In this interview, Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks to PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff about Barack Obama’s childhood, his legacy, and how he ultimately connected with the American people. “This white family loving him deeply, and him being black, that is incredibly unique,” says Coates about Obama’s welcoming family in Hawaii. “I’ve never come across that in my life.” Read more in Coates’s article in the January issue of The Atlantic, “My President Was Black.”
The self-referential presidency of Barack Obama
Barack Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston was an astonishing piece of oratory. It was also a bit of sleight of hand.
Then a U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois, Obama wove his personal ancestry and biography — black and white, Kenya and Kansas, Hawaii and Harvard — into the American story of opportunity, multiplicity and solidarity. Not red vs. blue, but united. Out of many, one. David Axelrod calls the address a love letter to America. “In no other country on Earth is my story even possible,” Obama declared, his most poignant line of the night.
.. Two words in that sentence would matter most.
.. My story. This was a presidency preoccupied with Obama’s exceptionalism as much as with America’s.
.. So much so, in fact, that when President-elect Obama endured criticism for recycling Clinton-era officials into top posts, he argued that it didn’t matter, that he was enough. “I was never of the belief that the way you bring about change is to not hire anybody who knows how things work, and to start from scratch and completely reinvent the wheel,” Obama saidto The Washington Post in January 2009. “I’m the one who brings change. It is my vision. It is my agenda.”
.. As a candidate, Obama explained the logic. “I think that if you can tell people, ‘We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country,” Obama told journalist James Traub in 2007. “And they’d be right.”
.. “I stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents. My father came to these shores in search of the promise that they offered. My mother made me rise before dawn to learn their truths when I lived as a child in a foreign land. My own American journey was paved by generations of citizens who gave meaning to those simple words — ‘to form a more perfect union.’ I’ve studied the Constitution as a student, I’ve taught it as a teacher, I’ve been bound by it as a lawyer and a legislator. I took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution as commander in chief, and as a citizen, I know that we must never, ever, turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake.”
.. with a “don’t worry, it’s me” approach to national-security powers. When the New York Times described the president’s personal role in selecting terrorists (including a U.S. citizen) to target for attack, for example, it noted how “the control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes.”
.. After reassuring Americans on the extent of NSA oversight, he offered some unusual comfort. “I will leave this office at some point, sometime in the . . . next 31/2 years, and after that, I will be a private citizen,” Obama said. “And I suspect that, on a list of people who might be targeted so that somebody could read their emails or listen to their phone calls, I’d probably be pretty high on that list. It’s not as if I don’t have a personal interest in making sure my privacy is protected.”
.. So because Obama worries about his own future privacy, we should trust that he would never violate ours?
.. Obama, evocatively yet unmistakably, brought the discussion back to himself again. “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,” the president remarked.
.. “The White House did little to dispel the notion that Obama came first, over and above the party.”
.. “I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election,” he urged a Congressional Black Caucus gathering.
.. The man soon supplanting Obama in the Oval Office is even more enamored with his own story and more dismissive of his own party, and promises to remake the nation on the strength of his personality. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” Trump asserted at the Republican National Convention, “which is why I alone can fix it.” It is a more concentrated and insidious iteration of the personalized presidency.
.. A president who used his story in an attempt to uplift and empower is giving way to a leader for whom the office seems an exercise in personal brand extension.
.. “The spirit of national conciliation was more than the rhetorical pixie dust of Obama’s 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention ..
.. “It was also an elemental component of his self-conception, his sense that he was uniquely suited to transcend ideology and the grubby battles of the day.
The personal character of public figures
White evangelicals don’t care as much about corruption in political leadership as they used to. A Public Religion Research Institute poll released in October reported that white evangelicals have dramatically revised their opinions about politicians’ personal morality, in recent years.
In 2011, 70 percent said they cared about public figures’ personal morality. Personal ethical behavior was connected, they believed, to faithfully fulfilling the duties of public office. In 2016, only 28 percent of evangelicals still thought this, while the majority of them told pollsters that public figures’ personal morality didn’t really matter.
