Barack
Obama was six months into his post–White House life when Donald Trump
found a new way to grab his attention. It was a Tuesday morning deep in
the mid-Atlantic summer, and, feeling a world away from the Pennsylvania
Avenue grind, the former president was reading the New York Times on his iPad.
The previous evening, Trump had visited West Virginia, where he spoke at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree.
Addressing a crowd of roughly 40,000, who were expecting the usual talk
about citizenship and service, the president uncorked a political
diatribe packed with jabs at Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Washington,
D.C., “cesspool”; reminders about the importance of saying “Merry
Christmas”; and reminiscences of Election Night 2016 and the pundits he
embarrassed. “You remember that incredible night with the maps, and the
Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red
it was unbelievable. And they didn’t know what to say,” Trump told the
Scouts. They seemed bewildered at first but before long broke into
chants of “USA!” Adult observers were openly horrified. Three days
later, the Boy Scouts’ leader would apologize for Trump’s speech.
In
Washington, where the former president still works and lives with his
wife, Michelle, and his younger daughter, Sasha, Obama stewed. Ever
since the shocking election, he had resisted condemning his successor
directly. Early on, he would muse to senior aides in private about what
it meant that the country had chosen Trump, bouncing between writing off
the election as a freak accident and considering it a rejection of his
own vision of America. In the months after the inauguration, Obama
referred publicly to the new president only sparingly — but still more
than he expected to. He issued careful statements defending the Affordable Care Act and supporting the Paris climate-change agreement,
avoided mentioning Trump by name, and largely let the resistance speak
for itself. But the Boy Scouts speech really troubled him. Kids their
age are the most impressionable group there is, Obama reminded friends
at the time, likening them to sponges. If the president shoves a
divisive political argument at them, that’s what they will absorb.
It
was a very Barack Obama thing to get agitated about. Throughout his
entire political career, he has attached an unusual degree of
significance to storytelling, and he has often spoken of the importance
of modeling what it means to be a good citizen. He had recently
concluded a two-month stretch full of international travel and was just
starting to settle into his post-presidency, and that week was a busy
one in Washington — Republicans were zeroing in on a vote to repeal the
Affordable Care Act.
The Boy Scouts speech was relatively unimportant
(mostly improvised, probably something Trump would forget about within a
week), but perhaps it presented an opportunity. One of the most potent
tools in Obama’s arsenal, as a retired president, is rhetoric. Even if
he no longer enjoyed the bully pulpit, he could, if he wanted, fill the
vacuum of moral leadership Trump had created and offer, to not only the
Scouts but the entire country, a lesson in civics that no other Democrat
is positioned to give.
But then he did another very Barack Obama thing: He decided to stay quiet.
Where is Obama?
It is a question much of the country has been asking over the last two
years, sometimes plaintively. “Come back, Barack,” Chance the Rapper sang in a Saturday Night Live
sketch. “We all miss him,” Kobe Bryant said, speaking for other
athletes. Even former FBI director James Comey admitted to German
interviewers this spring that he misses Obama.
Beyond
the anguish is, often, simply bafflement: How did the most ubiquitous
man in America for eight years virtually disappear? Over the course of
his presidency, Obama cast himself as the country’s secular minister as
much as its commander-in-chief, someone who understood the moral core of
the nation and felt compelled to insist that we live up to it. What
explains his near absence from the political stage, where he might argue
publicly against the reversals of his policy accomplishments, and also
from American life more broadly? What is keeping him from speaking more
frequently about the need to protect democratic norms and the rule of
law, to be decent people? Where is the man who cried after Sandy Hook
and sang in Charleston, who after each mass shooting tried to soothe an
outraged nation, who spoke of American values in his travels across the
globe? And, tactically, what is behind the relative silence of one of
the most popular figures alive just as American politics appears to so
many to be on the brink of breaking?
