Chapter 10
The Shock of Donald J. Trump’s Election
As Obama entered the last year of his presidency, he was concerned about his place in history. His vision of the United States as a middle-class society welcoming to all regardless of background remained the same as it was when he took office seven years earlier. He expected the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, would build on his legacy. Like most political analysts, he did not take seriously the candidacy for the Republican nomination of Donald Trump, whom he held in little regard and had already roasted at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in 2011 for making false charges about his place of birth and lack of an official birth certificate.
Even after the New York billionaire won the nomination, Obama believed Trump would never be elected president. He was stung by Trump’s victory in November, which he took almost as a personal insult. As he accepted the reality of a Trump presidency, he developed doubts about his legacy. As he left office on January 20, 2017, he hoped for the best but feared the worst.
Obama’s Message of Hope
On January 12, the president delivered his final State of the Union address. In contrast to Republican depictions of his presidency as one of failure and incompetency, he spoke of his many achievements as president, such as the ACA, the Iran deal, his opening to Cuba, and the Paris Agreement on climate change. Acknowledging that he had failed to achieve all his priorities as president and that 68 percent of Americans still thought the country was on the wrong track, he continued to offer hope and promise about the future. “Tonight was President Obama’s morning-in-America response to the malaise speech that the Republican candidates have been delivering in the last year,” commented Jon Favreau, the president’s former chief speech writer.1
Instead of presenting Congress with a long list of proposals it would never consider, Obama built his speech around four themes: (1) giving everyone a “fair shake” in the nation’s new technological economy, (2) using technology “to work for us” in dealing with such challenges as climate change, (3) protecting America while leading “the world without becoming its policeman,” and (4) making politics “reflect what’s best in us and not the worst.”2
Even though the president denounced the campaign’s partisan politics, he intended his address to be as much an election year speech as a government document. “Last year, he spoke to Congress. This year he’ll be speaking more to the American public,” said Jennifer Psaki, the White House communications director. Without naming him, the president directed many of his remarks to Trump, who was now the leading candidate for the Republican nomination.3
His staff, who at first joined the president in ignoring Trump, remained furious that he had accused the president of hiding the fact he had been born in Kenya and that his remarks morphed into what became known as the “the birther movement” despite the president’s decision in 2011 to release the document showing he had been born in Honolulu. Ben Rhodes also felt “helpless” at the Republican candidate’s repeated accusations that American troops were being killed in Libya while at the same time criticizing him for not committing forces to end the civil war there.4
Obama was more annoyed by the media’s focus on Trump the candidate rather than on his message. “I can’t believe they’re giving this airtime,” he said with respect to the birther movement. Referring, nevertheless, to the election already underway, the president commented in his State of the Union, “there will be voices urging us to fall back into our respective tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background. We can’t afford to go down that path.” As he neared the end of his presidency, he considered his failure to mend this partisan divide one of his greatest disappointments. “A president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide,” he acknowledged.5
Not surprisingly, reaction to his address split along partisan lines. In a televised debate among the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination held shortly after Obama delivered his speech, they portrayed his presidency as a total failure that had diminished freedom and opportunity at home and left the nation in a weakened position around the world.6
Iran’s seizure of two small American naval patrol boats and ten crewmen just hours before Obama delivered his message, seemed to underscore the Republican charges. The boats had wandered off course and were in Iranian territorial waters when they were captured. The seizure of the vessels and their crews became fodder for Republican attacks on the administration just when the US was supposed to unfreeze $100 billion under the provisions of the Iran Nuclear Agreement.7
On March 20, two months after delivering his State of the Union address, Obama traveled to Cuba to reopen the US embassy in Havana, which had been closed since 1961. “We want to make the process of normalization irreversible,” said Rhodes, who had led an advance logistical group to Havana.8
The next day, the president was formally welcomed at the presidential palace by President Raul Castro, whom he had met in Panama in 2015. During his three-day visit, he met with Castro, spoke before a group of US and Cuban business executives, and gave a televised speech to the Cuban people followed by a meeting with a group of Cuban political dissidents. At all these events, Obama criticized the Cuban government for its violation of human rights and spoke of his efforts to open up further lines of communication with Cuba.9
In his talks with Castro and at a joint press conference that followed, he pointed to the progress made between Washington and Havana in the fifteen months since the decision to establish diplomatic relations between the two governments and the importance of lifting the trade embargo against Cuba, even as he criticized what he regarded as Cuba’s human rights violations. The “United States will continue to speak up on behalf of democracy, including the right of the Cuban people to decide their own future,” he remarked. “We’ll speak out on behalf of universal human rights.”10
