Obama weighs legacy, Trump
Post-presidency life might not be as tranquil as he hoped
Whatever President Obama had planned for life after the presidency, the election of Donald Trump will probably change those plans.
Instead of building on his legacy, he’ll be defending it. Instead of helping to nurture his Democratic Party as an elder statesman, he’ll be helping to rebuild it — finding new generational leaders who can carry the banner in future elections.
And instead of providing friendly counsel to President Hillary Clinton, he’ll have a more complicated relationship with President Donald Trump.
“Obama’s post-presidency just got exponentially more interesting,” said Cody Foster, a University of Kentucky historian who has studied the postpresidential lives of former presidents.
“Whereas he might have focused on building upon policies created during his administration, he must now defend his administration’s legacy,” Foster said. “Every policy, every veto, every word must now be carefully defended against an incoming leader eager to blindly press ‘undo’ on everything that Obama created. And President Trump can do that because he has a Republican Congress and is likely to have a more conser-
vative Supreme Court.”
It’s Obama’s relationship with Trump that will probably be most scrutinized. Presidents have often relied on their predecessors for advice, support and even some sensitive diplomacy. In return, modern presidents have avoided public criticism of their successors — although they’ve sometimes conducted freelance foreign policy in a way that’s flummoxed the incumbent, as Jimmy Carter has in his outspoken work on human rights.
“I don’t see him immediately becoming a Jimmy Carter-like thorn in the new president’s side,” said Anthony Clark, author of The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity & Enshrine Their
Legacies. “But I also think he’s going to be more critical than previous presidents have been. He’s going to have to find a way to be anti-Trump without appearing to be anti-Trump.”
In recent weeks, Obama has talked specifically about the role he’ll play in partisan politics after the election. At his end-of-theyear news conference, Obama said he sees a role in giving “counsel and advice” to the Democratic Party in an effort to reach areas of the country where Democrats have not performed well — places where he said “Democrats are characterized as coastal, liberal, latte-sipping, politically correct, out-of-touch folks.”
Obama said he’ll work to rebuild a Democratic Party that’s been decimated over the course of his presidency. Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential elections. But since 2010, Democrats have lost thousands of down-ballot races — the congressional seats, governor’s mansions, state legislative districts and local offices that form a kind of bench for a political party.
“With respect to my priorities when I leave, it is to build that next generation of leadership: organizers, journalists, politicians. I see them in America, I see them around the world, 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds who are just full of talent, full of idealism,” he said. “And the question is how do we link them up? How do we give them the tools for them to bring about progressive change? And I want to use my presidential center as a mechanism for developing that next generation of talent.
“But the day-to-day scrum, not only is it contrary to tradition for the ex-president to be involved in that, but I also think it would inhibit the development of those new voices,” Obama said.
That’s not a departure from past presidents, Clark said, but Obama may be a bit more upfront about using his foundation as a party-building tool.
“Prior to the election, my thought was that both the library and the foundation would be more in line with Jimmy Carter, who spent more time on his foundation and less on his library,” Clark said. “Now, I see it more like the Reagan Presidential Center, which is the altar on which rising conservative stars must go to become baptized.”
In one signal of how Obama intends to use his Chicago presidential center, he appointed David Simas to be the CEO of the Obama Foundation last month. Simas rose through Massachusetts politics, working for Gov. Deval Patrick before becoming Obama’s campaign pollster and the director of the White House Office of Political Strategy and Outreach. Patrick is on the board of the Obama Foundation, as is Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe.
Obama’s plans for a presidential library in Chicago have come a long way since the beginning of his presidency. In the 2011 book
The Promise, journalist Jonathan Alter wrote that Obama dismissed the idea of a brick-andmortar library entirely, musing to a friend that perhaps it should be entirely online.
Now, he has a foundation raising millions to build his library and endow his foundation. The foundation won’t discuss specific fundraising goals, but the cost of a president’s library has doubled for each of the past three presidencies. President George W. Bush’s foundation raised $500 million. (According to the Obama Foundation’s most recent tax filing, it’s raised $7.3 million in 2014 and 2015.)
Through the latter part of his presidency, Obama has talked about a litany of places he wants to return to and issues he wants to be involved in: the minority mentoring program My Brother’s Keeper, his various global youth development programs, criminal justice, gun control and nuclear non-proliferation.
Foster sees Obama settling into a role as a sort of citizen-diplomat — a position pioneered by former president Herbert Hoover and exemplified by Carter and Bill Clinton. Those former presidents were most ambitious on foreign affairs. The question for Obama, Foster said, is whether he can find an appropriate role as a citizen-activist at home.
Obama is “going to have to find a way to be anti-Trump without appearing to be anti-Trump.” Author Anthony Clark