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slug: barack-obama name: Barack Obama role: 44th President of the United States type: person

Barack Obama

Biography

Barack Hussein Obama II (born 1961) was the 44th president of the United States, serving from January 2009 to January 2017, and the first African American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, he was educated at Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review. He worked as a community organizer in Chicago, taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and served in the Illinois State Senate from 1997 to 2004 before winning election to the US Senate in 2004.

His 2008 presidential campaign — built on themes of hope and change, opposition to the Iraq War, and a promise to transcend partisan division — defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and John McCain in the general election, which took place in the shadow of the financial crash of 2008. He assumed office amid the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression. His major domestic achievements included the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus, the Dodd–Frank financial reform, and the Affordable Care Act; in foreign policy he ended the Iraq War, negotiated the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement, and restored relations with Cuba. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, nine months into his first term.

His presidency was marked by deepening partisan polarization: the Tea Party movement arose in early 2009, Republicans retook the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, and the political reaction his presidency provoked culminated in the election of Donald Trump as his successor. For Soros — an early and major financial backer in 2008 — Obama became one of the most consequential case studies of his later writing: a leader he supported, criticized, and ultimately used to illustrate how reflexive feedback loops operate in politics as much as in markets.

Key Stories

The 2008 bet. Soros was, as Fareed Zakaria put it on air, "a big supporter of then Senator Obama in the 2008 elections" (see the 2011 GPS interview). The attraction was ideological: after the Bush years, Soros saw in Obama a president who could restore America's standing and its commitment to an open society. Years later he recalled the moment's significance:

"The election of President Obama in 2008 sent a powerful message to the world that the US is capable of radically changing course when it recognizes that it is on the wrong track." — Soros, My Philanthropy, 2011

The TARP fight and the road not taken. The central policy dispute began before Obama took office. In September 2008, writing in the Financial Times, Soros endorsed the four conditions then-Senator Obama had outlined for the bank bailout — "an upside for the taxpayers as well as a downside; a bipartisan board to oversee the process; help for the homeowners as well as the holders of the mortgages; and some limits on the compensation of those who benefit from taxpayers’ money" — while arguing the money should recapitalize banks' equity directly (see Paulson Cannot Be Allowed a Blank Check). Through late 2008 and early 2009 Soros pressed the incoming administration, in a series of articles, to inject equity into the banks and write down mortgages rather than buy toxic assets through an "aggregator bank" (see The Right and Wrong Way to Bail Out the Banks and We Can Do Better Than a Bad Bank). Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic adviser, objected that equity injection "would mean nationalizing banks. Such a policy reeked of socialism and America is not a socialist country" — an argument Soros and his co-author found "unconvincing," since relieving banks of overvalued assets already socialized the downside (see A Better Bailout Was Possible, 2018). The administration chose otherwise, and the episode left Soros with a lasting personal regret:

"My greatest disappointment was that I was unable to establish any kind of personal contact with President Obama himself." — Soros, My Philanthropy, 2011

The confidence multiplier. Soros's most original critique of Obama was not about any single policy but about political method. In his analysis, Obama recognized that the American public was averse to harsh realities and deployed what Akerlof and Shiller called the "confidence multiplier" — painting "a rosier picture of the economic situation than was justified" in the hope of moderating the recession. The tactic worked economically but "had disastrous political consequences": when unemployment failed to fall, confidence turned to disappointment and anger, and "By avoiding conflict Obama handed the initiative to the opposition" (see My Philanthropy). Soros later folded the episode directly into his theoretical framework, citing it in his 2014 lecture on fallibility and reflexivity as a textbook case of a manipulative function that succeeds for a while "until objective reality reasserts itself".

Egypt and the Arab Spring. In February 2011 Soros intervened publicly to urge Obama to side with the Egyptian revolution, publishing Why Obama Has to Get Egypt Right in the Washington Post. Days later he told Zakaria that "President Obama did an — an outstanding job" on Egypt — "It’s — it’s not sufficiently appreciated. Really, what a big difference it was that he was — he is our president at this time" — and praised Obama's restraint on Iran, where he "scrupulously avoided" externally imposed regime change (see the GPS transcript).

