Legacy: Obama Wants to Make Sure Future Presidents Can’t Oppose Gay Marriage, Immigration
“He wants to leave behind a national conversation that has changed because he was here.”
Washington Post‘s National Political Correspondent Karen Tumulty told Candy Crowley that President Obama wants to leave behind a legacy that changes the “terms of engagement” to ensure that future presidents will be unable to run in opposition to gay marriage or immigration reform.
Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, Tumulty said that Obama came to Washington to “change the way it worked” and that he has used his executive power to do so. She said folks inside the White House are saying Obama is using the “bully pulpit” to implement his strategies:
You talk to people at the White House and they say that it is very important to the president, before he leaves office, to use the bully pulpit to sort of change the terms of engagement, so that no future presidential candidate could ever run as opposing gay marriage or as opposing immigration reform. Essentially, he wants to leave behind a national conversation that has changed because he was here.
Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith was also a panelist who agreed that Obama “created his legacy early” and will fight to make sure his signature health care legislation is “invulnerable to the next president.”
However, Smith didn’t agree that Obama’s legacy will change the platforms of future presidents saying the presidency is a “dynamic office:”
We’re not talking about our fathers, let alone our grandfather’s presidency. This is a dynamic office. This is not TR’s bully pulpit or FDR’s fireside chats. Harry Truman was the first president to pardon a White House turkey and he went out of office with a whole lot lower popular approval rating than this president has at the moment.