.. Obama’s personal character, his family life and his finances, provided no fodder for his enemies. Attacking him on that basis was like trying to smear Fred Rogers — or Steve Rogers. So his opponents and enemies had to turn elsewhere — to fantasy, fake news, and the fetid racist fever-dreams of “alt-right” neo-Nazis, Alex Jones loons, and the “birther” lies of a lecherous faux-billionaire.
In other words, an emphasis on “personal ethical behavior” ceased to matter because it ceased to be useful.
If personal ethics and character were treated as meaningful and important, then white evangelicals would have to concede that — despite any disagreements they might have with his policies — Barack Obama, as a person, deserved their respect. And, since they couldn’t bring themselves to concede that, they simply tossed aside their earlier “principled” belief that “Personal ethical behavior was connected … to faithfully fulfilling the duties of public office.”
.. White evangelicals toyed with one unqualified not-Romney candidate after another before eventually, begrudgingly, settling on the Mormon. Mitt Romney’s scandal-free personal life wasn’t perceived as a virtue by white evangelicals, just as the rubbing of salt into an old wound — the constant reminder that Latter Day Saints always seem, as a whole, to be way better at white evangelical piety than white evangelicals have ever managed to be.)
.. Evangelical concern for the personal morality of political leaders probably peaked after Watergate, which was a big part of why, in 1976, they supported a governor from the Bible Belt who was a Navy hero, a Baptist Sunday-school teacher, and a man of almost painful personal integrity. Four years later, though, they abandoned that guy, rallying behind the religious right as it rallied behind a twice-married former Hollywood star who campaigned on states rights and saber-rattling anti-Communism.
Reagan’s history of Hollywood and divorce were, very briefly, matters of ethical concern for white evangelical voters. His pledge to support “states rights” — at a campaign kick-off in Neshoba County, Mississippi
How Much of the Obama Doctrine Will Survive Trump?
And if, God forbid, a major terrorist attack occurs in the United States, he could well repeat the mistake of the Bush Administration, reacting in ways that benefit only the jihadis and enemies of America.
.. Constructed in response to the disaster that was the Iraq War, the Obama doctrine abjures direct U.S. military intervention in countries that don’t represent a direct security threat to the United States, such as Syria. It favors working quietly through allies and proxies, such as Kurdish peshmerga forces, and even, where necessary, Iranian militias, to attack America’s enemies, and also through deploying U.S. military and technological assets that can be operated from afar, such as cyber-spying systems, reconnaissance planes, and drones.
.. The record shows that the Obama Administration has launched, or helped enable, military strikes in more countries than the Bush Administration did, extending the campaign against Islamist extremism to places like Mali and Libya. But, whereas the Bush Administration will always be known for the large-scale wars it initiated in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama seems to prefer “waging war in the shadows with a light footprint and if possible limited public scrutiny,”
.. Trump, of course, could choose to reverse this approach, sending in the 101st Airborne whenever it suits him. But that doesn’t seem likely. Like Obama before him, he will be dealing with an American public that is tired of foreign wars
.. His transition Web site says only that a Trump Administration would “work with our Arab allies and friends in the Middle East in the fight against isis. Pursue aggressive joint and coalition military operations . . . international cooperation to cutoff their funding, expand intelligence sharing, and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting.”
.. This happens to be a pretty accurate description of what the Obama Administration has been doing in concert with Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and other countries. Flynn and Mattis have both criticized Obama’s campaign against isisas half-hearted, but how much further would they, and Trump, go?
.. “Reality will force him to adjust how he approaches many of these issues. That’s just the way this office works.”
.. Trump, for example, has said he would “dismantle” the nuclear deal with Iran and adopt a more confrontational approach to Tehran generally. But how would that effect the war on isis, in which Iranian-trained militias have played a key role?
.. At some point, Trump will also have to face fiscal reality. He has promised to rebuild a U.S. military he claims has been depleted, but he also wants to introduce big tax cuts at a time when the federal budget is already straitened by the rising demands of programs like Social Security and Medicare, along with interest on the national debt. One of the virtues of Obama’s light-footprint approach is that it is relatively cheap
.. Obama said, “We’ve accomplished all this at a cost of ten billion dollars over two years, which is the same amount that we used to spend in one month at the height of the Iraq War.”