuating inequality, starting with the underfunding of many schools in poor urban areas and the soaring cost of higher education. A 2004 study revealed that at the 146 most selective colleges, two-thirds of the students came from families with incomes in the top 25 percent, compared to just 6 percent of the students from the bottom income quartile. The very nature of the contemporary economy seemed to pose daunting obstacles to creating more equitably shared prosperity.

The Debt Debate

Spurred on by a still-potent Tea Party faction, House Republicans threatened once again to refuse to lift the debt ceiling without policy concessions from Obama. In contrast to 2011, the president now refused on principle to negotiate when threatened with a national default. The stalemate led to a sixteen-day government closure in October 2013 before the GOP backed down and allowed for a vote temporarily raising the debt ceiling and funding the government. (In February 2014, the federal debt level approached the statutory limit once again. This time the House allowed a vote to raise the debt ceiling without any demands attached.)

The Great Recession

The American housing price bubble, fed by years of the Federal Reserve System's easy-money policies and the private banking system's lax lending practices, burst at last. The long era of cheap and abundant credit, when bankers had stuffed their balance sheets with complex and highly risky loans, shivered to an alarmingly abrupt halt. By 2008 the collapse in real estate values was generating a tsunami of mortgage defaults, especially among "subprime" borrowers whose escalating mortgage payments stretched them to the breaking point. Bankers and other lenders watched in horror as countless homeowners defaulted and the worth of mortgage-backed securities sank precipitously. Aggressive "deleveraging" set in world-wide, as financial institutions from Tokyo to New York to London scrambled to reduce their debt loads by selling assets (at ever-declining prices). But some debts could not be unloaded at any price, and credit markets soon froze everywhere. Following the collapse of the venerable Wall Street firm of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, stocks fell into a deep swoon. The gravest financial hurricane since the Great Depression of the 1930s was gathering ever-increasing force.

Mishandling of Iraq

The biggest factor in the Democratic sweep was the perceived mishandling of the war in Iraq. Prewar claims about WMD and Iraq's connections to Al Qaeda and 9/11 had all proved false. By late 2005 polls revealed that a majority of Americans considered the war a mistake. Even more felt that the Bush administration, particularly the Defense Department under Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had badly mismanaged events on the ground. Rumsfeld resigned after the Republicans' "thumping" in the 2006 midterm elections. But Iraq still knew no peace, and the death toll, Iraqi and American alike, continued to rise. The Bush administration attempted to assert greater control in early 2007 with a "surge" of twenty thousand additional troops. The surge brought a modest measure of stability to Iraq, but as the 2008 election cycle got under way, public opinion nevertheless solidified even more strongly against the war.

The Tea Party

The conjunction of expanding federal programs and mounting deficits tapped into a deep vein of American wariness of "big government." Starting with vehement attacks on the health-care bill in the summer of 2009, angry protesters accused the Obama administration of promoting "socialism" and "unconstitutional" controls over individual lives. Calling themselves the "Tea Party" after the American Revolutionary Patriots, these aggrieved citizens combined a knack for street-theater demonstrations with nonstop Internet and media fulminations against the president and his policies. Backed by billionaire donors and corporate-backed political action committees (PACs), the Tea Party movement galvanized a hyperconservative grassroots constituency that pushed the Republican party even more sharply to the right. Heartened by the Tea Party's mobilization, Republicans determined to fight the administration tooth and nail, steadfastly repudiating Obama's promise of a postpartisan politics.

Occupy Wall Street

The fall of 2011 saw the emergence of an eclectic protest movement that colorfully dramatized the issue of rising inequality. "Occupy Wall Street" began as a small demonstration by youthful radicals who pitched their tents in New York's financial district. Similar encampments soon sprang up in several other cities and popularized the slogan "We Are the 99 Percent"—a reference to the concentration of wealth and income among the highest earning 1 percent of Americans. Though the protesters gradually decamped, President Obama eventually acknowledged their cause, declaring in his January 2012 state of the union message. Growing inequality had deep roots and assumed dramatic proportions as the new century opened. In an unsettling reversal of long-standing trends in American society, during the last two decades of the twentieth century the rich had grown fabulously richer, middle-class incomes had stagnated, and the poor were left to make do with an ever-shrinking share of the economic pie.

Obama

The new president inherited a crushing economic crisis, soon dubbed "The Great Recession." Its scale was exceeded in modern times only by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like Franklin Roosevelt in the depression era, Obama seized the occasion to pursue major reforms in health care and financial regulation. But unlike FDR, Obama triggered a powerful Republican backlash that erased the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives in the congressional elections of 2010. Obama's reelection two years later neither restored Democratic control to the House nor tempered the rancor of political divisions in the country, which threatened to turn the federal government into a useless laughing-stock. A standoff between the House and the president over the nation's debt ceiling led to an unprecedented downgrade in the government's credit rating in 2011, and a second standoff over funding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act shut down the government entirely for more than two weeks in 2013.

