Twelve years ago, Barack Obama introduced himself to the American public by way of a speech given at the Democratic National Convention, in Boston, in which he declared, “There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America, an Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” Few of us believed this to be true, but most, if not all of us, longed for it to be. We vested this brash optimist with our hope, a resource that was in scarce supply three years after the September 11th terrorist attacks in a country mired in disastrous military conflicts in two nations. The vision he offered—of national reconciliation beyond partisan bounds, of government rooted in respect for the governed and the Constitution itself, of idealism that could actually be realized—became the basis for his Presidential campaign. Twice the United States elected to the Presidency a biracial black man whose ancestry and upbringing stretched to three continents.
At various points that idealism has been severely tested. During his Presidency, we witnessed a partisan divide widen into an impassable trench, and gun violence go unchecked while special interests blocked any regulation. The President was forced to show his birth certificate, which we recognized as the racial profiling of the most powerful man in the world. Obama did not, at least publicly, waver in his contention that Americans were bound together by something greater than what divided them. In July, when he spoke in Dallas after a gunman murdered five police officers, he seemed pained by the weight of this faith, as if stress fractures had appeared in a load-bearing wall.
It is difficult not to see the result of this year’s Presidential election as a refutation of Obama’s creed of common Americanism. And on Wednesday, for the first time in the twelve years that we’ve been watching him, Obama did not seem to believe the words he was speaking to the American public. In the White House Rose Garden, Obama offered his version of a concession speech—an acknowledgement of Donald Trump’s victory. The President attempted gamely to cast Trump’s victory as part of the normal ebb and flow of political fortunes, and as an example of the great American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power. (This was not, it should be recalled, the peaceful transfer of power that most observers were worried about.) He intended, he said, to offer the same courtesy toward Trump that President George W. Bush had offered him, in 2008. Yet that reference only served to highlight the paradox of Obama's Presidency: he now exists in history bracketed by the overmatched forty-third President and the misogynistic racial demagogue who will succeed him as the forty-fifth. During his 2008 campaign, Obama frequently found himself—and without much objection on his part—compared to Abraham Lincoln. He may now share an ambivalent common bond with Lincoln, whose Presidency was bookended by James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, two lesser lights of American history.
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