If you’re a former US president, there’s one guaranteed way to be remembered fondly – make sure you’re followed by a truly awful successor. It certainly worked for Barack Obama: you only had to mention his name these last four years to send millions of Americans (and others) into a reverie of nostalgic longing. The gulf in calibre between Donald Trump and his predecessor was so wide that each day Trump sat in the Oval Office, Obama’s reputation shone a little brighter.
Not that he needed the comparison. Even before Trump took office, Obama left the White House with unusually high approval ratings: 59% of Americans thought well of him, according to Gallup – and that figure has held ever since. Outside the US, Obama recently displaced Bill Gates as the world’s most admired man, according to YouGov, which is handy as Obama is married to the world’s most admired woman.
If you had to construct the unTrump, Barack Obama is what you’d come up with: cerebral and well-read; deliberative; self-critical to the point of self-doubt; a faithful husband and conspicuously devoted father. He was a chief executive whose team was so functional that, over the course of eight years, there was scarcely a leak; not a single person was forced to resign in disgrace, let alone face legal proceedings. The closest the Obama White House got to scandal was when he wore a pale “tan” suit in 2014, a look some considered unpresidential. Not for nothing did they call him “no drama Obama”.
There is much to criticise in his record, whether it be a covert drone war that saw 10 times the number of strikes as were authorised under George W Bush, resulting in the loss of as many as 800 civilian lives in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen – or a failure to enforce his supposed “red line” on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, a failure that Bashar al-Assad seemed to read as a licence to keep killing his own people. You can criticise Obama for failing to do enough for small-town and postindustrial America, so that people who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 voted for Trump in 2016. Still, and even taking all that into account, from the vantage point of 2020 the Obama presidency looks like a calm, flat sea before the roiling tempest of Trump.
The outgoing president features only a little in Obama’s 751-page memoir, A Promised Land, which covers the period from the author’s entry into politics – winning a seat in the state senate of Illinois in 1995 – until the moment that may have ensured his re-election: the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. A second volume will address the rest. The book is written in the same voice that made Dreams From My Father a bestseller, letting the reader in on the author’s inner monologue – as Obama observes his own life as it plays out, questioning his motivations, noticing his hypocrisies.
Trump’s cameo role is that of villain, the lead proponent of “birtherism”, spreading the racist smear that Obama was not really born in the US, “a conspiracy theory he almost certainly knew to be false,” Obama writes. Trump also makes an appearance as the butt of Obama’s jokes on the fateful night in 2011 when, delivering the traditional comic turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president mocked Trump as a man whose idea of an important decision was choosing between the boys’ and girls’ teams on Celebrity Apprentice. Was it that humiliation that stung Trump into seeking the presidency, just to get even?
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