Earlier
this month, weeks after news first came out of thousands of immigrant
children being held apart from their parents at the border, and after
Laura Bush had published an article excoriating her party’s policy,
Obama and his team chose to make a rare foray into the news cycle.
First, they decided that Michelle should take the lead, and she did so
by retweeting Bush’s
article approvingly (“Sometimes truth transcends party”). That received
a further retweet from Barack, in a bid to keep the conversation about
families rather than about politics — as he calculated it would have
been had he weighed in directly. Two days later, with the crisis
dominating the national news, Obama’s advisers saw an opportunity in
World Refugee Day to issue a statement of his own that focused on
American values rather than Trump-administration policy. It was an
eloquent call for empathy. It was also, to Democrats desperate for him
to break post-presidential precedent, the very least he could have done.
Obama’s
reticence is more than simply a matter of communications strategy. He
has mostly opted out of liberal America’s collective Trump-outrage
cycle. Though he reads the Times and other newspapers, he
doesn’t follow daily Trump developments on Twitter or watch television
news. He is upset by the administration’s actions, and he’s confided to
friends that what worries him most is the international order, the
standing of the office of the presidency, the erosion of democratic
norms, and the struggles of people who are suddenly unsure of their
immigration status or the future of their health-care coverage. Still,
in conversations with political allies, Obama insists that today’s
domestic mess is a blip on the long arc of history and argues that his
own work must be focused on progress over time — specifically on
empowering a new generation of leaders. He says his legacy
is not what concerns him. (“Michelle and I are fine,” he tells those
who ask about it.) And while he often says he misses the day-to-day work
of fixing people’s problems, he has even less patience for day-to-day
politics than he did as president.
“The
important thing to think about with Obama in the context of politics is
what his overall goals are,” says Jim Messina, his 2012
presidential-campaign manager and informal adviser. Obama’s first goal
is to adhere to the precedent George W. Bush set, leaving him alone and
respecting the peaceful transfer of power. The second is to engage a
younger generation of leaders. “And then, three, how to carefully decide
when you have to sacrifice one and two, especially one. He has been
really careful about No. 1,” Messina says. “He could pick a fight with
Donald Trump every day, and (a) the only winner would be Donald Trump,
and (b) we would kind of get into this back-and-forth the Clintons have
gotten themselves into: Is there too much Obama? Not enough Obama?”
One
of Obama’s friends repeatedly described the former president as newly
“Zen-like,” a striking descriptor given that Obama’s impossible calm has
been a hallmark of his entire time on the national stage. To those
who’ve known him longest, his confidence in the decision not to wade
back into the political muck is the product of the same hyper-self-aware
posture he’s had since childhood, growing up straddling worlds and then
writing a book about himself in his 30s. “This has been a difficult
thing for him, and for me, to see what this administration has done to
the policy initiatives that we put in place and that were proving to be
successful,” says Eric Holder, Obama’s friend and former attorney
general. “But I think it’s really been true — we’ve had conversations
about this — he’s been encouraged by the amount of progressive energy
he’s seen around the country.”
To
Obama, the Women’s Marches and the wave of gun-control activism after
the Parkland school shooting are more influential than anything he might
do to alter the news cycle, especially since his presence as a Trump
counterweight often consolidates the otherwise fractured GOP base. “Even
when we were in the White House, he wasn’t interested in discussing the
day-to-day of politics, whether it was Speaker Boehner or Speaker Ryan
or Leader McConnell, or whatever was the news of the day,” says Valerie
Jarrett, one of Obama’s closest advisers. “Wasting time on things he
can’t control is not of interest to him. Getting sucked into a
conversation over someone who he has no ability to influence? What’s the
point?”
Of all his political gifts and tools, Obama has always been most
hesitant to wield raw power, circumscribing the options available to him
by dismissing the bluntest tools as either immediately or eventually
counterproductive. If one philosophy governed his political activity in
the final stretch of his presidency, it was articulated by Michelle at
the 2016 convention: “When they go low, we go high.” Built into that
code of conduct is his famous long-term optimism about historic progress
as well as a confidence that his empathetic approach to governing will
ultimately be more successful than dishonest tactics or mean-spirited
politics.
