OBAMA’S FATAL TEMPTATION.

Having now seen Obama, the movie, to its final frames, I’m looking forward to the book. As Kelly McParland argued Wednesday, Obama’s official farewell address, delivered in Chicago last week, was a pro forma defence of everything he did in his presidency. It’s hard to see how it could have been otherwise. Obama is widely and correctly regarded as thoughtful, even if some of the thought he’s full of is banal, boilerplate progressivism. But if he’d damped down an amped- up audience of 25,000 dedicated fans and associates with a dispassionate analysis of his achievements and failures, he would have seriously ruined the occasion.

He’s writing a book, however. I liked his first book, Dreams of My Father, even if, like many books these days, it was too long and introspective. Conventional wisdom is that Ulysses S. Grant wrote the best presidential memoirs, which he undertook only because he was dying of throat cancer and needed to provide for his family following a financial misadventure. I’m not so sure about the conventional wisdom. Grant’s descriptions of Civil War battles get a little tedious even if the characterization of some subordinates’ shortcomings is wonderfully frank.

Obama recently told David Axelrod, who ran his campaigns, was a senior adviser in the White House and now hosts one of the best American podcasts, that he has been thinking about what kind of book to write. How it turns out will say a lot about his post-presidential political career. If he’s going to lead the anti-Trump movement, it will probably be defensive, concede little and not be very interesting — like the Chicago speech. If he’s really letting go of active politics, however, maybe he’ll tell us what he really thought about things.

My own theory of Obama is that in his first big choice in the White House he succumbed to a fatal temptation. He had won the 2008 election by seven points in the popular vote and with big majorities in both houses of Congress. He won that big for several reasons, but probably the most important was the overwhelming attractiveness of his message that “there is no Red America, there is no Blue America, there is only the United States of America.” Remember? Obama’s main message coming to the presidency was that America needed to move beyond partisanship.

In perfect irony, however, Americans’ yearning for post- partisanship gave the new president a partisan majority so impressive it created the partisan temptation, overpowering for a Democrat, to enact the party’s long- standing goal of universal health care, even when it meant passing Obamacare on a purely partisan basis and, in so doing, poisoning the chalice both of his remaining six years in office and maybe even of the reform itself.

Whether Obamacare really is doomed we’ll have to wait and see. As a new president with his own albeit smaller majorities in both houses is now discovering, the political challenge of repealing a social program with 20 million beneficiaries is considerable.

The great what- if of Obama’s presidency is what if he had tried harder in his first year in office to impose postpartisanship and be so accommodating to Republicans that they would have had no choice but to co- operate? Obama’s story — he told a version of it to Axelrod — is that he did try, hard, but Mitch McConnell, leader of the Senate Republicans, refused every overture, believing, as McConnell candidly conceded a year into Obama’s first term, that a successful Obama presidency, whatever it might do for the country, would damage his party’s overriding interest, which was to get the White House back. In short, post- partisanship failed because the loyal opposition was disloyal.

That’s certainly one possibility. Another is that it was a failure of presidential leadership. A lifelong pol like Lyndon Johnson, flatterer and bully extraordinaire, might have got it done.

But a young president with a cool, detached personality didn’t have a chance. ( JFK, another young, bookish, charismatic and temperamentally cool president, had almost no success with Congress, even with LBJ helping him. In some ways, the disappointment and dashed idealism of Obama’s denouement suggest what Kennedy’s might have been, had he lived.)

The reason so many intellectuals and others in the chattering classes like Obama is that he is so similar to them: reflective, not reactive. All the professors I know adore him — mainly because he is so, well, professorial. But professors seldom do well in politics. Woodrow Wilson was another professor- idealist who mainly failed. What’s needed in politics are pols, people who know how to schmooze or smash heads together and get things done. In the end, Obama wasn’t able to do that and so he failed in what he himself had set as his chief goal.

But now he’s done with politics. His failings as a pol are behind him. And he’s writing another book. It may be the job that suits him best. We may all stand to benefit.

OBAMA’S PROMISE TO MOVE PAST PARTISANSHIP GAVE HIM POWER TO BE STARKLY PARTISAN.