Barack Obama: The Incandescent President
Barack Obama’s presidency is over. It is a difficult fact for millions to come to terms with. Those who admired him tried to absorb what was left in the last days, inscribing images in memory hoping they would last. His rousing farewell speech in Chicago, a moving ceremony to award Joe Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a commuted sentence to Chelsea Manning, his last press conference.
Commentators offered clinical perspectives on his legacy. Obama averted economic catastrophe, he saved the banks and the car industry, as the Economist pointed out. Twenty two million Americans got access to healthcare they did not have earlier. Prison sentences for crack convictions were reduced. Osama bin Laden was killed. The deal with Iran averted near-certain conflict; he steered the State Department towards a measure of sanity by restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba. He rehabilitated America’s image in Muslim countries and elsewhere — think of the infamy George W Bush left it in.
This telegraphic summary does not quite do justice to the momentous nature of these interventions and the amount of effort it took to deliver them. There was no telling, for instance, where Iran-Israel recriminations about Tehran’s nuclear programme would lead the world to. Also worth noting that the successes came through notwithstanding the implacable opposition of the Republicans, who early on decided to oppose Obama at every turn. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell reportedly demanded “unified resistance” from Republican colleagues, forcing Obama to resort to governing via executive orders.
There has been stern criticism too, particularly on foreign policy and issues liberals care about. In an excellent column Harvard professor Stephen Walt writes that Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan through a pointless surge “that was doomed to fail and did.” He embraced the Arab Spring too quickly underestimating the resilience of authoritarian regimes in Syria and Egypt. (The bloodshed in Syria is widely seen as his biggest failing, a stain on his progressive vision.) Obama’s administration did not foresee how its policies in Eastern Europe would be seen in Russia and it was outmaneuvered by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and the Crimea. Walt writes that “Obama never seemed to grasp that relying on pro-Israel advisors with a long track record of not producing an agreement [on a two-state solution] was a pretty good way to guarantee failure again.” He did not realise that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not interested in a genuine solution. His administration made important progress in rebalancing attention to Asia but its “failure to set clearer priorities or liquidate losing positions faster undermined the effort.”
Liberals championed Obama but were disappointed by his approach to national security — the use of armed drones in Pakistan and Yemen, the failure to close Guantanamo, refusal to prosecute those who committed torture, denying the right of habeas corpus to those in offshore prisons, militarily attacking Libya without Congressional approval and so on. How he reconciles these decisions with his beliefs or explains the decision-making process is something to look forward in his memoirs or those of his colleagues.
These lines of criticism resonate and other factors cast a shadow on Obama’s presidency: a Democratic Party in disarray at the end of his term, America’s sharpened racial divisions and the election of Donald Trump, a figure celebrated by the Ku Klux Khan. The euphoria of 2008 has given way to the anxiety of 2016. Structure has apparently triumphed over agency and what we’re left with is an appreciation of his charisma, charm and rhetoric — for short, a cultural moment that may soon pass.
Actually that moment may not pass. Presidents are a big part of America’s political imagination from Washington to Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson and Reagan. Obama will take his place alongside them as a man who had a profound influence on American culture. He came to power with his soaring rhetoric about American unity and purpose that captivated young and old and looking back few of his predecessors can claim to be as cultivated, thoughtful and self-aware as he was coming to power. And these facets have helped him emerge as the benchmark for presidential conduct.
First, his blazing intellect. He was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He wrote his memoir Dreams from my Father at the age of 33, which TIME magazine called “the best written memoir ever produced by an American politician”. It is an unforgettable book laced with magical prose that captures growing up as the son of a white American mother and Kenyan father who separated when he was a child. Sample this for a line. Speaking of an innocent time when he was too young to know that “he needed a race” he writes “for an improbably short span it seems that my father fell under the same spell as my mother and her parents; and for the first six years of my life, even as that spell was broken and the worlds they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.” And about a difficult phrase in his grandparents’ life: “it was as if they had bypassed the satisfaction that should come with middle years, the convergence of maturity with time left, energy with means, a recognition of accomplishment that frees the spirit.”