When asked about the trade embargo, he said he had taken all the steps he could to ease the embargo. Now it was up to the Republican-controlled Congress to lift it completely. “Frankly, Congress is not as productive as I would like it to be,” he said. Always hoping for the best, however, he thought that the large congressional delegation of forty Republicans and Democrats was an indication that there was “growing interest inside Congress for lifting the embargo.” That is why he called the dialogue taking place between Washington and Cuba “so important.”11
The president made these same points in his meeting with the US and Cuban business executives and, the next day, in his nationally broadcast address to the Cuban people. Pointing to the changes in the economic relationship between the US and Cuba, such as making more dollars available to Cuba and the resumption of commercial flights and cruises between the two countries, he acknowledged the importance of Washington lifting its trade embargo on Cuba. He also said that neither Cuba nor the United States should have anything to fear from the other country.12
He also spoke of “the power of entrepreneurship” to bring about prosperity even in economically poor nations like Cuba. It is about “the pride that comes from creating something new and improving the lives of those around you,” he remarked. “That’s the spirit of entrepreneurship… . Cuba’s economic future—its ability to create more jobs and a growing middle class, and meet the aspiration of the Cuban people—depends on growth in the private sector.”13
The next day, the president addressed the Cuban people from one of Havana’s landmark sites, the Gran Teatro. In the audience was Cuba’s leader Raul Castro, who listened intently to what he had to say. Remarking that the failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, known as the Bay of Pigs Operation, occurred in the same year (1961) that he was born, he tried to separate himself from the invasion. “I know the history, but I refuse to be trapped by it,” he remarked.14
Acknowledging once more the serious differences remaining between Cuba and the US on forms of government, foreign policy, and human rights, Obama again presented his vision of Cuba’s future. “I want the Cuban people—especially the young people—to understand why I believe that you should look to the future with hope; not the false promise which insists that things are better than they really are,” he said. “Hope that is rooted in the future that you can choose and that you can shape, and that you can build for your country… . That’s where hope begins—with the ability to earn your own living, and to build something you can be proud of.”15
Obama’s three-day visit to Cuba was generally well received in Cuba and among Cuban Americans living in the United States. There remained participants in the revolution in Cuba, who stayed deeply distrustful of the United States, and exiles from Cuba, who fled the revolution and still considered Cuba a threat to all of the Americas.16
In contrast, younger Cuban Americans living in southern Florida and Cubans who had little memory of the Cold War, approved the restoration of diplomatic relations as a way to reunite with their families. Cubans who were poor and without a job (the majority of the population) also welcomed Obama’s vision of a more economically thriving nation with the promise even of owning one’s own business.17
The Asian Pivot and the Partisan Divide
Even as Obama presented his message of hope and promise for a better future to the people of the United States and Cuba alike, he still had to confront the partisan divide plaguing his presidency. Following the 2014 elections, the influence of Republican right-wingers grew stronger. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated by his right-wing opponent in the Republican primaries. House Speaker John Boehner resigned from the speakership (and Congress) under pressure from his party’s right wing. With the primary season already underway, Trump became the front-runner for the Republican nomination by appealing to its right-wing base. Congressional Republicans were determined not only to oppose the president’s legislative agenda but to reverse his past legislative accomplishments. His decision to govern by executive order alienated them even more.18
Republicans also criticized Obama for what they considered an apology to Japan for President Harry Truman’s decision in August 1945 to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a cost of 120,000 dead. The president made his remarks on May 27 during a visit to Hiroshima’s Memorial Peace Park, the last leg of a trip to the Far East, where he also visited Vietnam. The official purpose of the trip was to attend the G7 economic summit in Shima City, Japan. Unofficially, it was to enhance the president’s ongoing pivot toward Asia.19
On the flight to Hanoi, he had a long conversation with Rhodes, who had recently testified before the Republican-controlled Benghazi Committee as it prepared its report on the seizure of the American embassy in Benghazi and the deaths of Chris Stevens and three other Americans after an especially partisan hearing. Rhodes was also the subject of a controversial story in the New York Times Magazine by David Samuels, in which Samuels portrayed him as a cynical manipulator of the news, who, through spin, was able to gain the approval of a gullible US public for the Iran Nuclear Agreement.20
On the flight to Vietnam, Rhodes relayed his account to Obama of his meetings with Samuels. Although the president made clear his displeasure with some of Rhodes’s comments in the Times Magazine story, he told his adviser not to worry too much about the piece. “No, forget about that,” he said. “That’s just a pimp on the ass of progress… . The notion that there’s something wrong with storytelling—I mean that’s our job. To tell a really good story about who we are.”21
