The Observer newspaper recently invited five writers to share their reflections on the Obama years – to consider what had changed within the United States and how the President would most likely be remembered. Their insights are instructive not only with respect to the triumphs and failures of the last eight years, but also as a guide to the some of the challenges that face Obama’s successor.
On the vexed question of personal style, for instance, Tobias Wolff notes that the equanimity of the “no-drama Obama” candidacy soon drove him “sort of crazy” when it persisted in the face of the Republican party’s relentless obstructionism. As Wolff admits, most of us think of politics as a higher form of mud-wrestling and the President’s refusal to be drawn into “the namecalling, the attacks on Michelle Obama for encouraging schools to serve healthy food, even for occasionally wearing dresses that showed her arms” didn’t sit well with many Obama supporters. Correctly, Wolff attributes the frustration to a collective immaturity in the electorate. This insight rings true elsewhere. We often call for higher standards in public life, but when someone shows genuine forbearance in the face of seemingly inexhaustible vituperation we are, more often than not, frustrated by their patience. Perhaps only now that there is a candidate with no apparent restraint, a buffoon who relishes mudslinging, and excels at it, will Obama’s tact be fully appreciated.
On a related point, the novelist Attica Locke recalls being “stunned” in her soul as she watched the election results in 2008. As time passed, however, her euphoria changed to distress at the routine hatred displayed to the new president. Locke suggests that the day to day incivilities which Obama endured with such grace indicates “a level of racism in America that can no longer be ignored.” If a President so “well-educated, so graceful, so intelligent, so charming, can be so reviled and denigrated on a daily basis in some parts of the country and in Congress … you can no longer as a normal American ignore the profound problem of race in this country.” Indeed the administration’s failure to move the conversation on race any further in eight years leaves the next president with even greater difficulties on this issue.
British novelist Hari Kunzru holds a less rosy view of the Obama brand and observes, apropos of the frustrations that many activists have voiced, that once the “thick rind of symbolism has been peeled, the president has always been a cautious centrist Democrat with an instinct for consensus…” Kunzru trenchantly criticises Obama’s “rudderless” Middle East policy and ascribes part of the blame for the carnage in Libya and Syria to his “vacillation about engagement”, even though he acknowledges that there were no good options after “the squalid disaster of the Bush wars.”
Akhil Sharma and Jayne Anne Phillips, both agree that Obama’s personal integrity subtly shifted the centre of American politics. Sharma, an Indian writer who has lived and worked in America for years notes that now he doesn’t feel obliged to humour “white stupidity”; “My role is no longer to help them become comfortable with racial issues or to help them see another point of view. My response [now] is to tell people to grow up.” Phillips praises Obama for being a “stealth president” who achieved much even though the Republicans blocked every initiative. Both writers imply that while the President lost, or was forced into compromise in most of his battles, he may have won the larger war. In time the petulance of the GOP, its apocalyptic rhetoric, its opportunism, obstructionism and downright nastiness will make Obama’s successful stewardship of the economy, and his victories on healthcare reform, marriage equality, military de-escalation (despite a deeply troubling embrace of drone warfare), the Iran deal, the normalization of relations with Cuba and the recent climate agreement with China seem all the more impressive.
What comes through most forcefully in all of these reflections is that, on current form, neither of Obama’s likely successors seems well placed to achieve as much he did, especially if they encounter similar opposition. While Hillary Clinton at least has the skills to govern intelligently, she remains a deeply divisive figure throughout the country. It is hard to look at either candidate without feeling, in the words of Tobias Wolff, “nostalgic for Obama.”