Obama was raised in a variety of settings (in Hawaii and Indonesia) and with great honesty and insight captures his struggles with race and identity. He writes movingly and unsparingly about being a black man in America, e.g. of racist jokes and the old woman who got agitated when he got on the elevator, the rage such incidents provoked, the hegemony of white cultural power that black assertion has to define itself in relation to, that it was the minority that “assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way round” — the cynicism all this tempted youth to, the fatalism that throttles hope and individual endeavour and the communities of resentment and despair it nurtures. Obama was caught between the world of white grandparents who loved him and “his brothers” who sometimes inspired “their rawest fears”. He writes of a range of experiences and conversations that help him deal with inner doubt and redirected him away from himself — a friend who tells him that it’s “never just about you. It’s about people who need your help”, those “who are not interested in…irony or sophistication” or egos getting bruised.
At 22, Obama decides to go to Chicago and help marginalised neighbourhoods organise for better infrastructure and services. This was hard work, often disheartening — asking people to turn up for meetings and persuading churches, schools, officials and community groups. This brings Obama face to face with different forms of deprivation and the venal side of local politics. After some success and seeing through what he started, he heads to Harvard to return and eventually become a senator.
The short of it is that by 2008 he is toughened by politics, he is under no illusion about human nature but remains sensitive to suffering. He is calm, attains a measure of self-mastery, is not overawed by others cerebrally, has little need for approbation that other politicians seek, as his friend David Axelrod says, and he has a wealth of human contact to retain empathy. To this, he has a love for words especially since college when he found that people listened to his opinions. Words rescued him from inner conflict, they framed his purposes, they led him to comprehend that his journey was uniquely American and, therefore, translatable at large. Hence, the ‘audacity of hope’, the serious pursuit of public reason, the high-minded ideals in speeches, the sense that every act of presidency has meaning in a deliberative democracy and the refusal to get drawn into ugly debates (‘when they go low, we go high’, as Michelle Obama would put it).
This confidence enabled him do many unexpected things, attending to the festive and salutary dimensions of democracy. He turned up at comedy shows, interviewed writer/scholars he admired like Marilynne Robinson and Doris Kearns Goodwin and invited a range of guests to the White House. His thoughtfulness showed in many ways. In his brilliant essay writer Ta-Nehisi Coates reports on those he encountered at the White House: “a deaf woman who worked as the president’s receptionist, a black woman who worked in the press office, a Muslim woman in a head scarf who worked on the National Security Council, and an Iranian American woman who worked as a personal aide to the president.” He appointed to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, from a Puerto Rican family, who grew up in the Bronx and went on to Princeton, Yale and had a distinguished legal career. He also nominated Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court who went to Harvard after being raised in a family whose father ran the “smallest of small businesses from a room in [a] basement”. Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on those whose achievement could not be grudged — including Sidney Poitier, Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Itzhak Perlman, Bruce Springsteen, Daniel Kahnemann, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Ben Bradlee, and Ellen DeGeneres.
He could not secure Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court and there are now fears about the direction of the Court but Obama did what he could for the future. Jeffrey Toobin wrote that Obama appointed 329 federal judges, more than a third of the total. They include two on the Supreme Court and fifty-five on the court of appeals. “Democrats now dominate most of the court of appeals. When Obama took office only three of the thirteen appellate courts had more Democratic-appointed judges than Republican-appointed judges. Now nine do.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates mentions a conversation with Obama about some leaders of the Black Lives Matter who did not turn up for a meeting because they didn’t want to be seen as compromising with the State. Obama says:
“I think where I got frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it. And that sort of lack of awareness on the part of an activist about the constraints of our political system and the constraints on this office, I think, sometimes would leave me to mutter under my breath. Very rarely did I lose it publicly. Usually I’d just smile.” He laughed, then continued, “The reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, ‘[Don’t] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it? Do you think that the only problem is that I don’t care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people?’ ”
Barack Obama did what he could do during his eight years. Some of his judgments were debatable but his promise was thwarted by small-minded men who claimed to be speaking for a city on a hill. Obama’s policies will have their ripples in society and some may be reversed. Ultimately his decency, grace and elevated sensibility will endure. Other countries have shown that democracies can turn noxious quickly if those in charge do not set the tone for the public sphere.
America and the world will rue Obama’s absence soon.
Twitter: @SushilAaron