In his conversation with Rhodes, Obama began talking about a best-selling book he was reading, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, a conversation he had to interrupt but resumed three days later as he was being helicoptered to Japan. Beginning with the “cognitive revolution” seventy thousand years ago, Harari maintained that homo sapiens went through a series of revolutions, most notably the “agricultural revolution” eleven thousand years ago and the “scientific revolution” five hundred years ago. Instead of viewing these developments as progress, he maintained they contained the seeds of humankind’s destruction, arguing, for example, that the agricultural revolution has resulted in obesity and other health problems and contributed to sharp disparities in wealth. Several features of the book caught the president’s attention, including the author’s ability to view history as a series of stories about humankind told well. “I’m reading a good book now,” he told Rhodes. “It reminds you, the ability to tell stories about who we are is what makes us different from animals. We’re just chimps without it.”22
Another matter that also caught his attention was how Harari viewed the history of humankind as one of its growing ability to kill growing numbers of other human beings to the point of being able to wipe out perhaps all life on earth with a single weapon. This made him think not only about the necessity of preventing nuclear proliferation, but of the need to eliminate war entirely.23
During his visit to Vietnam, the president met with three of the country’s leading young entrepreneurs. In his conversation with them, he emphasized many of the points he made during his visit to Cuba, such as the fact that he was not a prisoner of the past, and the importance of looking to the future. He stressed once again the importance of entrepreneurship, this time for Vietnam, which, he said, was not only about “building businesses,” it was also “about creating good jobs, and developing new products, and devising ways to serve others. [It was] the fuel for prosperity that puts rising economies on the path to success.”24
Obama also spoke of the importance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to Vietnam’s future. Because congressional approval of the TPP remained stalled on Capitol Hill, he tried to reassure Vietnam (and Japan) of the United States’ commitment to the TPP. “And not only do all the countries who are participating stand to gain from increased trade,” he remarked, “but Vietnam, in particular … would be one of the biggest beneficiaries.”25
The president’s most important meeting during his three-day visit to Vietnam was his private session with Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of the Communist Party and the country’s real power. What Trong wanted was his commitment to lift the US arms embargo on Vietnam. At a news conference on May 23, Obama announced he was rescinding the ban on sales of lethal military equipment to America’s former enemy. “The decision to lift the ban,” he said, was not giving Vietnam carte blanche to buy arms. The US would review future arms sales to “examine what’s appropriate and what’s not.” Nevertheless, Vietnam welcomed his announcement as a major step toward improving relations with Washington.26
Human rights advocates were disappointed by the president’s announcement. They wanted him to link the lifting of the ban to the release of prominent political prisoners in Vietnam and to the stoppage of police brutality against protesters. He did bring up human rights issues with Trong and in his address to the Vietnamese people on May 23, but to no avail.27
From Ho Chi Minh City, the president was helicoptered to Shima City just across the bay from Hiroshima. In a joint press conference, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe lashed out at the United States for the recent brutal rape and murder of a women by a military base worker, just the most recent of a long list of rapes and murders by American military personal going back to the occupation of the island after World War II. “I feel profound resentment against this self-centered and absolutely despicable crime,” he told the president. He also emphasized the importance of the US-Japanese alliance to the global economy and to Japanese security. In response, Obama expressed regret for what had happened on Okinawa and promised to cooperate with Japan in ensuring justice according to Japanese law, but he made no commitment when it came to relinquishing the US military bases on Okinawa. Like Abe, he also spoke of the importance of the US-Japanese alliance. 28
The next day he went to Hiroshima to visit the Memorial Peace Park, the site where the atomic bomb was dropped in August 1945. Although the drive was short, the president took a long time before deciding to visit the site. For months, Caroline Kennedy, the US ambassador to Japan, had urged him to visit the site. Secretary Kerry had gone there in April.29
As the first sitting American president to visit the park (former president Jimmy Carter went there in 1984), his decision to go to Hiroshima was fraught with controversy. While many Americans welcomed his decision as an opportunity to speak out against the future use of nuclear weapons, other Americans feared he would apologize for what they regarded as the justified use of the bomb against an enemy known for its brutality in the territories it occupied during the war and in the way it treated its prisoners of war. Instead of the president making an apologetic trip to Hiroshima, they thought it was more appropriate for Prime Minister Abe to go to Pearl Harbor to apologize for its unprovoked attack against the US naval base there, in which more than 2,400 Americans, including civilians, were killed.30