But
there was always a flip side to both of these assumptions: alongside
the optimism, a fatalism about human nature and political incentives,
and alongside the confidence, a streak of resignation, a sense that he
alone can only do so much. Throughout Obama’s administration — even
before, during the 2008 campaign — liberals agonized over his
temperament, afraid that he was squandering opportunities or bringing
knives to gunfights. As he finished his second term, Obama took a
victory lap, and it was easy to believe that he’d been right all along.
Then came the Trump era — and with it, a greater test of Obama’s
philosophy than he ever imagined it facing.
And
yet, for all of the new president’s radical transformation of the
nation, he’s done little to alter the character of his predecessor, or
reshape Obama’s vision of the world. Obama believes more than ever in
his capacity to spark an immediate backlash among Trump fans and to make
any policy matter far more partisan. The calls from former staffers and
allies who want him in the field, actively protecting his policy legacy
— whether it’s through speeches, organizing, or lobbying — are
considered but mostly brushed aside. “I know it isn’t usually done that
former presidents weigh in, but these are not usual times, and protocol
seems to have vanished,” says Susie Tompkins Buell, a major Democratic
donor. “On the immigration stuff, if he were willing to go way over the
line and get arrested, or something way out there, that would be a
galvanizing event,” says one frustrated leading Democratic operative in
the midst of the 2018 campaigns.
Even
quotidian political activity would be welcomed by many — after all,
about two-thirds of the country now approve of his presidency. “People
continue to want, to ask for, his intervention — and even be frustrated
when they don’t get it,” says Jennifer Palmieri, Obama’s communications
director during part of his second term. “But they will be, ultimately,
wrong to feel that way. Because what they want is for Barack Obama to be
president, and he is not. They miss Dad, and they’re homesick, and
there’s so much in the world that’s disorienting, and they want
something that they love and that’s familiar. And he can never be what
people ultimately want. There’s no outcome here where everyone says, ‘I
miss Barack Obama, but I understand what he’s doing and I understand the
choices that he’s making.’ ”
Modeling
his political engagement out of office after George W. Bush’s, of all
people — privileging the customs and traditions of our democracy rather
than upending some in order to fight for others — may be among the most
optimistic choices Obama has ever made. Perhaps an America that survives
Trump will appreciate that his predecessor did not stoop to his level.
But Obama’s disciplined restraint could also prove a poorly timed
abdication of leadership. “The reason this is different than other
post-presidencies,” says Princeton political historian Julian Zelizer,
“is this is kind of a crisis in governance.”
The
people around Obama are living in Trump’s America, too, they remind
skeptics of his approach. They’re just wagering that the former
president’s bet pays off. “He’s recognizing that the party and our
country will benefit from other voices having an opportunity to weigh
in, and that opportunity would be all but completely obscured if he were
regularly sharing his opinion on these issues,” says Josh Earnest, who
joined Obama in the early days of his first presidential run and who
finished the administration as Obama’s last White House press secretary.
“It is far too early to tell whether that works.”
Not since
Harry Truman’s icy handover to Dwight Eisenhower has the country
experienced anything close to the distance between the outgoing and
incoming president as there is now between Obama and Trump. There’s been
no direct contact between the two since Inauguration Day.
While
Trump expressed openness to Obama’s guidance when they first met in
November 2016, that fizzled almost immediately as the new president and
his allies became obsessed with the idea that Obama and his holdovers
were trying to undermine them. Trump even accused Obama of wiretapping
him, against all evidence. The hard turn against Obama was probably
inevitable from a man whose rise to political prominence was fueled by a
conspiracy theory about Obama’s birth certificate. But it’s been
cemented by the administration’s systematic attempt to bludgeon every
one of Obama’s biggest moves, from strangling DACA and the Trans-Pacific
Partnership trade agreement to enacting regulatory rollbacks through
the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, and
Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Obama
is monitoring the destruction, but he spends the bulk of his time on
two projects, building his foundation and writing a memoir. It’s a
familiar vision for a post-presidency and, for now, a return to two
activities with which Obama is temperamentally more comfortable than raw
politics: organizing and writing.
