Many Americans who had welcomed Obama concluded that the game was rigged for the rich and well connected. While he sat through agonizing meetings in his first 100 days, outside the White House the Tea Party rose up like a vicious storm. Democratic Party suffered a massive defeat in the 2010 midterm elections, resulting in Republican obstruction for the rest of his presidency and a decade of gerrymandered statehouses, I was quick to fault Obama and his technocrats for failing to grasp the moment.
Ten years later, I’m more forgiving....
If our condition is a kind of democratic collapse—an erosion of institutions, an implosion of civic trust, an explosion of lies—then there isn’t a politician who has stood against it more wholeheartedly and eloquently than Obama. With every year, the faults of his presidency fade and his stature rises. When he was young and tempted by cynicism, he clung to “the American idea: what the country was, and what it could become.” He still clings to it today. He’ll be the last of us to let it go.
I agree with everything Packer says here in this insightful review of Obama's new memoir. Packer writes --
These early dilemmas in Obama’s presidency echo his youthful conflict between, in Michelle Obama’s words, “the world as it is, and the world as it should be.” His taking pride in “good process” and settling on politically thankless policies that dissatisfied even his ardent supporters while winning over none of his opponents could be seen as an idealist’s learning to govern in the world as it is, acquiring wisdom the hard way....
“I was a reformer, conservative in temperament if not in vision,” he writes. But perhaps those early months actually reflected an inexperienced young politician confronted with unprecedented difficulties—not so much the world as it was, but the president as he was.
I, like many others, thought that this kind of "conservative reform" was not what the moment called for, but rather a radical departure from the ethos defined by the Neoliberal "Washington Consensus". If Ronald Reagan could change the rules so radically in 1980, Obama could have at least tried to do it in 2008. But it became clear very quickly from Obama's appointments that he had no stomach to redefine the rules. He got behind efforts to reform healthcare. What he came up with was better than nothing, but did it in a way that only a Neoliberal technocrat could approve, and its flaws provided abundant low-hanging fruit for Obama's political opponents to pick and throw at him. Nevertheless, would it have been better had McCain or Clinton won in '08 instead? Hardly. Was there anybody on the scene at the time who could have done better? Who?
But rewriting the rules was what was called for, and the financial crisis presented the opportunity. Obama as a campaigner showed that he understood that, but once in the Oval Office, he was understandably overwhelmed. And so, alas, he leaned on the people who wrote the old rules and were therefore most responsible for creating the mess in the first place. It was the safer, more conservative thing to do.
It was disappointing, but to have realistically expected more of him is unfair. Nevertheless, whether fair or possible or not, his inability to do more has had consequences. Obama is refreshingly honest and intelligent enough to recognize the truth of this. Excerpts that I've read from the book make this abundantly clear. He wonders if he could have done more, but takes solace in that he ran a good process. But running a good process is not what the moment called for.
Obama was handed a hot mess from the Bush administration, whose mistakes were far more egregious and far more responsible for the rise of Trump. But even if we don't have enough perspective yet to know to what degree the Obama years played their role in bringing on the Trump years, it's clear that his focus on "good process" did little to impede forces already growing in destructive power. Perhaps that should be his gravestone epitaph--"A thoughtful, complex man who ran a good process". That being said, Obama is a remarkably astute public figure, and I have hopes that he might have a more consequential post-presidency than his presidency.
We'll see if Biden can do what Obama failed to do. But even if he is a far more talented politician than I give him credit for, I fear it's too late, that we are truly in democratic collapse. There are days, and today is one of them, when I think the situation Biden faces is not unlike that of Gorbachev faced in the 80s before the break up of the USSR. Like the USSR then, the structure in the U.S. is so rickety now after Trump that there's little that can be done to prop it up. All the king's horses, and all the king's men, etc.
Perhaps people like Barr, McConnell, and Graham understand this better than most--that since we are in democratic collapse and there's no saving democracy, why pretend that democratic norms and practices matter? The only thing that really matters is who emerges on top when the whole thing finally collapses. If it's the Christian nationalists who come out on top, expect a secession crisis.
But I'm with Packer when it comes to Obama's vision for America's better possibilities even when I'm most pessimistic about what is in fact possible. It's an America that's worth fighting for, but it's hard to see how that can succeed so long as it is joined at the hip to a Red America that has truly lost its mind.