The White House made it clear before Obama went to Hiroshima that his trip was not to be interpreted as an American apology for using the atomic bomb against Japan. “He will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II,” Rhodes stated. Besides being part of the president’s pivot toward Asia, the administration also thought it was time to make a statement reaffirming his commitment to the goals he announced in 2009. He also wanted to focus attention on the issue of nuclear proliferation at a time when Trump was suggesting that Japan and South Korea develop their own nuclear weapons in the face of North Korean threats.31
“We come to mourn the dead including over 100,000 in Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Koreans; a dozen Americans held prisoners,” he said in his seventeen-minute address in the park that was broadcast throughout Japan. “We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see.”32
Influenced by the book he discussed with Rhodes on his flight to Vietnam and then to Shima City, he recounted in his address how, as science allowed humans to “cure disease and understand the cosmos,” it also paved the way for humans to become more skillful in developing weapons of war until they had the ability to destroy themselves. One way to prevent more Hiroshimas, he remarked, was to “restrict and roll back, and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.” Even that did not seem enough for the president. “The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution, as well.” What he suggested was eliminating war itself. “For we see around the world today how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale,” he noted. “We must change our mindset about war itself.”33
In the United States, the response to his address was mixed. Veterans’ groups and other critics believed that, although the president may not have used the word “apology” in his address, he effectively apologized for a decision that did not warrant one. Indeed, he seemed to let Japan off the hook for starting the war. If war was simply the result of man’s capacity for inhumanity, they asked, who should be held morally and legally responsible for causing the war? Even some proponents of nuclear disarmament wanted to know how the president could advocate nuclear nonproliferation, while at the same time wanting to modernize the US nuclear stockpile? Republican opponents of the president also pointed to the address as one more example of how the president was making America look weak in the world. 34
Most Americas, however, welcomed the speech as appropriate for the occasion—not an apology for using nuclear weapons to end the war, but a plea that what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki should never happen again. Pacifist groups were especially pleased by the president’s call for the end of war. “He had to do it,” remarked Lester Tenney, a ninety-eight-year-old survivor of the Bataan Death March. “It was the right thing to do,” he stated.35
Domestic Terrorism, Syria, and ISIL
Returning from Asia Obama was besieged with problems both at home and abroad. Domestically, he had to deal with renewed attacks by terrorists linked to ISIL and a series of police shootings of Black Americans that threatened to rekindle the tinderbox of racial strife. Political partisanship also reached new heights as Senate Majority Leader McConnell refused even to grant a hearing to the president’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, following the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia on February 13. Obama also found himself diverting more of his attention to the 2016 presidential election and the right-wing campaign being orchestrated by Trump against his presumptive Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Abroad, the president continued to cope with the expansion of ISIL into Syria and the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
In the early morning of June 12, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old American-born son of Afghan immigrants, opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing fifty people and wounding fifty-three others before being killed himself by the police. His was the worst killing spree in the nation’s history and the worst act of terrorism on American soil since September 11, 2001. He had been on the FBI’s watch list from 2013 to 2014, but the agency was never able to charge him with a crime, and he was able to buy his weapons legally. Although he claimed his allegiance to the Islamic state in a 911 call to the police an hour before beginning his deadly rampage, no evidence was found linking Mateen to ISIL.36
Addressing the nation shortly after receiving news of the rampage, President Obama labeled it “an act of terror and an act of hate.” Noting that the shooter had targeted a gay bar, he called his action “a sobering reminder that attacks on any American [were] an attack on all of us and the fundamental values of equality and dignity that define us as a country.” He also said it was “a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hand on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub.”37
Following the Orlando attack, Trump called for the president’s resignation for not using the phrase, “radical Islamists,” instead of “Islamic terrorists.” The Republican candidate also called for a ban on all Muslims seeking to immigrate to America. “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump wrote. “I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”38
Without ever referring to Trump by name, Obama responded to his attacks two days later. “What exactly would using this label accomplish?” he asked. Instead of achieving anything, “it would unfairly target all Americans of the Islamic faith [including] folks across the government … working really hard to protect the American people.” Worse were the consequences of “this kind of rhetoric and loose talk and sloppiness… . We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee of the United States to bar all Muslims from immigrating to America,” he continued. That “suggests entire religious communities are complicit in violence.” In the US there was plenty of room for individuals of all kinds regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, he concluded.39
