Obama will go down in history as the first African-American President, and he derives immense pride from that, but he never fails to insist on the complexity of his story. Now, on the eve of the election, nothing was in the bag. There was all this talk about how she was going to need to find ways to distance herself from me.
Now, suddenly, she has problems with public opinion. But it all happens so fast. At an emotional level, they want to do the right thing if they have the information. Nobody at that point is really listening to an argument. The infrastructure is set. There is always the possibility of surprise. Weird stuff happens. Tens of millions of people turned on televisions and started checking their phones and laptops long before the polls on the East Coast closed, but Obama did not.
Obama said he had thought that the race was going to be very close. The negatives for both candidates were remarkably high, and there was so much volatility that whichever candidate was in the news most lost ground. And that was going to create, given the dynamics of this race, some challenges. At around P. By then, it was clear that the models were wrong and that Clinton was going to lose North Carolina and Florida—and that the difficulties she was having in the South were showing up in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Obama is hardly as cool and bloodless as advertised, but he will not perform, or even recount, his emotions on command. When I kept prodding him for a reaction beyond sheer fact and discernment, he stayed in that calm zone he likes to inhabit, the analyst of even his own gut. His story was ending in calamity, and yet he watched it from the outside in. This is part of politics. In New Hampshire, when I lost, it was only the second election in what proved to be an interminable primary season.
We had a fund-raiser and I had to speak to a bunch of supporters down there the next day. And Axelrod was surprised. I think this is how it should be. But he seemed to catch up with the disjunction. And obviously my feelings about the country and where these election results might lead the country are more serious.
My longest recent conversation with Obama came the day after he first met with President-elect Donald Trump, in the Oval Office. I arrived at the West Wing waiting area at around nine-thirty. There was a copy of USA Today on the table. Obama had steeled himself for the meeting, determined to act with high courtesy and without condescension. His task was to impress upon Trump the gravity of the office. He seemed to take pains not to offend the always-offendable Trump, lest he lose what influence he might still have on the political future of the country and the new Administration.
This is not the apocalypse. And yet even in the West Wing few could put up the same front. That much was clear when, the morning after the election, Obama and Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, had met with groups of staffers.
Obama seized on that. But the older people here, we have known loss. And this stings. This hurts. General Assembly, a defense of the liberal order that was willfully optimistic at a moment when illiberal currents were coursing all over the world. Now, in his own home, Obama sought to buck his people up and get them into a professional frame of mind. But there was little that could soften the blow, either inside the White House or in the great world beyond.
And this was before Trump appointed Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, as his senior counsellor. The outcome of the election was also a blow to those who anticipated major advances for the Democratic Party: it wrested over-all control of just one additional state legislature, and remains a minority in both houses of Congress, having gained only a handful of new seats in the House of Representatives, and only two in the Senate. Democrats saw a net loss of two governorships, leaving fewer than a third of the states with Democratic governors.
The party of F. But Putin may also think of himself as the chief ideologist of the illiberal world, a counter to what he sees as the hypocritical and blundering West. He has always shown support for nativist leaders such as Marine Le Pen, in France; now he had a potential ally in the White House. And even she faced a strong nativist challenge, for the sin of admitting thousands of Syrian refugees into the country.
There was inevitable talk about Joe Biden, who might have done better precisely where Clinton came up short: in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio.
The official line at the White House was that the hour-and-a-half meeting with Trump went well and that Trump was solicitous. Trump, despite his habitual bluster, seemed awed by what he was being told and about to encounter.
Denis McDonough strolled by with some friends and family. The day before, the person Trump sent to debrief him about how to staff and run a White House was his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. They had taken a walk on the South Lawn. I asked McDonough how it was going, and he gave me a death-skull grin.
