Open-seat presidential elections are shaped by perceptions of the style and personality of the outgoing incumbent. Voters rarely seek the replica of what they have. They almost always seek the remedy, the candidate who has the personal qualities the public finds lacking in the departing executive.
.. Beyond specific issues, however, many Republicans view dimly the very qualities that played so well for Mr. Obama in 2008. Deliberation is seen as hesitancy; patience as weakness. His call for tolerance and passionate embrace of America’s growing diversity inflame many in the Republican base, who view with suspicion and anger the rapidly changing demographics of America. The president’s emphasis on diplomacy is viewed as appeasement.
So who among the Republicans is more the antithesis of Mr. Obama than the trash-talking, authoritarian, give-no-quarter Mr. Trump?
How Change Happens
Yet his achievements have depended at every stage on accepting half loaves as being better than none: health reform that leaves the system largely private, financial reform that seriously restricts Wall Street’s abuses without fully breaking its power, higher taxes on the rich but no full-scale assault on inequality.
.. Could Mr. Obama have been more transformational? Maybe he could have done more at the margins. But the truth is that he was elected under the most favorable circumstances possible, a financial crisis that utterly discredited his predecessor — and still faced scorched-earth opposition from Day 1.
Giving Obama His Due
But on the night of Reagan’s final State of the Union speech in 1988, when he boasted that “one of the best recoveries in decades” should “send away the hand-wringers and doubting Thomases,” the economic numbers were not as good as those on Obama’s watch.
At no time in Reagan’s eight years was the unemployment rate lower than it is today, at 5 percent — and this after Obama was handed the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Reagan lauded a federal deficit at 3.4 percent of gross national product. By last fall, Obama had done better than that, posting a deficit of 2.5 percent of G.D.P.
.. But it may also be that the country was not ready for a transformational president; rather than sweep away the last racial barrier, his years in office showed just how deep-rooted the sentiment behind those barriers remains.
Understanding Obama Through Basketball
Alexander Wolff, a longtime writer for Sports Illustrated, argues that basketball has been a “touchstone” in Obama’s “exercise of the power of the presidency,” and that he has used it “more often and more effectively than any previous president had used any sport.” It was a campaign tool during Obama’s first run for the Presidency: scenes of him playing basketball on the trail highlighted his youthful vigor and, as Wolff writes, “undermined Republican efforts to portray Obama as foreign, suspicious, or someone who ‘pals around with terrorists.’ ”
.. “At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own,” Obama writes. “It was there that I would make my closest white friends, on turf where blackness couldn’t be a disadvantage.” The court was a plausibly fair and meritocratic space where the best might flourish, but also a place where ideas about race were inescapable.
.. Obama’s brother-in-law, the college coach Craig Robinson, identified the President as being “extremely left-handed,” meaning that he can’t go right. (This fact has perhaps been underutilized by the President’s Republican opponents.)