The next month, when he went to Orlando to meet with the families of the victims, the president said much the same thing. “This is a country founded on basic freedoms, including freedom of religion,” he remarked in response to those who would discriminate against Muslims. We also had “to end discrimination and violence against our brothers and sisters who are in the LGBT community… . We have to challenge the oppression of women, wherever it occurs.” Speaking out once more in favor of background checks on gun purchasers, he remarked that those who opposed them should meet with the families of the Orlando victims “and explain why that makes sense.”40
Obama was rejecting the nationalistic and discriminatory message on which Trump was basing his campaign. Instead, the president called for the type of pluralistic society he had always advocated since his years as a community organizer in the 1980s. To the president, there was no radical Islamic threat to the United States. There were only threats from terrorists who claimed to be Islamic.41
While the president was confronting domestic terrorism, including the Charleston church shooting a year earlier, he was also conducting military operations in Syria, where ISIL had seized vast parts of eastern and northern Syria, including its rich oil fields. A few months after the terrorist regime beheaded James Foley and another American journalist, Steven Sotloff, in widely disseminated videos in the United States, he announced that he intended to bomb ISIL targets in Syria and asked the Senate and House to authorize a program to train and arm rebels who were fighting ISIL. “We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are,” the president stated in a fourteen-minute address. “This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threatened America, you will find no safe haven.” At the end of the month, both houses approved his request, following which he announced that he would be sending only advisers into Syria, not combat troops.42
The president’s announcement came only a month after he said the United States did not have a “strategy yet” to bomb ISIS (used interchangeably with ISIL). At the time, he was considering military options with the NSC for destroying the terrorist group’s infrastructure in Iraq and killing its leadership. He feared becoming bogged down in an expanded military commitment in the Middle East when he believed China posed “a greater threat to the national interest than ISIS.”43
Obama realized, however, that the terrorist organization did not recognize territorial borders as it took control of large parts of northern Iraq and eastern Syria. He also understood the importance of being part of a coalition that included Arab nations. “Our military action in Iraq has to be part of a broader comprehensive strategy to protect our people and support our partners who are taking the fight to ISIL,” he remarked in August. One nation he excluded as part of the coalition was Syria, where, for years, he had been trying to get rid of Bashar al-Assad. “The issue with respect to Syria is not simply a military issue,” he said. “It’s also a political issue.”44
Instead of sending troops into Syria, the White House relied on air strikes against ISIL. Their purpose was to disrupt its daily operations, deny it financial resources, cause fear among its fighters, and kill its leadership. Although the United States carried out most of the airstrikes, other coalition partners launched their own operations. By December, the US and its coalition partners had carried out over 3,000 airstrikes in Syria and over 6,000 in Iraq. By the spring of 2016, the US and Russia, which was helping prop up Assad’s government, were even considering joint operations to take out ISIL, including a coordinated attack against Raqqa, the self-proclaimed capital of the terrorist state.45
The president’s decision to intensify military operations against ISIS came under widespread criticism, both from Democrats and Republicans and from home and abroad. It continued into the fall, even though ISIS was being driven out of regions where they had established their own local governments. Even Obama’s supporters were concerned. From the time he announced expanded air strikes in Syria and Iraq, they were worried that the White House was leading the United States into another war in Syria in which the United States sided with the anti-Assad forces. They criticized the president for not laying out a timeline for successful completion of the war. Others were worried by what they regarded as a growing sense of militarism in America and the “hair-trigger mentality of the American people.”46
Most critics did not think the air strikes were working. Too many of them were missing their targets. In September 2016, the White House acknowledged that one strike killed sixty-two Syrian troops and wounded one hundred more, paving the way for an ISIS offensive. Pointing to the political and social complexity of the Middle East and other places where ISIS operated, the critics also said that the strategy of air strikes and advisers on the ground was too incoherent to work. Some of them remarked that the military intervention was actually playing into the hands of ISIS by creating more terrorist groups.47
Phillip Gordon, the president’s former Middle East adviser, argued that Obama should have bombed Assad following his use of chemical warfare against his opponents. Not getting bogged down in the Middle East was one of the determinants of Obama’s foreign policy, he noted, based on a certain fatalism about his limited ability to direct the course of events in the region. Gordon mostly supported this position. But because the president took such a firm position against using chemical weapons, he felt Obama had no choice except to launch an immediate military response. “If we won’t enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act,” he asked in 2016, “what does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules?”48
