Savior Politics Personified
Remembering Barack Obama, The Greatest President Who Absolutely Ever Was
In my most recent “Notes on the Way,” I had occasion to mention a former president, Barack Hussein Obama—in no very complimentary manner. This attracted the attention of some leftie troll who, when he wasn’t accusing me of harboring “MAGA mind worms” and calling me a fascist, fulminated over the fact that I referenced Obama’s middle name. He also took issue with my observation that Obama was the darling of white progressives. Never happened, he insisted.
Now it’s certainly true that as things turned out Obama was a disappointment to the comrades, who’d hailed his advent with hosannas and waving palm fronds. Having projected their ideological hopes and dreams onto Mr. Hope & Change, they were chagrined to discover what it was like to be governed by the president of their high school senior class. So now they’re rewriting history: Hey, we never really liked the guy!
As my interlocutor’s demonstration of selective memory attests, Barack Obama cut a curious figure in American public life. Nowadays the term White adjacent is deployed as a slur, for instance against Asian Americans—who, it seems, are just too gosh-darned smart to be included among the BIPOC. But was there ever a politician of color more adjacent to white than Barack Obama? Though nominally African American, his parentage and upbringing set him apart. And that apartness, his intellectual cool, was what commended him to white progressives. Though they pined for a black president, they could never quite swallow the notion of, say, President Jessie Jackson: too flashy, too much the showman, too reliant on call-and-response street politicking. But Obama? As a denizen of the seminar room with a postmodern vibe, he reminded white progressives of themselves, not least in the enormity of his self-regard.
The fact that Trump followed Obama is not as surprising as many found it in 2016. After all, the cult-like hype that surrounded Obama as a candidate prefigured MAGA. Recall the iconography: Barack the Lightbringer, Barack the Christ-like figure. The cult of Trump is just a down-market version of the same thing. But the real Obama was different: intelligent but not wise, glib but not eloquent, casually dismissive of criticism and opposition. He gave the impression that America was not quite worthy of him. FDR too was a cold man, but he cultivated a surface geniality and sunniness that made him popular as an individual. Obama's popularity was purely a function of projection.
His actual record as president was none too impressive. Obamacare, supposedly a long step down the road to universal healthcare, turned out to be one more dysfunctional government program. The pullout from Iraq produced a mess. The red line in Syria was rubbed out. The Iran nuclear deal was a colossal blunder. He was president for eight years and though he talked a lot, he never produced a memorable turn of phrase. The empty circularity of his campaign catchphrase, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” sums up Obama as a man and a chief executive.
All that may seem odd, given the undoubted fact that Obama is an intelligent person. But then, sheer intelligence is overrated as a qualification for the presidency. The besetting sin of highly intelligent people is intellectual vanity: the conviction, often subconscious, that what they know is all there is to know. It appears that in Obama’s case, intellectual vanity was top of mind. In September 2008, a New York Times profile quoted him as saying “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.” He was speaking to Patrick Gaspard, his political director.
Intelligence tainted by arrogance and bull-headed stupidity can produce much the same results—as a comparison between Obama’s Iraq pullout and Joe Biden’s Afghanistan skedaddle demonstrates.
But the most damning entry in Obama’s record is the fact that he was succeeded by…Donald J. Trump. Obama entered office in 2009 promising “fundamental change”—and in a perverse way, that’s exactly what America got. Two can play at savior politics and whatever else may be said of Trump, he proved just as effective in that role as his predecessor. By being so much less than he seemed, Barack Obama cleared the way for a candidate with similar characteristics. And thanks to them both, America is now saddled with that comical absurdity, the Biden Administration. No wonder my leftie troll now disavows The Greatest President Who Absolutely Ever Was.
Bismarck once cracked that “There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.” Man, let’s hope so, because right at this moment, we could use some divine assistance. Thanks a lot, Barry!
Isn’t Biden like a schizoid senile combo of Obama and Trump? Really progressive domestic policy, showering the economy in free money, with a Wilsonian foreign policy outlook deluding himself that America’s sins as a superpower have to be redeemed by surrendering the Middle East, to preserve our basic moral perfection-- “Democracy...” {...} crickets chirping. Then on the other hand he’s like Trump, yelling at us all the time about jobs and manufacturing, and then his bizarre China hawkishness abandoning strategic ambiguity towards Taiwan. And if our every new executive builds on the follies and illiberalism of his predecessor, then I suppose RFK would be next, who would be a combination of grandiose Trumpian fire and damnation, and, Bidenomics massive social spending, the deficit going to hell, and detente and conciliation everywhere