The
Obama Foundation is designed to be a grand, global convening zone for
younger generations of leaders, physically on its Chicago campus but
also through international programming and an ambitious online presence.
Already this year, it has launched an academic program with the
University of Chicago, a hyperselective global fellowship for “civic
innovators,” and a community program designed to support and train 300
young leaders in Phoenix, Chicago, and Columbia, South Carolina. The
presidential center and museum in Chicago’s Jackson Park, scheduled to
open in 2021, is being designed with the idea of giving visitors
resources to change the politics around them. “It’s not a mausoleum;
it’s not a retrospective-looking entity,” says David Simas, the
foundation’s CEO and former White House political director. “The entire
experience is being structured in a way where the success is when
someone leaves there and wants to not only engage in their community —
but we help them tie back into the network that we’re trying to create.”
In Washington, Obama frequently meets with the architects of the space.
Much of the ambition behind the foundation comes from the assumption
that, at 56, he will be fueling its growth for decades.
Obama
has been raising money to get the organization on its feet. Multiple
people familiar with the fund-raising conversations said it’s currently
aiming to bring in between $500 million and $1 billion, and that when
Obama meets with major potential donors, his asks can sometimes reach
$10 million or $20 million. The foundation has periodically disclosed
its donors, categorizing them in broad tiers. Organizations and
individuals who have given at least $1 million include major
institutions like the Gates Foundation; Democratic heavyweights like Bob
Iger, Marc Benioff, and J. J. Abrams; and even Chicago hedge-fund
manager Ken Griffin, a prominent Republican donor.
Obama has given well over a dozen paid speeches,
earning at least $300,000 for each, sometimes far more, including ones
to financial institutions like Carlyle, Cantor Fitzgerald, and Northern
Trust. By mid-July, he will have visited every continent but Antarctica
since leaving office. At each stop, from New Zealand to Italy, he’s met
with local heads of state or allied former leaders, almost always in
private. He’s been careful not to appear to be playing at international
diplomacy, but people close to him believe his presence is often
intended as a reassurance that the world isn’t about to end.
Appearing
in public with German chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin in May 2017, he
declared, “We can’t hide behind a wall.” In Milan, he sat with former
prime minister Matteo Renzi and talked about the populist Five Star
movement and Russian election meddling in Italy. In Buenos Aires, he
golfed with President Mauricio Macri, who was facing his own populist
challenges. In Montreal, he joined Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for a well-publicized dinner over Hinterland wine and local halibut.
And
as he travels the world for speeches and vacations, Obama has included
on his itinerary meetings to gather ideas for the foundation from
civically engaged young people in India, Indonesia, and Brazil. In
October in Chicago, the foundation held its first summit, bringing local
civic entrepreneurs together with celebrities including Chance the
Rapper, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Prince Harry. In July in Johannesburg,
he will convene 200 young leaders from across Africa.
But
meanwhile his book looms. While Michelle’s will be published in
November, no title or date has yet been announced for his part of the
reported $65 million deal the couple signed with Penguin Random House
last year. No one close to Obama expects the finished product to look
anything like other White House memoirs, given his history as a writer.
“He is engaged in reflection, and he also cares about writing,” says Tim
Kaine, the Virginia senator and an Obama friend. “I would be surprised
if it’s just a standard chronological accounting of his last eight
years.”
