Obama Is Still Pulling a Genius Marketing Trick. Biden Could Never.

Barack Obama is a big fan of Mitski. He’s never made this announcement formally, but the indie singer-songwriter—who has racked up a galley of accolades from discerning tastemakers around the music-crit intelligentsia—has appeared in the former president’s famous lists of his favorite songs, films, and books twice in the past three years. In 2021 Obama name-checked Mitski’s dreamy ballad “The Only Heartbreaker” alongside other Pitchfork-core mainstays like Wye Oak and The War on Drugs, and this year, the artist’s “My Love Mine All Mine” shares rarefied air with Big Thief and Megan Thee Stallion.

The rest of us are left to conclude that not only is Obama familiar with the greater Mitski discography, but he’s also the sort of person who considers himself to be a discerning aesthete. Liberals can read his lists and fantasize about him drafting in the discourse-friendly echelons of coastal taste—watching, listening, and reading with enough careful attention to formulate snappy cultural opinions, which can then be easily condensed into a catalog. (Case in point: Obama was also a fan of the low-key A24 romance Past Lives and Lauren Groff’s zeitgeist-y new novel The Vaster Wilds.) In fact, Obama has now been out of office for almost as long as he was president, and beyond all of his legislative achievements and shortcomings—or really anything he did while he was in the White House—these lists have become the perfect distillation of Obama’s characterizing legacy, at least the way we experience it today.

It goes without saying that Joe Biden, who is 81, does not issue a recap of his favorite music every year. The one time he did, during the summer of 2016, the result was geriatric, focus-tested, and A.I.–ish, a lowest-common-denominator smattering of the Beatles, Springsteen, and a notably turgid Coldplay song. Mitski, or anyone else belonging to her voguish enclave, was nowhere to be found. Trump, meanwhile, had by 2016 so thoroughly alienated the arts and the people who make art that he was forced to recruit D-level acts like 3 Doors Down to consecrate his inauguration in one of the starkest depictions of the glaciating schism between the parties. (The 45^th president famously does not read books, and his favorite song appears to be the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” alongside various stodgy Broadway hits.) Don’t get me started on any of the Republican hopefuls because, frankly, I wouldn’t be shocked if Ron DeSantis attempted to outlaw music in Florida. When Politico asked the vindictive, cyborglike Vivek Ramaswamy to select 20 songs that “stir [his] soul,” I was not surprised when he issued only eight, and included not one but two Imagine Dragons joints.

That leaves the eternally tasteful Obama, who remains one of the most popular politicians in America, on an island all his own. Mainstream liberals are still desperate to vote for him, and as his era recedes further into the horizon, the basis of their appetite becomes more evident: He seems to experience the world around him, in a way his peers decidedly do not.

The average American president is by necessity pretty cloistered, and I’m not saying that being conversant in music, books, or film is some kind of prerequisite for the job. But if the continued approval of Obama has taught us anything, it’s that an ideal president possesses at least a modicum of cultural fluency. This person would have seen Saltburn, perhaps, or could elucidate a preference for either pre- or post-Blueprint Jay-Z. Maybe they could extol the virtues of their favorite Toni Morrison or their favorite Cormac McCarthy. I promise you, a normal conversation about what a candidate has been reading lately would be so much more illuminating and convincing than the usual middle-school pablum that dominates the average Town Hall stump. Of course, the only president who ever really had that capacity left office in 2017.

Obama’s lists have been a genius bit of marketing. The former president has smartly ascertained that the people who were inspired by him in 2008, at the height of his power, saw something in his overall gestalt: young, upwardly mobile, nurturing a swank set of dictums and tastes, embracing the designators of nouveau liberal identity. So he appeases us, every year, with a sly reminder that he too loved Paul Giamatti’s performance in The Holdovers. As the myriad disappointments of Obama’s reign continue to erode into memory, all that is left is the reminder of a former leader, fluent in the culture, wielding the power of sweet, sweet relevance—an increasingly rare resource in modern Washington. We’re heading deeper into the ossifying gerontocracy of 2024, and it’s clear that there’s no master of the canon quite like Obama (or at least his public relations team).

And what a public relations coup it is. By almost every conceivable metric, the Biden administration has been more progressive, and arguably more effective, than either of Obama’s terms. The incumbent shepherded a mammoth $3.2 trillion infrastructure bill across a razor-thin majority in Congress, which is lawmaking at a scale that Obama never imagined. (For what it’s worth, Obama’s post-recession stimulus package capped out at $800 billion, despite being blessed with an unparalleled supermajority in both houses.) Biden was also decisive, perhaps to a fault, in his exodus from Afghanistan and—at least during his time as president—has been much more assertive in his advocacy for queer Americans compared to his former boss.

These are the sorts of victories that should add up to popularity, or at least the sort of polarized status once held by the man he shared a ticket with. And yet, Biden’s approval rating has floundered under 40 percent for months. (A polarizing war in Gaza has made his standing with the nation’s youth even worse.) Obama, on the other hand, is coasting at 51 percent, years after he left office. You could say Biden’s flatlining is a failure of the DNC’s infrastructure, a failure of messaging, or just indicative of the “vibescession” and an encroaching climate Armageddon. All of those things are likely true, but that also doesn’t change the fact that for the vast majority of the low-information liberals in my life—the kinds of folks who make up a not-insignificant part of the Democratic base—the sensation they’ve been seeking for the past three election cycles is the electricity they felt when they were voting for Barack Obama. (Biden knows this better than anyone. He built an entire campaign strategy around his status as the heir of the Obama lineage.) I do not think that this dynamic is rooted in any policy fundamentals. A second Biden term promises the exact same Keynesian stasis that a hypothetical third Obama term would offer. But the ephemeral perception gap is incredible, especially when you consider that the only tangible difference between the two is that Obama watched and enjoyed the second season of Fleabag.

It also likely helps that Obama is currently savoring the aspirational life that so many millennial strivers—who were first catalyzed by him in their 20s and are now retreating into their 30s and 40s—want for themselves. Here is a man who left his high-paying job in government to embark on a career in content creation, no doubt energized by his ravenous taxonomy of books and movies. He launched a production company called Higher Ground with his wife and immediately inked a lucrative deal with Netflix, so now the Obamas can churn out films and documentaries that interact with severe American traumas without being on the hook to balm them with legislation. (It should be said that Obama included all three of Higher Ground’s 2023 productions—Rustin, Leave the World Behind, and American Symphony—in his best-of list this year.)

In both his consumption habits and his ambitions, Obama is relatable. If it’s myopic to parlay political success into greater avenues of celebrity, it’s at least myopic in a way I can understand—especially when compared to the stock of dead-eyed up-and-comers on both sides of the aisle, like Josh Hawley and Pete Buttigieg, who seem to long for nothing other than increasingly hollowed-out plots of Washington bureaucracy. At least Obama made time to read a few novels, or watch a few movies, or check out the new Mitski album on a languid afternoon. If nothing else, he leads a life, which is something that so many other D.C. creatures fail to demonstrate.

Unfortunately, it is far too late for any of us to broaden Joe Biden’s cultural palate. He is in his 80s now. And he is busy. The cement has been set. Our only hope is that Donald Trump is so flagrantly unrelatable—in his offensive dismissal of democracy, astounding number of alleged crimes, and disconcerting Batman villain–esque eccentricity—that this totally eclipses the stiffness of the incumbent. Until then, though, I have only one piece of advice for anyone else who wants to be president: Be the Cowboy is the best Mitski album. Work forward from there.