He clenched his teeth and grinned harder in self-mockery. McDonough is the picture of rectitude: the ramrod posture, the trimmed white hair, the ashen mien of a bishop who has missed two meals in a row. It was a matter of amour-propre, but—again—also of tactics. To have any chance to influence Trump, they had to avoid any trace of the contempt that had once been so pronounced. Perhaps the more acute personal sadness for White House staffers was the vision of Obama and Trump sitting side by side in the Oval Office.
In the Oval Office, the President was quick to comfort the young members of his staff, but he was, an aide told me, even more concerned about the wounding effect the election would have on the categories of Americans who had been routinely insulted and humiliated by the President-elect. At a social occasion earlier this year, someone asked Michelle Obama how it was possible for her husband to maintain his equipoise amid so much hatred. His practiced calm is beyond reckoning.
In , John Kerry did not win a single southern state. America was good. America was great. Over the next 12 years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal—the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people.
For eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell. Nothing in that time suggested that straight talk on the facts of racism in American life would have given him surer footing.
I had met the president a few times before. I saw him as playing both sides. I attempted to press my points in these sessions. My efforts were laughable and ineffective. I was always inappropriately dressed, and inappropriately calibrated in tone: In one instance, I was too deferential; in another, too bellicose.
I was discombobulated by fear—not by fear of the power of his office though that is a fearsome and impressive thing but by fear of his obvious brilliance.
These were not like press conferences—the president would speak in depth and with great familiarity about a range of subjects. Once, I watched him effortlessly reply to queries covering everything from electoral politics to the American economy to environmental policy. And then he turned to me. I thought of George Foreman, who once booked an exhibition with multiple opponents in which he pounded five straight journeymen—and I suddenly had some idea of how it felt to be the last of them.
Last spring, we had a light lunch. We talked casually and candidly. He talked about the brilliance of LeBron James and Stephen Curry—not as basketball talents but as grounded individuals. I asked him whether he was angry at his father, who had abandoned him at a young age to move back to Kenya, and whether that motivated any of his rhetoric.
He said it did not, and he credited the attitude of his mother and grandparents for this. Then it was my turn to be autobiographical. I told him that I thought it was not sensitive to the inner turmoil that can be obscured by the hardness kids often evince. I told him I thought this because I had once been one of those kids. Nonetheless, he agreed to a series of more formal conversations on this and other topics.
The improbability of a black president had once been so strong that its most vivid representations were comedic. In this model, so potent is the force of blackness that the presidency is forced to conform to it. But once the notion advanced out of comedy and into reality, the opposite proved to be true. But black people, then living under a campaign of terror for more than half a century, had quite a bit to fear, and Roosevelt could not save them.
To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased. It is also the only tradition in existence that could have possibly put a black person in the White House. Whenever he attempted to buck this directive, he was disciplined. His mild objection to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. Race and Politics in the Obama Era , very little had improved. Yet despite this entrenched racial resentment, and in the face of complete resistance by congressional Republicans, overtly launched from the moment Obama arrived in the White House, the president accomplished major feats.
He revitalized a Justice Department that vigorously investigated police brutality and discrimination, and he began dismantling the private-prison system for federal inmates.
Obama nominated the first Latina justice to the Supreme Court, gave presidential support to marriage equality, and ended the U. Millions of young people now know their only president to have been an African American.
In , the Obama administration committed itself to reversing the War on Drugs through the power of presidential commutation. The administration said that it could commute the sentences of as many as 10, prisoners. As of November, the president had commuted only sentences. Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception—let alone his ascendancy to the presidency—had long stood in force. A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people.
The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama—a black man with deep roots in the white world—was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave way to, unthinkable. When Barack Obama was 10, his father gave him a basketball, a gift that connected the two directly.
Obama was born in in Hawaii and raised by his mother, Ann Dunham, who was white, and her parents, Stanley and Madelyn. They loved him ferociously, supported him emotionally, and encouraged him intellectually.
They also told him he was black. Ann gave him books to read about famous black people. This biography makes Obama nearly unique among black people of his era. That passion was directed at something more than just the mastering of the pick-and-roll or the perfecting of his jump shot. These are lessons, particularly the last one, that for black people apply as much on the street as they do on the court.