Over the summer, criticism of Obama grew even among some of his former backers. George Soros, the multibillionaire contributor to the Democratic Party, was angry that the president failed to consult with him after he won the presidency. He called him his “greatest disappointment.” Obama “closed the door on me” after he was elected president, Soros complained.49
In early 2016 Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine, conducted a series of interviews with some of Obama’s closest advisers and then with the president himself. Goldberg probed for the rationale behind the president’s hardest foreign policy decisions. Obama’s interviews with the writer were among the most revealing of his entire presidency. They made clear how dispirited and angry he had become by 2016 as a result of the constant harping and criticism about his leadership, even within his own administration and among his supporters and allies.50
In his meetings with Goldberg, Obama described himself “as a realist in believing we can’t at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery.” Reflecting the realist views of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whom, he told the columnist David Brooks in 2007, he regarded “as one of my favorite philosophers,” he described the world as “a tough, complicated, messy, mean place and full of hardship and tragedy.” Underscoring Gordon’s assessment of him as being something of a fatalist, he acknowledged that he came to office convinced that while he had enormous powers in foreign policy, there were also limits to the scope of executive power. 51
The president also described himself as “very much the internationalist [and an] idealist insofar as I believe that we should be promoting values like democracy and human rights and norms and values.” Reflecting his middle-class values and the importance he attached to the law (even when he was violating or raising new issues about international law by using drones or illegally crossing national borders), he singled out the “rule of law and property rights.” Yet he was also convinced that the US should intervene with military force against violators of human rights only when it served the national interest.52
With respect to his decision not to respond to Assad’s use of chemical warfare, despite violating his own “red line” threat, the president said that had he responded militarily, it would not have made much difference. “I’m very proud of this moment,” he told Goldberg. “I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made.”53
That decision was the moment, he stated, when he broke from what he called derisively, “the Washington Policy playbook,” which was to respond militarily whenever American interests seemed threatened. “Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works,” he commented. “But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.”54
As his interviews with Goldberg continued, the president began to lash out at his critics. He showed great respect for German chancellor Angela Merkel, but he was critical of most other leaders, who, he believed, lacked the will or the wisdom to use their political capital to pursue progressive goals. He resented military leaders whose solutions for all problems was to flex America’s military might and was critical of the State Department and of foreign policy think tanks in Washington. They were not as rational as he was. “What they didn’t understand,” he told Goldberg, was that history was “bending” in his direction.55
He also mused about what kind of president he wanted to replace him. That person, he said, should have an understanding of the limits of American power in the world, but recognize that the United States still had to be the world’s leader. “I want a president who has the sense that you can’t fix everything.” At the same time, “if we don’t set the agenda, it doesn’t happen… . That’s true whether you’re talking about nuclear security, whether you’re talking about saving the world financial system, whether you’re talking about climate.”56
Obama also touched on a number of other points, such as his concern that the United States avoid hubris in its foreign policy by limiting military spending and sharing leadership. He was indignant that the NATO allies were not contributing the 2 percent of their GDP to their defense as they had agreed to do in 2014. He was particularly critical of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, he felt, treated him condescendingly. He also resented the power of the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington and advocated a more balanced policy with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict. He admitted that his intervention in Libya was a mistake and that his administration underestimated the degree of tribalism in the country. But he also attributed much of the problem in Libya to the failure of the international coalition to live up to its responsibilities. He called its members “free riders.”57
In sum, Obama’s interviews with Goldberg revealed a disappointed and angry president, whose earlier self-doubts about his ability to lead had morphed into a self-confidence sometimes bordering on arrogance. They also made clear how well developed his views were about the US role in the world. His calibrated view of American foreign policy extended even to the demeanor he thought American presidents had to have in moments of crisis. As he told Goldberg, a misplaced word, or a frightened look, or an ill-considered hyperbolic claim, could result in panic.58
Police Shootings and the Garland Nomination
Obama’s problems as president mounted as the summer continued. Besides domestic terrorism and the threat of ISIS, the president had to deal with the renewed threat of racial violence as a result of a series of incidents involving the suspicious shootings by police officers of Black Americans. He also faced ongoing Republican opposition to his administration, tightly controlled in the Senate by Majority Leader McConnell, who even refused to hold a hearing on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the US Supreme Court following Scalia’s death in February.