Disillusionment, 2012. Asked by Der Spiegel whether he was disappointed with Obama, Soros gave his most quoted verdict:

"Disillusioned is a better word. I had expected more transformational leadership." — Soros, Der Spiegel interview, 2012

He added that Obama "is more of a follower than a leader" — much less so than Angela Merkel, for example — and said he would not repeat his 2008-scale campaign contributions — though he still supported "Obama’s proposal for higher taxes on the rich."

Russia, Syria, and Ukraine. In the second term, Soros's criticism shifted to foreign policy passivity. He agreed with those who faulted Obama as too weak toward Putin — "Rightly so", he said: "President Obama should have challenged him earlier. If Obama had declared a no-fly zone over Syria when Russia started to supply military equipment on a large scale, Russia would have been obliged to respect it" (see The EU Is on the Verge of Collapse, 2016). In Wake Up, Europe (2014) he faulted Obama for refusing Poroshenko's request for Javelin missiles and warned that "President Obama may accept such a deal" trading Ukraine for Russian cooperation against ISIS — "That would be a tragic mistake, with far-reaching geopolitical consequences." In On the Bombing of Aleppo (2016) he described Putin exploiting the transition window, calculating "that the departing President Obama will be unlikely to intervene in the escalating Syrian conflict". Yet his overall verdict on Obama's foreign policy remained more favorable than the conventional one: Obama "brought American policy back to reality. His record in foreign policy is better than generally recognized" (see The Future of Europe, 2014). On China, Soros urged Obama to draw a distinction between Putin's Russia, which "has replaced the rule of law with the rule of force," and a China that "respects its treaty obligations", and to offer Beijing "a genuine offer of a strategic partnership" — while criticizing the fast-track approach to the Trans-Pacific Partnership as conceived "as an anti-Chinese alliance under US leadership" (see A Partnership with China to Avoid World War, 2015).

Impact on Soros's Work

1. A live case of reflexivity in politics. Obama's confidence multiplier became Soros's canonical non-market example of a reflexive feedback loop: a positive influence on perceptions feeds back positively on economic reality — "But if reality, for example the unemployment rate, fails to live up to expectations, confidence turns to disappointment and anger; that is the other half of the reflexive feedback loop, and that is what came to pass" (My Philanthropy). The episode is cited in his mature theoretical statement, Fallibility, Reflexivity, and the Human Uncertainty Principle, as proof that the manipulative function can work "at least for a while, until objective reality reasserts itself".

2. Confirmation of his crisis prescriptions — by rejection. The administration's refusal to recapitalize banks through equity injection, taken on explicitly political grounds, became Soros's standing counterfactual: he argues that the chosen path "exacerbated the gap between America’s haves and have-nots" and fed the resentments the Tea Party exploited, a line of argument sustained from 2009 through 2018. The episode also illustrates his conviction — sharpened by the crash — that market fundamentalist ideology survived its own failure and was turned, politically, against the government that rescued the system.

3. A test of open-society advocacy. Egypt 2011 was the Obama-era moment when Soros's political philanthropy and US foreign policy most nearly converged: he urged the president to stand "firmly by the values that got him elected", and pledged that his foundations were "prepared to contribute what they can" — resource centers for the rule of law, constitutional reform, and fighting corruption. His praise for Obama's handling of Egypt and Iran stands in the corpus as the high-water mark of his approval.

4. The diagnosis of American democracy's malaise. The fate of the Obama presidency — "his election and inauguration were the high points of his presidency" — deepened Soros's post-2004 conviction that the problem went "deeper than incompetent leadership": a public "unwilling to face harsh reality" and "positively asking to be deceived". That diagnosis, worked out through his Obama analysis in My Philanthropy and the CEU lectures (see The Way Ahead), underlies his later warning: "If President Obama fails, the next administration will be sorely tempted to create some diversion from troubles at home" — a fear he judged realized in 2016.

Key Passages