After eight years in the White House, Barack Obama is now a private citizen. He had brought hope and yes, even excitement, when he became the country’s president in 2009. The US needed that in the midst of the worst financial crisis after the thirties’ depression. At the time it seemed that the country needed a different direction from an altogether different man at the helm in every sense of the word. The US never had an Afro American as the country’s president and in Obama there appeared to be a young, personable, intelligent, hopeful candidate with no evident bitterness that was understandably ingrained among blacks. Indeed, he passionately believed and talked about one country and one people, thus transcending all differences of race, ethnicity, and partisan politics. And he believed too that the Americans were ready for that kind of unity of purpose and commitment, both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Obama was lyrical about his faith in America and the American people. Speaking at a public rally in Chicago after he won the race for the White House, he declared with pride, “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” And in the spirit of Martin Luther, he added, “The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.”
But from the viewpoint of the Republican Party, Obama might have won the election but he was hardly the one to lead the nation. First and foremost, Obama’s message of uniting the nation and transcending differences seemed too self-serving. Second: political partisanship of the country’s two major parties, Democrats and Republicans, was the guiding principle of its politics. Sure, both sides of the political divide sought to present themselves as advancing national interests but they didn’t always see that in the same way. Obama’s sincere effort to project himself as the all knowing wise man seemed brash and abrupt, not only because of his young age, and for many, due to his race. He was not only black but also suspiciously Muslim and probably not even born in America.
According to a 2015 CNN poll, 29 per cent of Americans still believed that Obama was Muslim. One in five Americans believed that Obama was born outside the country. Indeed, the proportion of Republicans who mixed Obama’s race, religion and birth was much higher. It is not for nothing that Donald Trump continued to paddle the ‘birther’ lie almost to the end, even after Obama had revealed his birth certificate. How humiliating and undignified for the president of the country to be harangued about his origin and whatever else!
But Obama maintained his dignity and continued to pursue his message of national good. He certainly waited too long, hoping that on issues like health cover for all Americans, he might be able to forge an agreement with the Republicans and, in the process, much time and energy was expended without substantive results. It would have been better for him to push necessary legislation, like on health care, when Obama’s Democrats had majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Even the truncated Affordable Care Act (Obama Care), which sought to extend cover to nearly 20 million Americans, was highly controversial with the Republicans vowing to repeal it, which Donald Trump as President has taken steps to dismantle.
In trying to be everyone’s consensual president, Obama sought to present a highly varnished and idealized version of America. He incessantly talked about American ‘exceptionalism’, of respect for human rights and so on, which, at times, so starkly contrasted with US’ reality. The imagined post-racial America was a myth when incidents of Afro American deaths by police shooting and by a Nazi white youth at a Church service highlighted the problem so starkly. While Obama expressed usual sorrow and sympathy for the victims, he was very restrained on such occasions. It was very disappointing for many that he was so ineffective in articulating and dealing with the whole range of disadvantage and discrimination that affected the country’s Afro American population and other minorities.
In his powerful book, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, wrote that nothing had really changed for the blacks. He said, “‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our (black) bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and some times it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.” And the election of Donald Trump as President is proof of the strong reaction to Obama’s presidency, even as it was ineffectual in building bridges and creating unity in diversity.
Of course, Obama’s election as the country’s first black president was highly symbolic and symbols are important at times, but Obama was too decent, too dignified and too consensual to take it beyond that. In trying to be everything to everyone, he had to even abandon his long time pastor Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 election who had denounced the policies of his country. Wright reportedly had said after the 9/11 terrorism attacks, “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye… and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” It was hot stuff and when it came out during the election, America’s consensual president-in-the making, Barack Obama, had no choice but to disown his old church and the pastor. Obama tried too hard to believe in his rhetoric and we know now that it didn’t work.
Under Obama’s administration, the country’s has made some economic recovery but it is too patchy with so many people still in doldrums, not sure of where the country is going. The hope that Obama generated has given way, among many people, to despair and desperation. Which has contributed to the Trump phenomena.
The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at [email protected]