Can Obama Rescue the Democrats?

This is strictly, sketchily anecdotal, so don’t strap me to the wall and drill for data, but listening to fellow liberal neurotic Democrats over the last year, I detect a sense of abandonment. Of Obandonment, to be more precise. Obama, Obama, where art thou? The Bat Signal scours the city night in vain for thee. Think of it, treasure the memory: A president who didn’t brag about himself. Who made it about “we,” not “me.” Who could lankily stride around the Oval Office without getting winded. Occupying the White House for eight years, Barack and Michelle Obama conducted themselves beautifully and irreproachably, elevating the national tone, embracing the once excluded, and leaving 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue radiating an afterglow rare for presidents and first mates, second terms usually being brutal and humbling. Their afterglow persists, giving their absence a keener pang, but the halo effect they left on governance, integrity, and diversity was turned into a bent hubcap on Week One of the Trump presidency; it’s been Satyricon ever since under a chief executive whom political consultant, analyst, and Never Trumper Rick Wilson has crowned our “Kentucky Fried Nero.” The contrast between the recent Then and the nonstop Now is painful, poignant, and demoralizing . . . one stabbing reminder after another of what we have lost.

The unveiling of the official presidential portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery on February 12 iconicized the couple with a provocatively fresh re-envisioning: Kehinde Wiley’s Obama seated in a sylvan setting against a wall of foliage suggesting a more colorful outfield wall in Chicago’s Wrigley Field, his posture and gaze firm, direct, resolute, and a trifle stern; Amy Sherald’s Michelle not the White House Wonder Woman we remember, a flexer of impassioned energy, but a contemplatively chill queen in repose, the volume of her skirt serving as throne. Political pundits turned overnight art critics complained that the Obama portraits “didn’t look like them,” but that’s the traditional croak of philistines who have their realist expectations confounded. The Obamas never did anything the orthodox way, and the portraits underscored their precedent-shattering sophistication. Crowds were less kvetchy. The portraits drew 72,000 visitors to the museum in the first week, many of them no doubt thirsting for a reminder of what a real president and First Lady look like instead of the Tussauds living waxworks we have now. Symptoms of Obandonment: sudden gusts of wistfulness, accompanied by plaintive sighs; intermittent patches of malaise; pausing on the sidewalk for no apparent reason; opening the medicine cabinet and staring fondly at the pharmaceuticals, those little friends in pill form; wishing Joe Biden were your grandpa.

This ache of absence comes with grumbles of resentment from some in the choir. So, goody for them, Barack and Michelle get to sky off into the azure and enjoy vacation after vacation, idyll after idyll, while the rest of us schmoes plod along on this endless cattle drive. (“Just tone it down with the kitesurfing pictures,” John Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, vented last year on Late Night with Seth Meyers. It’s not a good look while “America is on fire.”) The Obamas get to land a joint book deal in the ballpark of $65 million, which is one hell of a ballpark. Obama gets to deliver speeches to Wall Street firms for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop while millions of Americans (whom I’ve never actually met but am certain exist) have to make do at Costco. O.K., maybe he’s earned his perk walk, his frolics in the holiday sun, but still!

Just when we’re on the edge of being fully irked with him, Obama rolls his Kirlian aura of Retired Champion to David Letterman’s premiere Netflix talk show, reminding us all over again of what we once had, the contrast between his ease, suavity, decorum, quick-wittedness, and gestural coherence and the hectic buffoonery of his successor (who wags his arms like Robby the Robot) almost too much to bear. As he did in the interview conducted by Prince Harry for BBC Radio 4 (which preceded the Uncle Dave hoedown), Obama sought to calm and uplift the weary and worn, offering reassurance and the glimmering prospect of this-too-shall-pass, while Michelle professes it explicitly, emphatically. Addressing the free-floating anxiety, skidding morale, and morbid fatalism of tremulous Americans after the brontosaurus destruction of President Trump’s first year in office, the former First Lady, appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, urged people to tune out the headlines and focus on daily acts of kindness and empathy: “All we have is hope.” I esteem Michelle Obama from sole to crown, but frankly, if all we have is hope, we’re farkakta’d. But as she famously said, “When they go low, we go high,” and on March 8 The New York Times reported that the Obamas were negotiating with content colossus Netflix to produce original programming, discussing, among other possibilities, “shows that highlight inspirational stories.” Which is faithful to the political catechism they teach, though not as exciting a prospect as, say, a series starring Barack and Michelle as masked crimefighters.

The Obamas possess a special charisma that makes them seem almost detachable from political realities, a holographic independence. It’s an illusion, this divorcement, but it helps to explain why Obandonment hit so hard once they vacated center stage in the power arena. In part, Obama’s reliable veto pen fostered an emotional over-reliance. How could it not? For most of his tenure, his presidential veto was the only Excalibur against Republican obstruction and sabotage. (Which, remember, was Senator Mitch McConnell’s master plan from the outset of Obama’s presidency—oppose everything with a single partisan unified no.) But as Obama’s personal Jedi mastery grew, foiling the worst excesses of Republican rollback, the political fortunes of the Democratic Party at large became enfeebled. Under Obama’s presidency, the Democratic Party didn’t flourish—it atrophied. This can be chalked up to the natural cycle of incumbency, the party in charge traditionally losing seats in the midterms, but the numbers are still sobering. “In his eight years in office, Obama oversaw the rapid erosion of the Democratic Party’s political power in state legislatures, congressional districts and governor’s mansions,” reported Clare Malone in an article for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight in January 2017. “At the beginning of Obama’s term, Democrats controlled 59 percent of state legislatures, while now they control only 31 percent, the lowest percentage for the party since the turn of the 20th century. They held 29 governor’s offices and now have only 16, the party’s lowest number since 1920.” Malone points out that the weaknesses of the Democratic Party are structural and long-brewing, and can’t be dumped solely on Obama’s beach towel. But there’s no question that the grassroots wave enthusiasm that helped drive Obama’s election victories petered out at legislative crunch time. This is attributable partly to the decision to fold Obama’s original organizing machine—MyBO, later Organizing for America (OFA)—into the Democratic National Committee, where it was subsumed into the mother ship. There were sensible reasons for this at the time, but the result was a rinky-dink sideshow, as reported by Micah Sifry in an extensive investigative piece for The New Republic called “Obama’s Lost Army,” in February 2017.

Obama is aware of the need to rebuild troop strength. Reinforcements are being trained and readied. In 2017 the Obama Foundation held three Training Days—the first in Chicago, the next two in Tempe, Arizona, and Boston—to teach organizing skills to a new generation of activists from all over the country and world. Many more of those days will take place in 2018. It’s not as sexy to the media as a superstar mogul summit at Davos or Aspen, but it shows that the Obamas haven’t forsaken teaching and inspiring rookie activists to become the change agents of tomorrow. Obama plays a long game, doing his patient best to bend the arc of history an extra bend toward justice. Hence, the Obama Presidential Center, to be built on the South Side of Chicago, will be more than a museum—according to its Web site, it will function as “a living, working campus—an ongoing project where we will shape, together, what it means to be a good citizen in the 21st century.” It’d be nice to return to the 21st century and make it our home again. There’ll be a lot of tidying up to do after Donald Trump and his fellow debauchers are finally evicted.