Large
swaths of Obama’s days are now carved out for writing. Yet friends
who’ve spoken with him about the process say Obama, who is working
closely with speechwriter Cody Keenan and other aides, is still thinking
through the central thrust of the book, which he’s been scrawling out,
longhand, on yellow legal pads at his desk. People around Obama tend to
sigh when asked about his progress — more than one said, “Well, you
know, he works best under pressure.”
Occasionally
restless, he has taken to bringing in friends to chat during what his
aides call “desk time,” both to break up the monotony and to ask for
memories of the administration. Kaine said that once, last year, Obama
asked him to come over and talk when he was clearly supposed to be
writing. Their 30-minute appointment bled toward an hour.
Usually,
these catch-ups touch on ongoing issues. Sometimes, he’s offering
advice. Eric Lesser, a 33-year-old Massachusetts state senator who
worked for Obama’s 2008 campaign and then at the White House, met with
him this spring to talk through his work and legislative frustrations.
(“It’s like talking about peewee-football practice with Tom Brady,” says
Lesser. “Like: ‘I can’t throw a spiral, Tom! Help!’ He was amused I was
coming to him with that.”)
Most
of those meetings take place in Obama’s polished office, which he
shares with Michelle, their chiefs of staff, and roughly 20 staffers.
The walls are decorated with memorabilia, including a framed American
flag presented to Obama by the Navy seals who killed Osama bin Laden;
Norman Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges, signed by Ruby Bridges; and a
photograph of one of Obama’s ancestors that was presented to him by the
Irish government.
The Obamas appear to be settled in Washington. The chatter about their potential move to the Upper East Side has died out,
and they are installing a pool at their home, which is around the
corner from Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s. Obama is open with friends
about the new comforts of his life: the games of Words With Friends
on his iPad, the rounds of golf, the slower-paced international travel.
Immediately after leaving office, he flew to Palm Springs, then visited
with Richard Branson on his private Caribbean island. Before long, he
was on David Geffen’s yacht in French Polynesia with Tom Hanks, Bruce
Springsteen, and Oprah Winfrey.
Even
in Washington, he’s taken to undoing an extra button on his dress
shirts and musing about how much more sleep he now gets. When he lets
his guard down, he admits that he misses being in the middle of the
international fray, but he confides that his life has slowed down so
dramatically that he now feels like Neo, Keanu Reeves’s character in The Matrix, who can experience time hyperslowly while facing gunfire.
Over the next few years, his main source of income aside from the book is likely to be the deal he and Michelle signed in May with Netflix,
which, he has told friends, he sees as a more palatable way to make
money than the paid-speech circuit. That arrangement, long under
discussion, came about in large part because of the years-long
relationship between Obama and both Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, and
Ted Sarandos, its chief content officer. Sarandos, then a Hillary
Clinton backer, met his wife, Nicole Avant, at an Obama fund-raiser in
2008 that she was co-hosting. Avant became Obama’s ambassador to the
Bahamas. The connections between Obama and Netflix go deep: Sarandos’s
new chief of staff is Ferial Govashiri, who served as Obama’s personal
assistant in the White House.
After
leaving office, the Obamas were open about their interest in creating
content and aware of the positive reaction they received to their
recommended book lists and playlists during the White House days, say
people familiar with the discussions. They landed on a conceptual
agreement with Netflix to create a wide range of programming that will
likely be free of politics, light on their own faces, and heavy on
telling the stories of individuals who the Obamas believe can guide
viewers to be better citizens. When Netflix announced the deal, the
Obamas also disclosed that they were launching “Higher Ground
Productions” to create the shows. That studio, and team, does not yet
exist, and few of the details have been set. No one involved in the
project expects any programming to see the light of day until late 2019
or 2020.
Despite not wanting
to engage directly in Washington politics, Obama has played a
significant behind-the-scenes role in one battle: saving Obamacare from
Republicans intent on destroying it. Even before leaving office, he
signaled to party leaders that he didn’t see how having his face at the
forefront of the fight could be useful. “It’s pretty clear what
President Trump’s political strategy always is, which is to find a
foil,” says Earnest. “And with the possible exception of Hillary
Clinton, his most prominent foil has been Barack Obama. That’s been a
very effective strategy for President Trump to galvanize his base and
effectively put Republicans on Capitol Hill in the fetal position.”