Basketball was a link for Obama, a medium for downloading black culture from the mainland that birthed the Fabulous Five.
Historically, in black autobiography, to be remanded into the black race has meant exposure to a myriad of traumas, often commencing in childhood.
Frederick Douglass is separated from his grandmother. The enslaved Harriet Ann Jacobs must constantly cope with the threat of rape before she escapes. The division is not neat; the two are linked, and it is incredibly hard to be a full participant in the world of cultural identity without experiencing the trauma of racial identity.
Obama is somewhat different. But the kinds of traumas that marked African Americans of his generation—beatings at the hands of racist police, being herded into poor schools, grinding out a life in a tenement building—were mostly abstract for him.
Moreover, the kind of spatial restriction that most black people feel at an early age—having rocks thrown at you for being on the wrong side of the tracks, for instance—was largely absent from his life. In its place, Obama was gifted with a well-stamped passport and admittance to elite private schools—all of which spoke of other identities, other lives and other worlds where the color line was neither determinative nor especially relevant.
Obama could have grown into a raceless cosmopolitan. Surely he would have lived in a world of problems, but problems not embodied by him. He was sitting on Air Force One , his tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Why that is, I think, is complicated. You feel pretty good about it. Stanley, his grandfather, who came originally from Kansas, took him to basketball games at the University of Hawaii, as well as to black bars.
Stanley introduced him to the black writer Frank Marshall Davis. The facilitation was as much indirect as direct. That suspicion of rootlessness extends throughout Dreams From My Father.
But instead of being in awe, Obama realized that he and the woman lived in different worlds. After college, Obama found a home, as well as a sense of himself, working on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer. It was less obvious to me.
How do I pull all these different strains together: Kenya and Hawaii and Kansas, and white and black and Asian—how does that fit? And through action, through work, I suddenly see myself as part of the bigger process for, yes, delivering justice for the [African American community] and specifically the South Side community, the low-income people—justice on behalf of the African American community.
But also thereby promoting my ideas of justice and equality and empathy that my mother taught me were universal. And I can fit the African American struggle for freedom and justice in the context of the universal aspiration for freedom and justice. If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be.
Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television.
The South Side of Chicago, where Obama began his political career, is home to arguably the most prominent and storied black political establishment in the country. Washington forged the kind of broad coalition that Obama would later assemble nationally.
But Washington did this in the mids in segregated Chicago, and he had not had the luxury, as Obama did, of becoming black with minimal trauma. Axelrod recalled sitting around a conference table with Washington after he had won the Democratic primary for his reelection in , just as the mayor was about to hold a press conference.
He felt those things. He had fought in an all-black unit in World War II. He had come up in times—and that and the sort of indignities of what you had to do to come up through the machine really seared him. Like Washington, Obama attempted to forge a coalition between black South Siders and the broader community. But Obama, despite his adherence to black cultural mores, was, with his roots in Kansas and Hawaii, his Ivy League pedigree, and his ties to the University of Chicago, still an exotic out-of-towner.
But even as many in the black political community were skeptical of Obama, others encouraged him—sometimes when they voted against him. You just have to be patient.
And being able to break through in the African American community is difficult because of the enormous loyalty that people feel towards anybody who has been around awhile. There was no one around to compete for loyalty when Obama ran for Senate in , or for president in He was no longer competing against other African Americans; he was representing them.
Obama ran for the Senate two decades after the death of Harold Washington. Axelrod checked in on the precinct where Washington had been so loudly booed by white Chicagoans. Obama believes that his statewide victory for the Illinois Senate seat held particular portent for the events of Illinois effectively allowed Obama to play a scrimmage before the big national game in And so part of the reason I was willing to run [for president in ] was that I had had two years in which we were generating enormous crowds all across the country—and the majority of those crowds were not African American; and they were in pretty remote places, or unlikely places.
