Yes We Can? Did President Obama Deliver?
I can remember exactly what I was doing 8 years ago today. That isn’t often true but the 20th January 2009 wasn’t just any old day. I sat at my laptop utterly transfixed as America’s 44th President, Barack Hussein Obama, delivered his inaugural address and ushered in a new era in global politics. I’ve watched it back a couple of times since and it never fails to cause the heart to beat a little a faster. What isn’t possible to recreate however is the unbelievable sense of optimism, renewal and hope that it represented.
20th January 2017 couldn’t feel much more different but on this momentous day I wanted to reflect (briefly) on what Obama has meant to me.
Last week , in front of an adoring crowd in Chicago, Obama delivered his farewell address to the American people. It was a pretty emotional moment for those of us who are fully paid up, card-carrying Obama fanboys.
The content of what he said was not very surprising, but it was no less elegant, erudite and impassioned for that predictability. It added to a long list of the soaring oratory, whether in Denver, Oslo, Cairo, Charlestown and Selma, for which he has become rightly famous.
He robustly defended his record in office. Much as he did in his letter to the American people he pointed to his signature achievements in office; staving off a depression, providing healthcare to 20 million uninsured Americans, ending two decade-long wars, building bridges with old adversaries Iran and Cuba, appointing two inspiring women to the Supreme Court bench, achieving marriage equality in 50 states, and ushering the world towards the most significant international accord on climate change ever signed. It is an impressive list.
But what I think is more important than anything that can be put in a chart is the way he achieved these things. Countless people, and I would include myself in this group, saw in Obama a model of how to be better. How to go after the things you believe in and how to conduct yourself whilst doing it. Whether or not you agree the above list represents a fulfilment of his early promise, nobody could for a second question the integrity or intentions that Obama steadfastly stuck to throughout his time in office.
Fundamentally my admiration for Obama is driven by those personal qualities. His fierce intellectualism, his innate understanding of the power of the spoken word, his preternatural calm and resilience in the face of adversity, his deep-seated humility, and lastly (but by no means least) his relationship with his remarkable wife Michelle. As a model to live by I struggle to think of anything better. Charles Blow put it best when he described: “the decency and dignity, the solemnity and splendour, the loftiness and literacy that Obama brought to office.”
I will always think of Obama as my first president. This is a fairly nonsense statement. Firstly I’m not American and so I don’t get to have a President. Secondly he was actually the fourth President to serve in my lifetime and the second I remember (third if you include Jeb Bartlett). The reason I feel a sense of ownership is that he was the first political figure who I felt spoke to my beliefs, my hopes and my world view.
As a teenager I was reflexively, and often vitriolically, anti-American. The Neo-con America of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and Greenspan was easy to hate from this side of the Atlantic. I saw it as a nation of fools governed by an impressionable, intellectually stunted WASP who had stolen an election he was only part of due to unabashed nepotism. I watched a lot of Michael Moore. This all changed when someone showed me Obama’s address to the 2004 Democratic Convention. As Greg Jaffe explores in a recent article this address, largely written by Obama himself, became a kind of “ur-text” for the Obama administration and was the intellectual foundation of what he set out to achieve four years later.
With this 16 minutes my entire perspective on what America could mean and what it could represent was shifted. I became enraptured with the man who delivered it and that fascination has barely faded in the 10 years since I first watched it. I, for the first time, understood how people from across the political spectrum must have felt about FDR, or Kennedy, or Reagan, or Thatcher, or Blair. This wasn’t just another politician but someone who articulated, with a sparkling literary verve, all the things I held to be self-evident.
Of course Obama has not achieved everything he set out to. I’m sure he would be the first to feel the pain of the fact he leaves behind a country still murderously addicted to gun ownership and a world still riven by sectarian suspicions and violence. He also underestimated the callous obstructionism of the opposing Congressmen and Senators who were so terrified by the extent of Obama’s vision, the strength of his mandate and the colour of skin that they made non-cooperation the modus operandi of the Republican party. The government shutdowns and failure to give Merrick Garland a hearing are merely the most high-profile examples of a ruthless campaign.
And of course there is the 45th President.
Donald J. Trump is the photo negative of Obama. This is less about race than it is about temperament. His bullying, misogynistic, anti-intellectual brand of demagoguery is everything that Obama is not. This was clearly attractive to the minority of voting age Americans who plumbed for the Republican candidate but it undeniable poses a huge risk to all the things that the Obama administration achieved, not to mention global geopolitical stability or my blood pressure.
In summer I entered a FT essay competition and answered the question: “A great social reformer or a great disappointment? Which is the fairer verdict on the presidency of Mr Obama?”. It was an unashamedly optimistic piece in which I predicted that voters of November 2016 “ reject[ed] the demagoguery of neo-facist of Donald Trump and forced the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower to radically reconstitute itself.” Despite being disturbingly wrong about that I’m nevertheless confident that Obama will be remembered a giant amongst Presidents.
2016 was a chastening year and there is no reason to suggest that 2017 won’t be the same. But however long it takes for Trumpian fury to burn itself out in a blaze of entitled divisive anger that nihilistic vision is not the future. Obama’s message of collective optimism is what I will be following as we try to bend the arc of history towards progress.
Thank you BO.