So
Obama receded while organizations founded and run by his
administration’s alumni sprang up to lean on lawmakers and lead a
public-facing campaign to generate support. By mid-2017, the groups were
running a war room and hosting regular conference calls. Obama followed
at a distance, weighing requests for his input and support and
discussing tactics with leaders of the campaign. Senator Bernie Sanders,
a longtime skeptic of the ACA who instead favors a Medicare-for-all
system, became an outward face of the effort, holding rallies in states
where Democrats were trying to peel away GOP support.
Trump’s
war against Obamacare intensified, and after a failed effort to gut the
law in the spring, a summer vote in Congress began to look more likely
to succeed. Obama resisted holding rallies of his own, worried about
dissuading on-the-fence Republicans from breaking party lines, but in
May he agreed to ratchet up the pressure. He slipped a newsworthy bit
into his speech at the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award
celebration in Boston: “I hope that current members of Congress recall
that it actually doesn’t take a lot of courage to aid those who are
already powerful, already comfortable, already influential.”
The
next month, as the ACA’s survival prospects looked ever more grim,
Obama offered a statement on Facebook condemning the GOP replacement
plan. Across Washington, however, Democrats were losing heart, and some
wondered why the former president wasn’t more visible. “The idea that
Bernie is out there doing rallies for the Affordable Care Act — a law he
doesn’t believe in — while Obama pens a Facebook statement or two is
laughable. Where are you, dude?” says one top strategist involved in the
fight.
As the vote on the repeal effort neared and Trump grew more animated,
however, Obama made a few private, strategic phone calls. Alaska
Republican senator Lisa Murkowski had emerged as a pivotal swing vote,
and so he called Bill Walker, her state’s independent governor, to make
his case. The day of the vote came, and Murkowski voted against repeal.
Then, past midnight, John McCain stood up and stunned Washington by
turning his thumb down. The former president picked up the phone again,
this time to thank his old rival for the decisive vote.
Obama’s relationship
with his own party is complicated: He is singularly beloved but also
increasingly blamed for three developments that in retrospect look like
significant, but avoidable, mistakes. All three are directly related to
his preference for avoiding the political fray. First, in the immediate
aftermath of the 2008 economic crash, Republicans won the messaging
game, branding Democrats as the party of technocratic elitism and
themselves as the economic populists. Second, he didn’t speak more
forcefully in the moment about Russia’s attempts to sway the 2016
election. And third, he presided over a significant hollowing out of the
party’s down-ballot standing during his tenure. In the days before
Trump’s inauguration, Obama shouldered a piece of the blame for his
party’s sad shape: “I take some responsibility on that,” he told George
Stephanopoulos. “I couldn’t be both chief organizer of the Democratic
Party and function as commander-in-chief and president of the United
States. We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long
haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.” The
National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which Obama helped Holder
launch, is his primary attempt to do it.
The
NDRC is Holder’s baby, but it’s given Obama a tidy way to occasionally
step back into politics with an eye to long-term reform rather than
short-term partisan gain. The pair sat down in February to extensively
discuss the group’s 2018 targets and strategy before Holder announced
them, and when Obama campaigned in Virginia’s gubernatorial race last
year, he made a point of specifically mentioning redistricting on the
stump.
Still,
much of the liberal angst over Obama’s post-presidential role focuses
on what he might do to help direct a historic win in this year’s
midterms. He has committed in conversations with party leaders to
raising money and campaigning for candidates up and down the ballot.
According to those familiar with the conversations, his reemergence on
the campaign trail will come late — perhaps in September — and he has
told allies he is very unlikely to wade into competitive primary fights,
even when former staffers are running. (More than 60 have declared
their candidacies.) He often reminds those asking for his help that he
believes he needs to create the space for new leaders to emerge.
