The Hopeful Contradiction of Barack Obama
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Barack Obama is more than just a politician, he’s a symbol. A symbol of hope. Of change heralding a more equitable future where we care for all of our people. He believes that we can all truly be our better selves, and his unmatched oratory skills can convince anyone they can live up to the hope he has in each and every one of us. For all the cynicism that Obama evokes from a certain kind of jaded elder millennial like myself, last night at the Democratic National Convention proved that he can still inspire hope.
President Obama: The vast majority of us don’t want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided. We want something better. And the joy and excitement we’re seeing around the Harris-Walz campaign tells us we’re not alone pic.twitter.com/3sj26ZReno
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 21, 2024
Hope that we can elect someone smart enough not to let Larry Summers influence a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform a system Summers helped break. Hope that the president can lead on issues like providing unwavering support for marginalized groups, instead of being dragged into the future by their older white vice president. Hope that we can advance an agenda focused on helping new homeowners and not making it harder to achieve the idyllic American dream. Despite the fact that he had eight years in power and did things allowing and incentivizing me to attack him via sleight of hyperlink like that, Barack Obama still gives me hope.
So much of what the Democratic Party struggles with and destroys my hope in its ability to affect change can be summarized by a nostalgia for the 1990s, where everyone at the Democratic National Convention was doing the Macarena and vibing because the Dow was up a billion points and they had all just signed up for AOL accounts and knew it had another ten billion points to go.
Look at how happy they all were! That’s a vibes convention if I’ve ever seen one.
Anywho, all those people wound up dismantling a bunch of New Deal era banking laws and regulations and wouldn’t you know it, we had a generational financial crisis begin seven years after they left!
So back to the vibes guy who, as Heatmap News founding Executive Editor Robinson Meyer correctly noted on Twitter, “there is a cohort of american millennials for whom the obamas still activate what is basically firmware-level programming.”
The hope felt right now by switching from an old guy who makes you hold your breath with every word to a charismatic and talented politician in Kamala Harris is often compared to 2008, and both campaigns share a powerful symbol at the top of the ticket. Calling a politician a symbol can be both an insult and a compliment, as it can reduce a person to a campaign prop, but it is important to win elections and build coalitions that can do lasting things with its power, and we have over ten thousand years of documented human history proving that symbols are pretty important to help rally people around a cause.
Barack Obama wasn’t a bad president, per se (on a relative basis to other rulers of the depraved American empire). The car was fully falling off the cliff when he got into office, and he helped stabilize a near-cataclysmic situation, plus Romneycare is still better than the nightmare of nothing we had before the ACA was passed, but Obama had a once-in-a-lifetime moment he flat out blew. This is undeniable, because President Donald Trump following him into the White House makes it so.
Obama won Indiana for Mayor Pete’s sake. For all we know we may have made him King had he genuinely reformed the system. Instead, he continued to do the Macarena and advance the Clinton dynasty after literally running against it. So much of what Obama talked about last night can be found in his 2008 speeches. The man can identify the party’s ills, but even after eight years in power and another eight years outside it as the Democratic Party’s premier lifestyle brand, he cannot ameliorate them.
But even after all that cynicism, all my polisci-brained observations about the vast contrasts and results in ruling styles between Obama and Biden, after all those years of mounting resentment from 2010 onward that is the origin story of the modern left, Barack Obama still gives my firmware hope like no other politician can…just so long as he’s not the one who’s actually going to be in charge if we win.