Social Inclusiveness

The paradox of rising economic inequality amidst expanding social inclusiveness continued to shape the new century as it had the closing decades of the previous one. A painfully slow economic recovery and stubbornly high unemployment in the years following the 2008 financial crisis highlighted growing gaps in income and wealth, even as the country remained intractably divided over appropriate remedies. At the same time, American society grew more diverse in the twenty-first century, as evidenced by the biracial president and the multiracial political coalition that twice elected him. No less dramatic was the extraordinarily rapid expansion of popular acceptance of gay and lesbian Americans.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

The role of money in politics became a divisive issue in the race, thanks to a highly controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In a five-to-four ruling, the Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from limiting political expenditures made by corporations, unions, and advocacy groups. The decision helped to spur the proliferation of so-called "super-PACS," which, by avoiding any direct contributions to candidates and parties, could pour unlimited sums into the political arena. It also enabled nonprofit advocacy groups to spend money on elections without disclosing the source of their funds. With the floodgates of political spending open as never before, the presidential race of 2012 proved to be the most expensive in American history, with both campaigns and their allies spending a combined total of over $2 billion.

Government's Response

The terrorists' blows diabolically coincided with the onset of a recession. The already gathering economic downturn worsened as edgy Americans shunned air travel and the tourist industry withered. In this anxious atmosphere, Congress in October 2001 rammed through the USA Patriot Act (The act's official name is Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.) The act permitted extensive telephone and e-mail surveillance and authorized the detention and deportation of immigrants suspected of terrorism. Just over a year later, Congress created a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security to protect the nation's borders and ferret out potential attackers. The Justice Department meanwhile rounded up hundreds of immigrants and held them without habeas corpus (formal charges in an open court). The Bush administration further called for trying suspected terrorists before military tribunals, where the usual rules of evidence and procedure did not apply. As hundreds of Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan languished in legal limbo and demoralizing isolation in the Guantánamo Detention Camp on the American military base at Guantánamo, Cuba, public opinion polls showed Americans sharply divided on whether the terrorist threat fully warranted such drastic encroachments on America's venerable tradition of protecting civil liberties.

Citizenship and Civil Rights- Immigration

The vexed issue of immigration reform, especially with respect to the nation's 11 million "illegals," also continued to elude resolution during Obama's presidency. Obama and congressional Democrats in 2010 had pushed the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act), which would have created a path to citizenship for undocumented youths who either graduated from college or served in the U.S. armed forces, but it fell to a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Obama tried to make more comprehensive immigration reform a centerpiece of his second term, encouraged by signs that many GOP legislators were newly interested, given the rising electoral clout of Latinos.(With a population of 53 million and growing in 2012, Latinos were the country's largest minority group.) But though a bill offering undocumented immigrants a route to citizenship passed the Senate in the summer of 2013, the House refused to bring it to a vote. House Republicans' opposition to the bill reflected deep anxieties felt by many Americans over the presence of millions of undocumented immigrants seeking jobs and benefiting from public services. The economic crisis had only exacerbated such anxiety.

Bloodshed

These three battles—Shia-Sunni ethnic violence, counter-occupation insurgency, and jihadist terrorism—fed a spiraling maelstrom of bloodshed. By the end of 2006, more Americans had died in Iraq than in the attacks of September 11.

Battling for the Whitehouse in 2012- Obama

To a striking degree, inequality—both economic and political—remained a central theme of the heated 2012 presidential race. Barack Obama sought reelection on the basis of his stewardship of the economy in crisis times, his signature health-care law (narrowly upheld in a Supreme Court decision that summer), and his winding down of two unpopular wars overseas. Citing both fiscal soundness as well as economic fairness, he promised to restore income-tax rates on high earners to Clinton-era levels.

Debt

When the accumulated federal debt approached its legal limit of $14.3 trillion in the summer of 2011, the Republican Tea Party faction seized the opportunity to play a game of fiscal "chicken" with the White House. Raising the debt ceiling had historically been a routine matter, but urged on by the eighty-five freshmen elected in 2010, Speaker of the House John Boehner and his Republican colleagues stubbornly refused to lift the debt limit until the president agreed to a long-term deficit-reduction plan. Feverish negotiations proceeded as the deadline loomed, the stock market swooned, and the ratings agency Standard and Poor announced that it was downgrading the credit rating of the American government for the first time in history. Just two days prior to the projected exhaustion of America's borrowing authority, Boehner and Obama announced an agreement to lift the debt ceiling in exchange for huge spending cuts with no tax increases. Heartened by their triumph, Republicans looked to the upcoming 2012 presidential election with increasing hope for victory—though the spectacle of protracted bickering and partisan intransigence while the nation's credit rating, and the health of the global economy, hung in the balance deeply disillusioned many Americans of both parties.

Transitions in Industry

When the twentieth century opened, United States Steel Corporation was the flagship business of America's booming industrial revolution. A generation later, General Motors, annually producing millions of automobiles, became the characteristic American corporation, signaling the historic shift to a mass consumer economy. Following World War II, the rise of International Business Machines (IBM) and, later, Microsoft and Apple symbolized yet another momentous transformation, to the fast-paced "information age." But, in a sobering illustration of the dynamics of the new economy, that most iconic American company of the contemporary age—Apple—only employed 43,000 Americans in 2012. When General Motors occupied a similar status in the American economy a half century earlier, it employed over 600,000 Americans.