Obama said the doctor suggested she first look at her daughters' body mass index BMI. The minor changes she subsequently made in their daily habits, Obama said, made all the difference. The first lady's comments have stirred up the Web and medical world, and have drawn both criticism and praise. Some say Obama should not have personalized the issue and brought up her daughters.
Even if it is for the greater public good, critics say, it does not bode well for their self-image. Others say the first lady used that example only to connect to Americans who may find themselves in a similar position. Some charge that Obama's comments may be perceived as a focus on weight and dieting, which sends the wrong message to the public.
The first lady should be discussing behavioral change, not weight loss, said Laura Collins Lyster-Mensh , an eating disorder activist and executive director of Families Empowered and Supporting Treatment of Disorder F. The focus on obesity , Lyster-Mensh said, turns this into an issue of appearances, which does not bode well for children, especially girls. President Obama is also guilty of talking about his daughters' weight.
In an interview with Parents magazine in November , the president said, "A couple of years ago -- you'd never know it by looking at her now -- Malia was getting a little chubby. There he met Ann Dunham, married her, and had another child, Barack.
He left his second family to return to Kenya to work for the government, where he married another American woman and had two more children with her. Angry and penniless, he started to drink. She would go farther. She had no idea what she was getting into when she left Hawaii—no idea that only months before she arrived Indonesia had suffered a failed but brutal coup and the killing of several hundred thousand people. Innocence, freedom, individualism, mobility—the belief that you can leave a constricting or violent history behind and remake yourself in a new form of your choosing—all are part of the American dream of moving west, first from the old country to America, then from the crowded cities of the East Coast to the open central plains and on to the Pacific.
But this dream, to Obama, seems credulous and shallow, a destructive craving for weightlessness. Universalism is a delusion. Freedom is really just abandonment. You might start by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town, your people and your way of life, and when, later on, you end up leaving your wife or husband and your child, too, it seems only a natural progression.
So when it came time for Obama to leave home he reversed what his mother and father and grandparents had done: he turned around and moved east. First back to the mainland, spending two years of college in California, then farther, to New York. He embraced even the dirt, the violence, and the narrowness that came with that place, because they were part of its memory.
He thought about the great black migration to Chicago from the South, nearly a century before, and the traditions the migrants had made there. He wanted to be bound. Of course, in a sense, by choosing to leave his family and move to a place to which he had no connection, he was doing exactly what his parents had done, but, unlike them, he decided to believe that his choosing self had been shaped by fate and family.
There was, at least, something organic, something inescapable about that. In time, the roots would grow. He married Michelle Robinson, a woman who already owned the memories and the roots, who was by birth the person he was trying to become: the child of an intact, religious black family from the South Side. He took a job organizing a South Side community that was disintegrating but that he hoped, through work and inspiration, to revive. Later, rejecting the agnosticism of his parents and his own skeptical instincts, he became a Christian and joined a church.
By the time he arrived at law school, when he was twenty-seven, he had become the man he had imagined. All his life, people had considered him black because he looked black, however confused he might be inside, and now he was no longer confused. His conversion was complete. When I met him, he just seemed like a black guy from Chicago. He seemed like a Midwestern black man. The victory of freedom over history is not just, of course, an American story about individuals but also a story that America tells about itself.
Obama rejects this story even in one of its most persuasive incarnations, the civil-rights movement. It is, then, not surprising that when it was proposed that America should invade Iraq with the goal of establishing democracy there, Obama knew that it would be a terrible mistake.
In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. Take health care, for example. Even so, Republicans continue to find him congenial, especially those who opposed the war on much the same conservative grounds that he did.
In his election to the U. Senate, Obama won forty per cent of the Republican vote; now there is a group called Republicans for Obama, founded by John Martin, a law student and Navy reservist shortly to be posted to Afghanistan, which has chapters in six states.
Of course, not all Republicans like Obama—John Martin receives a steady stream of rude e-mails. Screw him! And screw you too!
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