After
helping get his former Labor secretary Tom Perez elected to the DNC
chairmanship early in 2017, Obama has had minimal involvement with the
party’s central committee. The two speak fewer than once per month now,
according to people close to both of them, and Obama has not actively
monitored the group’s reform efforts after 2016’s bruising primary
fight, which has turned into an identity crisis for the party. He only
agreed to hold three fund-raisers for Democratic groups this summer
after fielding months of requests, and aside from one event for Missouri
senator Claire McCaskill, he has yet to raise money for any individual
candidates or party super-PACs.
Party
organizers have begun complaining that his focus on his foundation is
sapping the coffers they’re desperately trying to tap. Whereas Obama has
found significant fund-raising success in Silicon Valley, for example,
the rest of the party is still struggling there. “The donor universe
that we operate in is limited. It’s the same usual suspects that
everyone is going to, whether it’s the House, or the Senate, or these
new outside groups, or super-PACs,” says one top party fund-raiser who
has been told by multiple potential donors that they’ve already emptied
their 2018 checkbooks for the foundation. “And most, if not all, of them
were previously Obama supporters, and we’re counting on them for
something more important right now than a library in Chicago. Nobody
expects him to be out there bashing Trump or being on the campaign trail
every day. But to be sucking up resources now is just tone-deaf, and
self-serving.”
To
the former president’s loyalists, it’s all evidence that some Democrats
haven’t come to grips with his role as he has defined it. “I don’t
think we should be relying on him as a crutch to deal with Trump,” says
Colorado senator Michael Bennet. “We need to step up and deal with
Trump.”
Nearly 50 Democrats
have, at some point, thought about running for president in 2020,
figuring Trump will either be easily beaten or, roughly, “if he can do
it, so can I.” And so while Obama is ensuring he’s not his party’s main
character in 2018’s fight, he has quietly offered himself up as a
consultant of sorts to the ambitious young Democrats who will define the
future of the party.
The
meetings, which often take place at the sofa and coffee table in
Obama’s office, last as long as an hour. Without explicitly diving into
his party’s internal disagreements about how far left to tack, and with
what emphasis, he takes their questions and talks philosophically about
what is needed in the current political moment. He is closely reading
contemporary conservative criticism, in particular the work of The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf and academic Patrick Deneen, whose most recent book is Why Liberalism Failed. He frequently worries about the gulf between Fox News and the Times, NPR,
and MSNBC, occasionally citing a rand Corporation study on the
shrinking role of facts in American life. With measured language, he has
occasionally mused about the left’s need to mix idealism with
practicality, without falling too hard on one side of the spectrum or
losing sight of everyday Americans’ financial reality.
“What we need President Obama’s help with is creating a contrasting
economic message heading into 2020,” says Connecticut senator Chris
Murphy. “What Obama was brilliant at in 2012 was making that election
with Romney all about an economic contrast, making Romney be the
candidate of the economic elites and making Obama be the candidate of
Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. That’s a contrast that we didn’t make
effectively in 2016 and need to make more effectively in 2020.”
After
Bill Clinton left office, he clearly enjoyed the power he retained
within the party, involving himself in large and small decisions and
flexing his influence. Here, too, Obama has assumed a more passive role,
positioning himself as a detached observer who might have some useful
advice to bestow. As he was leaving office, he publicly identified a
handful of rising liberals who he believes represent the party’s future,
including Kaine, Bennet, California senator Kamala Harris, South Bend
mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Missouri secretary of state Jason
Kander. He’s talked to all of them but Harris in recent months, and has
also met with others hoping to lead the party in the near term. This
includes both Sanders and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren,
potential progressive presidential front-runners who have had difficult
relationships with Obama. (They both criticized his paid-speaking tour
early in his post-presidency.) Other possible 2020 contenders who’ve met
with Obama include New Jersey senator Cory Booker, Los Angeles mayor
Eric Garcetti, and former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu.