One result of the killings of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Michael Brown in 2014 was to help turn Black Lives Matter (BLM) into a large social movement that remained active even after Martin’s and Brown’s deaths and the riots that followed in Ferguson, Missouri, faded in the news. BLM grew even bigger after two Black men, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota, were stopped in July 2016 by the police and killed under suspicious circumstances. In Sterling’s case, Officer Blane Salamoni fired six shots at Sterling after responding to a call at a convenience store. The killing was captured on the store’s videotape but not released until 2017, when Salamoni, who had a record of inappropriate police conduct, was fired. No criminal charges were ever filed against him, but the Baton Rouge police chief later apologized for hiring him. In Castile’s case, the incident was streamed live by his girlfriend, who was in the front seat next to him. Castile was killed by Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez after a heated exchange over a gun he owned. Yanez was charged with second degree manslaughter and endangering safety by discharging a firearm, but on the same day that Sterling was fired, he was acquitted.59
Although the fatal shootings sparked BLM protests throughout the country, the killing of five police officers and the wounding of eight others in Dallas on July 7 created a backlash against the BLM. The officers were killed by Micah Johnson, a Black Afghan War veteran with a troubled past. Not until the early hours of July 8 was Johnson killed by an explosive device after holding the police off for several hours in a parking garage. The heavily armed sniper, who hated white police officers, claimed to belong to the New Black Panthers, a group that advocated violence against whites and especially Jews.60
The killings of Sterling and Castile followed by the murders of the five police officers placed President Obama in a difficult position politically. The president condemned the first two shootings, saying they were “part of a broader pattern of racial disparities in law enforcement against people of color.” In response to the slayings of the police officers, he traveled to Dallas, where, on July 12, he delivered a memorial address in which he spoke of each fatally wounded officer, most of whom left behind wives and young children. He praised them for their commitment to dangerous public service despite the stress and long hours that came with their job.61
Had the president concluded his address in this way, he would have delivered a forgettable memorial to five police officers killed in the line of duty. But because of the series of Black men killed by the police, the peaceful protests throughout the country, and the backlash against BLM as a result of the five slain police officers, he felt obliged to address the whole issue of the nation’s racial divide the events of the last week exposed. Recognizing the seeming impossibility of healing the divide, he placed some of the responsibility for the victims of police violence on agitators against the police within the Black community.62
Mostly, however, he held the police responsible, but instead of delivering a despondent message, he offered, as he always did, a message of hope. “I know that Americans are struggling right now with what we’ve witnessed over the past few weeks,” he said. “We wonder if an African American community that feels unfairly targeted by police, and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs, can ever understand each other’s experience… . I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem. And I know that because I know America. I know how far we’ve come against impossible odds.”63
To bridge the nation’s racial divides, however, he said we had “to be honest with each other and ourselves.” We recognize “that the overwhelming majority of police officers do an incredibly hard and dangerous job fairly and professionally,” but we “also know that centuries of racial discrimination … didn’t just stop with the end of lawful discrimination.” Racial discrimination affected entire police departments. “Whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently, so that if you’re Black you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested.”64
One of the reasons for these inequities, the president remarked, was ingrained racial bias and often a racism that was not the result of some “bad apples,” but has become institutionalized within whole police systems for entirely understandable reasons. “We ask police to do too much and we ask too little of ourselves… . We allow poverty to fester… . We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs.”65
All that said, the police had to understand the legitimate reasons for the grievances against them by BLM and other protestors. “With an open heart, police departments will acknowledge that, just like the rest of us, they are not perfect.” “We need to do what we can, without putting officers’ lives at risk, but do better to prevent another life like [Philando Castile’s], from being lost. My faith tells me that the five slain officers “did not die in vain,” he concluded. Later, he referred to himself as “Mr. Hope.”66
Although short (about fifteen minutes) compared to his other speeches on race, Obama’s remarks in Dallas were one of the most important of his presidency on racial relations. Like the others, his memorial to the five slain police officers was sympathetic in terms of appreciating the causes and aftermath of the Sterling and Castile shootings. His ultimate point, however, was the need of the police to be more aware of the racial biases that still existed in the criminal justice system. He did so, moreover, before an audience that expected a less critical view of police officers and police departments.67
Of all the problems confronting the president both at home and abroad during the last months of his administration, however, he found none more serious or infuriating than continued congressional opposition from Republicans determined to deny him any significant legislative achievements during an election year. Despite polls showing the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, holding a wide lead over the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, the Republicans still anticipated holding onto Congress and banked on the possibility of taking back the White House from the Democrats. Republican opposition to Obama reached such a point that when Justice Scalia died suddenly of a heart attack in April, Senate Majority Leader McConnell prevented Obama from appointing Scalia’s replacement.
