Obama Speaks!
Ready to hate my guts? Again?
You may recall that my hobby horse of choice is Barak Obama, my erstwhile hero. Apart from the fact that he deported millions of brown people, he was a passing fair president with whom I felt closely aligned. He was a graceful writer, a thoughtful orator, and ran an administration entirely free of scandal. Even the thought that he would end up on a client list—let alone an Epstein client list—is a crazy fantasy beyond imagining. Barak Obama was clean as a whistle. Trump is unfit to shine his shoes.
What he has never mastered is capital “L” leadership. He went out of office to spend a couple of weeks windsurfing, but I don’t think he ever got off the board. Windsurfing is OK. Abdication is not. He had nothing important to say about Trump 1.0 and, even though the stakes are now higher by far, he has been largely silent on Trump 2.0. That’s despite the fact that Rome is on fire, with Sauron and Co. in the role of the Santa Ana winds. If we survive at all until the nation’s next big birthday, it will either be an accident or a miracle of Providence. I’m not betting on either possibility.
Obama seems to be slowly acknowledging some of this. I wouldn’t exactly call it an awakening. More like the occasional fluttering of his eyelids. He recently addressed an exclusive gathering to try to raise funds for New Jersey and Virginia. Two promising candidates are running for governor and Obama asked for contributions to their campaigns, and another bump for the DNC. Given the state of the national party, my guess is that the DNC did poorly in the ask.
The problems here were at least two-fold. If Obama speaks at all, it is always exclusively. I imagine a mess of beautifully dressed philanthropists sipping Negronis on a terrace in the Hamptons. Ina Garten herself is serving swordfish kabobs and Martha Stewart has just baked up key lime tartlets. Obama never had a gift for just-folk voters, and events like this one confirm impressions of his persona. As Valerie Jarett once cautioned him, never compromise the brand.
The other problem was what informants reported. He said all the obvious things about universities and all the obvious things about law firms. Neither should capitulate to Darth Vadar and The Barbarians. The big surprise is that he didn’t stop there. Obama always gets sweaty over elite institutions, whose fate is of little concern to voters. I actually care about universities and law firms, but they are sidebar issue next to undocumented immigrants.
He also said that we should speak up and out. Thank you, Barak, but I’d like to point out the obvious that you never manage to do either of those things and, even in the midst of our collapsing democracy, you have taken no risks in confronting the Beast in the White House. Of course, the rest of us should be screaming from the roof tops, but it would be ever so helpful if you were standing next to us. Maybe you and Michelle and Valerie and your kids, so that you could embolden our efforts and strengthen our hands.
And while you’re at it, you could think some new thoughts about how we dump our gerontocracy, regain our footing with brown people, and productively confront the wild incivility of the opposition. At this point, I’m still thinking good thoughts about your presidency, but the postlude is looking pretty shabby. Jimmy Carter, in the meantime, is looking better and better.