How Obama Broke my Heart
How Obama Broke my Heart
The esteemed and impressive President graced the political landscape with a defense of civility and of values but in a great time of societal upheaval, what exactly is he waiting for?
My first memory of Barack Obama was watching newsreel coverage of him at some sort of state fair or rally in 2006. It was before his formal entry into the Presidential race and at the time he was a nobody to anyone outside the political junky elite. I was fourteen or fifteen years old at the time and had already cultivated an interest in politics and the interest that comes before it – the world.
As the race unfolded, I was completely swept up by Obama and everything he sold. His youth and inexperience were masked by a calculated and cool demeanor. He was novel and fresh and new. The message of ‘hope and change’ and ‘yes we can’ was something that spoke to me. I wasn’t even old enough to realize how refreshing and necessary that was and still is in politics. When the task was walking into ‘political life’ during adolescence, there simply could not have been a better introduction or first love in politics than the underdog junior state senator from Illinois.
As he rose to power lots of things changed. Some things about Obama did not. He was always someone who came off as valuing information and exchanging in good faith. He was direct a lot of the time, and nearly always respectful and fair. He set a tone in that way but also didn’t suffer fools gladly. In one spirited exchange with a hack reporter, he defiantly and powerfully replied that he preferred to understand an issue before speaking on it publicly as President.
It wasn’t just the ease with which he dispatched nonsense but the cool bravado he delivered it all with. The ‘Obama Pause’ – that pause that no one dare interrupt – was in fact placed in my own oratory toolkit during medical school interviews.
After two terms in office, Obama exited the White House with grace despite being met with a narcissistic and obnoxious and braindead successor who made that anything but easy. After leaving office in 2016, he has maintained a relatively low-key presence in public life. And that is where the story of heartbreak begins.
Being quiet about Trump while he was in office was understandable. George W. Bush offered Obama the same public space. There is something to be said for not sucking the oxygen out of the room the successor sits in because love him or hate him, he’s running the country and by proxy the world.
But why now, in this broken time in our culture, is this man so quiet? Why is he so invisible and easy to forget. Why has he become an afterthought? Why has he onboarded the insidious Clinton tendency of seeming to focus group every statement and public appearance. Why is it that he is so careful?
But excuses like respect for the office, if we can call them that, simply do not compute anymore. We have become more tribal since Obama’s rise to power. The concept of the other is one we have become all too comfortable with. We see disagreement or a different point of view not with intellectual curiosity and excitement but with scorn. The ascendance of so-called ‘woke ideology’ – a real and cancerous thing that does exist – has done much harm to the world and to our ability to speak to each other, to forgive, to be more generous with the benefit of the doubt.
Obama holds immense power and street credential where it matters and where this ideology goes to feed and nourish itself – on the left. His silence on the moral hysteria we see so much these days is absolutely deafening. His public comments on this topic have been limited and vague. In perhaps his only meaningful commentary on the culture of call outs, cancellation, and not just political, but now societal tribalism, he said the following:
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”
Impressive to be sure. But there just hasn’t been enough of this from Obama. Because the volume of his condemnation of this cancer is so low it is also easy for foolish activists to ignore.
In a time where our society is ripping itself apart and where norms like the freedom of expression and the free exchange of ideas are so brutally under attack where is this man focusing his energy? In large part, from what we can see, he is focused on producing movies. Aside from now occupying an embarrassing space held by the likes of Harry and Megan, Obama has done little to impart his force and impact the very society that has given him so much.
What is he waiting for exactly? Why has he not entered the ring and tried to shift the society more towards normalization of mistakes and of the forgiveness of mistakes. Why has he not taken the opportunity to wander on a podcast or television set that could shift a narrative and expose this societal rot for what it is – the most dangerous affront to modern secular and enlightenment values in a generation?
Why has he not walked onto the set of the Joe Rogan Experience? Why has he not funded and stood up for actual independent film makers like the impressive and tortured Meg Smaker – vilified by a fringe leftist mob for the crime of shooting a documentary shedding light on Obama’s broken Guantanamo promise? Why has he not been out front explicitly calling out the distortion of crime statistics that fuels so much racial hatred in America? Why hasn’t he used his voice to lesson the identity politics narrative that will in effect do nothing to make our society stronger?
Why has he not in endorsed the compassionate and strategic activist values of MLK, discussed beautifully by Andrew Sullivan, in a full throated and uninterpretable way? Why hasn’t he championed the freedom of speech he so easily championed while running for office as a ‘former constitutional law professor’ and ‘community organizer’? Why hasn’t he chastised the hypocrisy so evident in his own party and so central to our being stuck in the mud on the question of progress?
These questions deserve answers. The simple answer likely involves the risks of wandering into the public arena, but that risk really doesn’t exist for Obama. He is in many ways untouchable. He’s untouchable financially, and culturally, and optically.
His active choice to not stand up for the values he told us he so firmly believed in is a red flag waving in the wind. It makes clear that he either doesn’t value these values or doesn’t have the courage or foresight to understand the potential he holds to steer the public conscience back onto a respectable pathway.
Both reasonings are bad – whether the lacking is one of sincerity or of courage, the disgraceful outcome of what Obama has become is the same - silent.
An old saying posits that time waits for no one. As the years tick on, and as his own party, controlled by a hysterical fringe, continues to fan the societal flames of chaos, one question screams out more and more – what is this man waiting for?