In Obama They Trusted — Too Much

I n a 2008 column that still deserves to be mocked, Mark Morford wondered if Barack Obama was a “Lightworker”: someone who could “help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.”

Morford wrote these words shortly after Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. Buoyed by such airy slogans as “change we can believe in,” Obama became a two-term president. But change is a constant in politics, whether you believe in it or not. Obama has now been succeeded twice by his arguable antithesis, Donald Trump, with a hapless interlude courtesy of Joe Biden, Obama’s vice president. The “Lightworker” has dimmed.

Now, disarrayed Democrats can’t decide whether the solution to their problem is less Obama or more. The truth is that we would all be better off if we resolved not to let politics revolve so overwhelmingly around one person.

On team “less” for the Democrats are those wondering if the people who spearheaded Obama’s presidential campaigns are so great at their jobs after all. Last month, NBC News reported that “more Democrats are openly criticizing Obama strategists and consultants, who were long treated as the high priests of their party’s politics.”

The presence on the ill-fated Kamala Harris presidential campaign of many Obama alums has helped drive this decline in their reputation. David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, took a high-profile role in the Harris campaign. Her loss has rubbed off on him. “The shine’s off Plouffe now. He was the golden boy,” one Democratic megadonor said. “Now he’s just an old broken-down boy, who lost. Big.”

Plouffe himself faults Biden, whose bitter clinging to his reelection campaign “totally f***ed us,” he says in a new book. This back-and-forth reinforces the blame game currently besetting the rudderless Democratic Party. That it remains so rudderless is why some think Democrats have no choice but to lean more heavily on Obama — if he is willing to oblige.

On team “more” is Mark Leibovich. In The Atlantic, Leibovich advances a consensus of frustration over the former president’s failure to be more heavily engaged in politics during Trump’s second term. “Obama’s detachment feels jarringly incongruous with the desperation of his longtime admirers — even more so given Trump’s assaults on what Obama achieved in office,” Leibovich writes.

Leibovich suggests that Obama could serve as a temporary bridge to the next generation of Democratic leadership (a promise Biden once made): “While Democrats struggle to find their next phenom, Obama could be their interim boss.” Arguing against presidential term limits, Publius in Federalist No. 72 warns of the proliferation of ex-presidents as “discontented ghosts” all “sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess.” Leibovich and others are saying to Obama: Please haunt us!

Both groups are onto something. The Obama nostalgics are right that the Democrats currently lack any figure of comparable stature. And those who wish to move on from Obama are right that his skill as a presidential campaigner may have unjustly inflated the reputations of those who managed his campaigns. “It’s pretty easy to win with a guy like Obama,” one Democratic strategist said.

Both groups agree on Obama’s political virtues. They are more hesitant to admit his faults. But there were — and there are — many. His presidency was great for him. It was a bloodbath for Democrats outside the Oval Office. From his first inaugural (the high-water mark of Democrats in the 21st century) to a few months before the 2016 election, Democrats lost 14 Senate seats, 69 House seats, and nine governorships. By number of offices held, they were at their lowest political ebb since the 1920s. If Democrats are wondering why they have so few rising stars right now, they can blame Obama.

This pattern bears out one of the unexpected oddities of Obama’s time in public life: As skillful as he was at selling himself, his magic touch wore off in selling other things and people. Yes, in the aftermath of the 2008 election, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were able to push through some of his legislative priorities, most notably Obamacare. But once Republicans retook the House in 2010, and then the Senate in 2014, Obama accomplished little. That tempted him toward a pen-and-phone unilateral governance that opened doors Donald Trump has gleefully walked through.

That Donald Trump, whom Obama may have inadvertently cajoled into running for president, directly succeeded him further speaks to his lack of a transferable imprimatur. Further evidence came last year, when Obama, in full professorial mode, hectored black male voters over their hesitancy to vote for Kamala Harris, a black woman. These voters had been essential parts of Obama’s coalition of the ascendent, which was supposed to guarantee Democratic electoral success. In 2024, many of them moved dramatically toward Trump.

None of this is to say Obama hasn’t left an imprint on national life. His status as America’s first black president alone assures that. He presided over an expansion of the size and scope of government that has yet to recede. Obamacare appears to be here to stay. As hapless as Biden’s presidency was, it still achieved real victories for the left, and it wouldn’t have been possible without Obama. The Obama legacy lives on in unexpected ways as well. Obama also played a large behind-the-scenes role in forcing Biden out last summer. And JD Vance, Trump’s vice president, has professed himself an admirer of Obama, a fact which can make Vance’s time in public life thus far seem like some bizarro-world impersonation of him.

Obama’s most enduring legacy, however, ought to be to make us skeptical of political movements based on cults of personality. All that talk of Lightworkers, of slowing the rise of the oceans and healing the planet (as Obama put it after he clinched the Democratic nomination), ought to have been a warning not to overinvest in the power of one political figure. If nothing else, the admonition ought to be practical: Such people are not always the best guarantors of a political legacy that extends beyond themselves.