An unfinished farewell
They stood aside for Hillary in 2016, but there’s still plenty of life left in the Obama-Biden legacy. Here’s hoping this is not a final goodbye.
After President Obama’s farewell address on January 10, 2016 I spent some time watching his victory speech in 2008. Oh, to go back there again knowing what we know now. That’s life’s greatest challenge isn’t it? Facing an unknown future in one moment, looking back on what could have been in the next. We all deal with it in our own lives, looking back through photo albums while wondering what the next few years will bring, always standing squarely on the nexus of yesterday and tomorrow. Sometimes we ponder what we’ve learned, sometimes we just want to leave it all behind. With Grant Park ’08, I strangely feel like I want to remember but at the same time wish I could forget. I want to embrace that moment, but what do we do with it now?
If only we could go back. My favorite moments from that evening happen after the historic and exhilarating speech was finished. A beaming Joe Biden strolling onto the stage, smiling from ear to ear. If you squint, Joe cuts the figure of your stereotypical older white male politician from any era, and here he was embracing his new boss, this young black man. There, Michelle’s quiet congratulatory embrace and simple “love you.” Their eyes reflected their humility in the face of the moment. The diversity of the crowd and of the two families on stage, the First Black American President. Not once-in-a-lifetime, but once-in-an-eternity.
And there on stage was Beau, Biden’s oldest son, an Iraq War veteran who would become Delaware’s attorney general before succumbing suddenly to brain cancer in 2015. This tragedy compelled Vice President Biden to forego a run for the White House in 2016, and left us to wonder would could have been for Beau’s own promising political career. It is just heartbreakingly bittersweet to look back on that magnificent evening.
Seeming to know exactly what we’d need, President Obama gave us one more sanguine moment to provide the opposite bookend to Grant Park: His surprise presentation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Joe Biden. Also bittersweet, but heartening and heartwarming, it gave a country coming to grips with what is to come something to smile about. These are two men, and two moments that are quintessentially American. History will remember their partnership and friendship well. However, we will also wonder what could have been.
The story in between
I remember watching President Obama’s address to the nation in 2011 that “justice had been done,” that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. Seeing him approach the podium, and state “on my order…” I thought to myself that he just got himself re-elected in 2012 right there, despite some ups and downs in his first term. I was probably right. In 2004, the Iraq war had gotten off to a rocky start but the electorate seemed to George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt in re-electing him, allowing him to see the conflict through as well as the over-arching war on terror.
Similarly, the 2012 election was a referendum on Obama’s first term that featured a bumpy start to the Affordable Care Act, but the electorate gave him the chance to see it through, as well as the economic recovery from ’07 crash—despite sending a shot across the bow by supporting the Tea Party wave in the ’10 mid-term. The Osama Bin Laden killing provided a boost.
After the events of 2011 and 2012, however, Obama and Biden moved forward two over-arching strategies (or lack thereof) that had started in the first term and grew only more troublesome in the second, leading to the inexplicable rise of Donald Trump.
The perception of weakness
First, there was a mostly perceived—but often real—leaning toward dovishness and pacifism. At least optically, Obama and Biden’s critics always accused them of taking the “weaker” approach: The exit from Iraq; the Iran nuclear deal; the plan to close of Guantanamo; the “red line in the sand” and Russian involvement in Syria; the DACA immigration policy; the re-opening of relations with Cuba; the San Bernadino shootings; the commutation of federal prison sentences for hundreds of drug offenders…
… The list goes on a bit longer, and the loudest and most stringent criticism came from the right. But there was a subtle erosion of American strength that even the center seemed to perceive. Obama supporters will tell you that all of these decisions were driven by an overarching policy toward peace, toward tolerance, toward environmental preservation, toward justice and equality, toward keeping American troops out of harm’s way and avoid an Iraq-style quagmire.
The nation was growing unsettled by unnerving, interwoven scenes of police violence against unarmed black men and reciprocal attacks on police. They saw refugee immigration threaten to destabilize Europe. By isolated yet frighteningly random terror attacks both there and here in the U.S; and they watch the source of that immigrant exodus, Syria, burn violently in a confusing and confounding conflict. The United States seemed to cede the chaos to a vile triad of a longtime nemesis (Putin), a brutal dictator (Assad) and a terrorist group (ISIS) that happened to be the origin of those aforementioned attacks.
No heir apparent
But Obama and Biden were, to an extent, selling the progressive approach. The country was polarized and paradoxical: Polls showing the country was headed in the “wrong direction” (polls ALWAYS show this) also gave Obama a high approval rating. Heading into the 2016 election, Obama had every opportunity to craft a message and vision that could be carried on by a successor of his choosing, molded in his image.
