28 United States The EconomistNovember 21st 2020
T
he onlyracist epithets Barack Obama recalls from his first
presidential campaign, in his engrossing new memoir, “A
Promised Land”, were uttered by the rural white folk who declared
they were “thinking of voting for the nigger”. He would go on to
win the biggest majority of any Democrat since 1964, including by
unexpectedly bagging white, working-class states such as Iowa
and Ohio. “Race doesn’t matter!” chanted the crowds that celebrat-
ed his victories. Yet two years later Tea Party protesters were wav-
ing banners of Mr Obama with a bone through his nose. The pro-
portion of Republicans who said he was Muslim soared—to
around half by the end of his presidency. Whereupon millions of
those same rural supporters elected the main spreader of racist lies
about Mr Obama to be his successor.
As that chronology should suggest, the white backlash to Mr
Obama, which Donald Trump rode to the White House, was not in-
evitable. It was engineered, a product of unprecedented obstruc-
tion from the Republican establishment in combination with re-
lentless slander of the president and his adored, politics-loathing
wife by the conservative media. “It’s a trip, isn’t it?” murmured Mi-
chelle Obama, after glimpsing a Tea Party rally on television. “That
they’re scared of you. Scared of us.”
The hate-mongering on Fox News was the channel’s stock-in-
trade. But what were Republican elites so afraid of? They said Mr
Obama was dictatorial or radical. Yet the record he describes in his
dispassionate yet fluid style suggests how untrue that was.
Though he had shortcomings—a tendency to vacillate, a distaste
for political cut-and-thrust that bordered on aloofness—Mr
Obama was a relatively unassuming chief executive. He rehired his
Republican predecessor’s defence secretary, awarded a plum cabi-
net job to his resentful Democratic rival and considered his celeb-
rity status absurd. (On learning he had been awarded the Nobel
peace prize, less than a year into his term, he retorted: “For what?”)
He was also intrinsically moderate. Indeed his presidency, to
use a term it popularised, looks in retrospect like a stress-test of
the system’s ability to embrace that consensus-forging quality.
Consider that Mr Obama’s signature health-care and climate
policies were based on Republican initiatives. And he diluted the
former in a failed bid to get a single Republican vote for it in theSenate,thoughhispartyhad a supermajority there. A veneer of bi-
partisan support would make the law more resilient, he thought.
And he had no time for those on the left who griped at such com-
promises. He and his advisers adopted the phrase “public option”
(which these days counts as the most modest health-care reform
Democrats will consider) to refer to any left-wing unicorn.
His moderation was part-learned: he notes that most of the big
social reforms started incrementally. But mostly it reflected his
background. Raised in Hawaii by his white, Kansan grandparents,
he retained a strain of their cultural conservatism—cautious, with
a reverence for tradition and community—even after he acquired a
more unambiguously black self-awareness and hunger for social
justice. Uniting those disparate parts, by acting “as translator and
bridge among family, friends, acquaintances and colleagues”, be-
came at once an identity and a political mission. It also explains
his characteristic political traits.
They were the idealism and fine sense of empathy he showed
on the trail (though his novelty—“a blank canvas upon which sup-
porters across the ideological spectrum could project their own vi-
sion of change”—also helped). His pragmatism and restraint were
related qualities. Together they defined his vision of change.
Thus, for example, the constrained idealism of his foreign poli-
cy, which is considered less heretical in the dcthink-tank realm
these days. Thus, too, his nuanced pronouncements on race, in-
cluding his greatest speech, in 2008, in which he claimed that his
grandmother’s petty chauvinism was as much a part of him as the
overheated America-bashing of his black pastor. (“That was a very
nice speech, Bar,” she responded.) Restrained to a fault, Mr Obama
is even unwilling to castigate his enemies. He confesses to a sneak-
ing regard for the Tea Party’s organisation. But he comes close to
letting Chuck Grassley have it. He was the Republican senator who
kept Mr Obama guessing on his health-care bill only to admit that,
for all his prevarication, he was never going to back it.
It seems likely that Republican leaders and donors obstructed
Mr Obama so feverishly not because they genuinely thought he
was an extremist, but because they knew that he was not. It was
precisely his attempted bridge-building that was so threatening to
them. Because it was at odds with the story they had been telling
their voters about the left for a decade. And because, had Mr Obama
pulled it off, it would have made his already powerful government
hugely popular. Paradoxically, it was by spurning his offer of bipar-
tisanship that the Republicans made him seem, true to the right-
wing caricature, overbearing and partisan. It also helped them sty-
mie his plans and thereby dismantle the powerful Democratic tri-
fecta he had assembled at the mid-terms in 2010.
The conventional wisdom, which usually exaggerates individ-
ual dramas and downplays structural flaws, still blames Mr Obama
for much of that failure. But, notwithstanding his imperfections, it
is hard to think what he could have done to avoid it. His presidency
represented a genuine effort to break through partisan polarisa-
tion which mainly showed what an impossible ambition that was.Barack to the barricades
This is not a great lookout for Mr Obama’s former vice-president—
about whom he is scrupulously complimentary and unrevealing.
Joe Biden will soon return to the White House for his own stab at
restoring bipartisan comity, but with a far weaker mandate than
Mr Obama had, and at a more brutally divided time. He will make
mistakes. He will be slammed for them. But if his government fails
to ease the rancour, he may not be the reason why. 7Lexington Audacious and obstructed
Barack Obama’s new memoir, “A Promised Land”, will give his former deputy little comfort