Obama and all of us
Elected President of a deeply divided nation, he seemed, for a shining moment, capable of bringing us together across chasms as deep as those the Colorado River cuts through the Grand Canyon. They separate conservatives from liberals, the well-off from the struggling, Democrats from Republicans, blacks from whites.
He had risen to stardom on the strength of a speech delivered to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, offering what was then a bitterly split country the possibility of healing.
His very face spoke to that promise. His mother was white, from Kansas. His father was black, from Kenya. He lived in Hawaii, in Indonesia, in Chicago. He traveled in and seemed to understand not just two worlds, but many more, even better than most of us understood one.
And so, as he campaigned in 2008, Americans began to believe they could escape the bitterness, vitriol and reflexive rejectionism that had come to characterize the country’s public sphere.
A war in Iraq tore at the country more intensely than any conflict since Vietnam. Debates about the scope of government raged, as did culture wars. Few policy battles were fought in good faith. Hope was possible, he told us. So was change. In two terms, America’s first black President leaves a legacy both uplifting and sobering.
Uplifting because Barack Obama, through the power of his example, signaled that politics can be not a nasty or venal enterprise to accumulate power and advance special interests, but a well-meaning attempt to elevate the public good.
Which is not to pretend the public good is selfevident, or that his decisions, any of them, were above reproach. It is simply to state that no one of right mind could doubt that time and again, this President tried his level best to get things right, and led with decency and integrity.
Nor was Obama’s way of politics characterized by small maneuvers and pieces of stagecraft to position him politically for the next small maneuver or piece of hollow stagecraft. He repeatedly risked his popularity as he reached to accomplish big things.
This undeniable uplift must be chastened by the recognition of Obama’s shortcomings, and, ultimately, of our own.
The man who seemed willing and able to unite the country couldn’t do it, and too often lacked the courage to try. To be sure, he was stymied out of the gate by a reflexive Republican refusal to take his hand. But it’s the President’s job to be the bigger man, and Obama wasn’t, not often enough.
A brain capable of embracing nuance and complexity, of seeing all arguments from all angles, got bogged down, particularly in a complicated world where raw power matters more than virtue.
And, as evidenced by the election of Donald Trump — who campaigned on the promise of undoing so much of what his predecessor accomplished — Obama in his eight years did too little to speak to the aching economic anxieties of millions of Americans.
Perhaps most painful of all, Obama leaves office having seen the partisan divisions he decried harden on his watch.
Especially vexing, white and black Americans seem no closer together today than they were eight years ago. No doubt, that’s partially because the very presence of a black man in the Oval Office, like chum in the water, brought long-submerged demons to the surface.
But it’s also a painful lesson that one man’s leadership, however graceful, however suited to the moment it may seem, cannot unite a country intent on remaining divided.