That heir apparent simply wasn’t there. He or she never arrived, mostly be cause he or she was never identified let alone nurtured. There was talk of Biden running in ’16, and of course Hillary Clinton would try again as she did in ’08. There is not much talk about the subject now but I suspect that the Democrats’ ongoing soul-searching and historians’ analysis will pose the question: Was there ever a thought of Obama and Biden nurturing their “own” successor—besides the 74-year old Biden himself? Into that void stepped, of course, Hillary Clinton, the candidate perhaps least equipped to establish a moral high ground against Donald Trump. More on that later, and I also wrote an essay about this topic shortly after the election, below.
An alternate universe
In part despite this frustration—and in part because of it—I am sad to see Obama and Biden go. I’ve recently been thinking about an alternate universe where Biden won the 2008 presidency with the younger Obama as his running mate, and it would have been the still-young 55-year old Obama running for the presidency in 2016 as that aforementioned heir apparent. Would it have been Obama vs. Trump? Almost definitely not.
The insanely talented Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a brilliant and sprawling summary of President Obama’s eight-year term, finished up just after Trump was elected and title “My President Was Black.”
Mr. Coates, an African-American man given generous access to the President, writes honestly and unapologetically. Coates’ primary thesis focuses on Obama’s unique upbringing and how it impacted his relationship with and perception of white America. (To summarize the article as such does not do its thoughtful scope justice, so please read it at the link above.) He also asserts that without an Obama presidency, there would have been no need for Trump. If Joe Biden had defeated John McCain in 2008 (my example, not Coates’), and either Biden or Romney had won in 2012, there would have been less clamor—and tolerance—for Trump’s nativist, nationalist, xenophobic approach.
That’s a good argument, and I’ll take the hypothetical one step further: If the ticket were reversed and Biden-Obama won in ’08 and ’12 … only now would a 55-year old Obama be running for president in ’16. All things being equal, I think I’d like his chances of being president until 2024.
Great regret
I’m not sure Coates is saying that “Obama led directly to Trump,” however. If a direct line can be drawn back to the source of Trump voters’ ire, it was Clinton. Donald Trump was so ill-prepared, so morally bankrupt, so thin-skinned, insensitive and foul, that you would have trouble inventing a plausible candidate with your wildest imagination who could not defeat him soundly. Unless you were presented with Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some of this is exit poll-driven 20/20 hindsight, but all the signs were there, blaring in bright lights alongside the road to defeat in the upper midwest. The signs spelled doom well before James Comey or the Russians and WikiLeaks.
In a brand-new exit interview by Jonathan Alter in the New York Times, Biden expresses regret that he didn’t use the right rhetoric to support Hillary during his campaign appearances; and that he recognized early-on that Trump had a chance, particularly with Biden’s own working-class brethren in Pennsylvania. He noted that Barack Obama was proudly looking forward to passing the baton from the first black president to the first woman chief executive. As the article’s title and contents imply, this is a great man, full of great regret, standing at the nexus of yesterday and tomorrow.
Two inaugurations
As the horror of the Trump campaign rolled on through 2016, every time his poll numbers rose there was one prominent vision that began to haunt me: The image of Trump The Birther taking over power from Barack Obama. I remember on election day 2009, making a playlist of Marvin Gaye, Fishbone, Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder and basking in the moment from my own, naive perspective. I remember feeling ebullient, glad this moment had arrived, pleased that it was this man taking the oath. I had fully made my choice of “which America” I wanted, more open and tolerant and diverse and progressive. I’m a lifelong centrist, but what I knew for sure that day and know now is that I have no use for the cocktail of white nationalism and xenophobia that is Trumpist Populism.
Trump will take office in a few days from this writing, and my depressive pall when thinking about that transfer has lifted. Obama and Biden’s graciousness has helped. Trump’s unprecedented cratering poll numbers for a president-elect have also. I’m well beyond acceptance. I’ll be boarding a plane and will not use wi-fi during the swearing in. When I land, I will wish him to not get anyone killed, and otherwise do everything within my rights as a citizen to ensure he loses in 2020 or is preferably ousted sooner.
A second act?
At that point, in 2020, who will be there to challenge him? I like what I have seen and heard from congressman Tim Ryan and senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown. As a moderate I would also enjoy the fireworks of watching Rand Paul or Marco Rubio challenge Trump in the primary.
But what is certain is that the Obama and Biden team, unbridled by Clintonism, the Clintons and their Clintonites, have the popularity, message and the gravitas to bring Trump down. They can’t run again, obviously. Biden could, at 78 … you can sense that desire within his painful recounting of what his family went through in 2015 and 2016 in Alter’s NYT article. Or, they could foster new leadership for a modernized campaign, one that counters Trump’s tweet-storming and pugilistic rallies with a more broadly sweeping, positive, inclusive message that resonates with the coasts AND the heartland.
Is there some audaciousness left in Obama’s original message of hope? Watching the way they launched in Grant Park ’08, and now witnessing what seems to be left in Obama and Biden: There’s frustration, there’s regret … and some anger beneath this graceful exit. And that’s fuel, and there’s fire.
This isn’t over yet.
