Obama is Hope

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

The Twenty-Second Amendment limits US presidents to two elective terms. If it didn’t exist, how many of us would vote for Barack Obama again in a heartbeat? I think I hear the rustle of 100 million hands going up in unison.

Recently my wife and I watched the must-see Netflix documentary American Factory, which the Obamas, Barack and Michelle, helped produce. After the movie ended, Netflix showed a brief discussion among them and the two hands-on producers. The camera opened on Barack, with his trademark smile, which lit up the room.

As our former President began explaining why he and Michelle helped make the movie, it all came back to me. The grace. The dignity. The wisdom. The human empathy. The simple and enduring decency. A whole eight-year presidency absolutely free of corruption, slime and any hint of scandal.

Later, I began recalling the actual accomplishments. There was the first big improvement in people’s health insurance since Medicare, plus forcing private insurance to cover pre-existing conditions. Despite all of Nancy Pelosi’s consummate skill as Speaker, “Obamacare” passed the House by only three votes out of 435, suggesting that Obama knew precisely the limits of the “art of the possible.”

There was the quick recovery from the Great Recession, despite McConnell’s pledge (following Rush!) to make Obama fail from day one. There was justice brought to Osama bin Laden, three years into Obama’s first term, after seven years of his predecessor’s failure, and without invading a whole new sovereign nation and starting yet another unnecessary war. There was the winding down of the two needless wars that Dubya had started.

There was the GM bailout. Many, including me, had resisted it; but it saved an American industrial icon and millions of good jobs in the upper Midwest. There was “Cash for Clunkers,” which got millions of polluting jalopies off our roads and made room for our own Detroit to get meaner, leaner and more efficient. There was the Iran nuclear deal, which gave us another decade to manage that prickly theocracy short of war. There was the stringent auto-mileage regulation, which put our auto industry on a glide path toward a sustainable and fossil-fuel-free future. There was a president who, for the first time since JFK, attracted adoring crowds whenever he went abroad.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. When Obama left the White House—and even more when he went in—we were a nation full of hope and dreams. Now look at us. Our fondest hope is avoiding the worst of the flurry of blunders foisted on us by a nasty, corrupt and selfish fool. As we cower in fear of Covid-19, we don’t know whom to believe—our narcissist-in-chief, or the people who’ve spent their careers preparing for a pandemic.

Our current simulacrum of a “leader” has done everything he can to erase Obama’s legacy. He hasn’t quite wiped out the 20 million policies of new health insurance under “Obamacare,” but he’s come close. His Administration’s and his Party’s lawsuits could finish the job. He’s torpedoed the Iran deal and is left with an unstable and ever-escalating crisis. He’s getting ready to knock our auto industry back toward reliance on fossil fuels at time of pandemic-caused low oil prices. If he could resurrect Obama bin Laden and put him in business again as a bogeyman to scare the rubes, he probably would. So all the hope that we once shared is under siege, retreating into the darkest halls of memory.

Make no mistake about it. Barack Obama is the titular head of the Democratic Party and our most recent ex-president. Hillary Clinton lost and is spending her time writing books to justify and excuse her unexpected debacle. She never held an office higher than the one Obama appointed her to. The Dems don’t have a presidential nominee yet, let alone one with the vision, wisdom and charisma of President Obama.

So where is our leader, our shining star, our hope? AWOL.

I know, I know. Barack Obama is the most gifted pol since FDR. He must have reasons, and they must be good ones. But meanwhile, we the people are starving for emotional sustenance, for hope.

With every twitch of the poll-o-meter, we can see our economy, our democracy, our unity, our human decency, and everything we love about our country not just slipping away, but falling over a cliff. We all know, deep in our souls, that the seven months to the next election are crunch time—make or break time for our 244-year-old experiment in self-government. We know that, if Trump wins again, most of what we love about our country, including honesty and simple competence, will vanish. The America that my generation of Boomers and our parents knew will be finished. And it will end regardless of how big or small a toll Covid-19 ultimately takes of us.

I have never been more convinced of anything political than that the coming election will be about character. Nothing about our nation’s and our species’ current position is simple. Under current circumstances, just getting rid of an inexperienced uber-incompetent buffoon is hard. Fighting Covid-19 is hard; even acknowledged experts disagree about who should wear masks, which anyway are in short supply. Getting our jobs back onshore is hard. Trump hasn’t yet even begun to reach for the low-hanging fruit of repairing our infrastructure. Apparently he’s been waiting until the very last minute, so as to force the Dems to agree amidst a pandemic, and thereby to claim near-election credit for something he should have begun over three years ago, in his very first month in office.

And of course fighting our ultimate existential challenge of global warming is the hardest of all. We have a decade, or at most two, to completely transform our energy infrastructure, and to convince and help the rest of humanity to do so. And we row against the tide of 40% or so of our own people who’ve been told the whole thing is a hoax. If all this weren’t tough enough, Trump’s penchant for lying incessantly and changing his mind and his position (retroactively, if the press would let him) obscures all our politics and policy in something like a deep fog of war.

Now stressed by economic catastrophe and the fear of sickness and death, our people are not going to figure all this out analytically by themselves. Even if they hadn’t been deliberately siloed into ideological apartheid by propaganda machines like Fox, Rush and the president himself, they don’t have the background, the knowledge or the patience. In the final analysis, they are going to vote on trust and confidence. They are going to vote character.

Of all the pols I can think of, with the possible exception of Adam Schiff, there is one who stands head and shoulders above the rest in character. It’s Barack Obama. Bill Clinton knew how to win elections, but his triangulation and questionable character killed progressivism among Democrats for a generation.

Maybe Joe Biden doesn’t want his mentor’s help. It’s perfectly understandable that, even in his late seventies, a man wants to make it on his own. But Al Gore apparently felt the same way about Bill Clinton, who at least knew how to win. And so here we are.

We’ve got indignation galore. We’ve got outrage by the bushel. We’ve got confusion, angst and despair. What we don’t have—and don’t see anywhere on the horizon—is hope. There is only one man in this exhausted, weary, scared, confused and divided nation who might spark it in the Dems, let alone the rest of us.

Maybe he’s waiting until the Dems have a nominee and the general-election campaign begins in earnest. But with the pandemic raging and primary elections falling like dominoes, that might not happen until August or September. We could all use some of Obama’s hope right now.

Permalink to this post