When
asked about the presidential election, Obama talks about his own
experience. He tells his visitors it took him about a year of
campaigning to figure out how to effectively run for president, and he
warns them about the toll a presidential race takes on families and
personal lives. He says there’s no half-running: They have to fully want
it, and they have to know exactly why they’re running. He directs them
to his 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, for mechanical and
operational advice. And he makes it clear that he has no intention of
endorsing early in the 2020 primary.
Still,
even this is complicated territory for the former president, who has at
least three close associates considering runs. His former
vice-president, Joe Biden, is near the top in early opinion polling of
the potential field, and Biden’s spent the past two years traveling
widely on behalf of local candidates who could prove useful allies in an
eventual campaign. Holder has also started publicly musing about
running. Yet it’s Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor,
whose exploration has stirred the most interest in influential corners
of Obama’s world, where he is sometimes thought of as the potential
contender likeliest to re-create Obama’s coalition of voters. The pair
never overlapped at Harvard Law School, but they met through that
connection, and they went out of their way to support each other’s
ascent as two of the nation’s most promising young African-American
politicians in the George W. Bush era. The former president and the
former governor, now an Obama Foundation board member, have spoken
multiple times in recent months, just as Patrick’s curiosity about a
nationwide run has become common knowledge in political circles.
Obama has said nothing about his three friends in public, but some of
his top allies have sent signals about their own preferences. In May
2017, Jarrett was invited to join Jeb Bush on a panel at a hedge-fund
conference in Las Vegas hosted by Robert Wolf, a close Obama friend and
former bank executive. Before they got onstage, Wolf warned that he’d
ask them whom Democrats would nominate in 2020. When the time came, Bush
named Biden, who was also at the conference. Jarrett surprised the
crowd by predicting her party would nominate Patrick.
On the gray morning of February 12, Trump’s White House was entering the stage of the Rob Porter scandal
where the president was defending the just-fired senior aide accused of
abusing two ex-wives. Later that day, Trump would introduce a budget
blueprint that included a nearly one-third reduction of State Department
spending and a one-quarter cut for the EPA.
At
the National Portrait Gallery, Obama stared out at a room full of
friends, political allies, and former staffers. Behind him onstage was a
pair of portraits of him and Michelle,
newly unveiled to wide, if wistful, smiles. “Well, good morning,
everybody. It’s wonderful to see you all,” he said, looking back at
Kehinde Wiley’s painting. “How about that? Pretty sharp.”
Swaths
of Puerto Rico were still blacked out, and at the Winter Olympics in
South Korea, Vice-President Mike Pence was inflaming tensions with North
Korea. Within a few hours, the Senate would debate immigration after
months of fury in Washington. The attorney general would soon praise a
group convened by the National Sheriff’s Association for upholding “a
critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.” Trump
would later sit for lunch with his Education secretary, Betsy DeVos,
perhaps as dedicated as anyone in his Cabinet to unwinding the preceding
administration’s work.
Looking
over the crowd, Obama saw people who had stood with him for eight years
and were now, largely, waging the resistance. Many were helping to run
issue-advocacy groups aiming to protect his signature achievements,
others jumping back into policy-making — some even as the kind of
cable-news talking heads Obama couldn’t stand.
“I
want to thank everybody who is here,” Obama continued. “It means so
much to us, and I hope you’re aware of that. We miss you guys. And — ”
The crowd broke out into uncomfortable giggles, then laughter and applause: He misses us? Does he realize how much we miss him?
Obama
looked up, appearing slightly startled by the reaction. The laughter
continued, and, clearly stifling a smile, he decided to look down at the
lectern for just a beat. Then, sounding serious and louder than before,
he repeated himself. “We miss you guys.” He seemed determined not to
acknowledge just how much of his isolation is self-imposed.
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