Obama Isn’t Going to Save You

Opinion|Obama Isn’t Going to Save You

For those who are paying attention and care at all about human decency, the Trump administration’s political chaos and social instability is a challenge that’s making some well-meaning people say some strange things. One of the strangest can be attributed to Obama derangement syndrome.

O.D.S. sounds sensible enough.

Barack Obama was a popular president. His approval rating was a solid 59 percent when he left office. That was just a little off from his high of 69 percent in 2009. YouGov data from this year ranks him as the second-most-popular politician, after Jimmy Carter. More important than how much people still like Obama, is that a lot of people felt really good about themselves when he was president. Nostalgia is a heck of a drug.

Compared with Joe Biden and President Trump, Obama looks healthy. His speech at the Democratic National Convention last year showed that he still has the juice. And the moment feels important. Trump took the country into dangerous territory this week. He attempted to take control of the California National Guard and has deployed a Marine battalion to rein in protesting Angelenos.

Meanwhile, a line of tanks will soon fête the president in his Army birthday parade, a galling display of authoritarian theater.

This week the writer Mark Leibovich leveled up dinner party and social media murmurs about Obama’s whereabouts with an essay asking why the former president has been missing in action. The question speaks to an accepted truth: The Democratic Party lacks leadership. Senator Chris Murphy, Senator Cory Booker and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offer glimmers of a charismatic party head waiting in the wings. But Obama is the complete package with a track record.

That idea has enough common-sense appeal to feel right.

Unfortunately, it is absolute madness.

I don’t know which Obama some of my peers remember, but the ex-president was fairly consistent. He governed as a moderate who, at one time, would have been recognizable as a Reaganite. Only in the rightward drift of today’s Overton window does Obama’s presidency seem radically leftist. As the Democratic Party’s leader, he chastised those on the left, threw in the occasional respectability politics about young Black men and sagging pants and gave us an imperfect but critical stop on the road to universal health care. He was a decent president of historical import, but he was still very much a product of his times.