Before the Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015, the president was able to appoint 323 moderates and liberals to the federal judiciary, including 268 in district courts and 55 in the courts of appeal. Even so, Republicans were able to filibuster a number of his other appointees. Once they took charge of the upper chamber, they voted to confirm only twenty-two of the president’s nominees, the lowest since 1951–1952.68
A similar story happened with Obama’s appointees to the Supreme Court. Before the Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015, the president was able to name two liberal justices to the court: Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic American to be appointed to the nation’s highest judicial body, who replaced David Souter, and Elena Hagan, a former dean of the Harvard Law School, who replaced John Paul Stevens. Together with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, they made up the moderate-to-liberal wing of the court. Before he died, Scalia and four other justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Anthony Kennedy made up the court’s conservative wing, although Kennedy often became a swing vote, joining with the liberal justices in cases involving gay rights, abortion, and limits on the death penalty. Decisions on most other major cases split along ideological lines, with the conservative wing winning on 5 to 4 votes. 69
With reports that Kennedy might be stepping down in the near future, McConnell remained determined not to allow the president to select Scalia’s replacement. Hoping for a Republican victory in 2016, he was bent on solidifying conservative domination of the court by replacing Scalia with another conservative and replacing Kennedy with a more reliable conservative after he announced he was retiring. So when the president named Garland as Scalia’s replacement, the majority leader was determined to block the appointment.70
Under normal circumstances Garland might have had an easy time filling Scalia’s seat. A graduate of Harvard Law School and chief judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Garland was widely considered a moderate who had, in the past, been praised by influential Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch (UT). Only hours after Scalia’s death, however, McConnell declared any appointment by the president null and void, maintaining that in a presidential election year, the new president should make the nomination.71
The majority leader refused even to allow the Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing on Garland’s nomination. He said later that one of his “proudest moments” was when “I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’ ” The Democrats were outraged by McConnell’s action, but, being in the minority, there was little they could do. The fact that there would be a Supreme Court opening to be filled by the next president motivated conservatives more than liberals to come to the polls in November.72
The 2016 Presidential Election
The presidential election of 2016 was one of the great upsets in modern American history. Going into election day, Clinton led Trump in almost every national poll and in polls in most “swing” states. When the votes were counted on November 8, however, Trump beat Clinton soundly in the electoral college, winning 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227 even though Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes (65.85 million to Trump’s 62.82 million). The president-elect won by carrying every swing state, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which usually voted Democratic. Historians will debate for years the reasons why Clinton lost, but among the most prominent causes seemed to have been Clinton’s unpopularity as a candidate and the mistakes she made during the campaign, such as her failure to visit the swing states in the Midwest, the nationalist and anti-immigrant campaign that Trump ran, Russian interference in the campaign, and the hope that Trump might break the gridlock that existed in the nation’s capital. His slogan, “Make America Great Again,” captured much of the public sentiment in the nation.73
Trump’s election shocked Obama, just as it did much of the nation. During the long primary season, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), a backbencher who voted with the Democrats even though he registered as an independent before declaring himself a Democrat in order to run against Clinton, surprised most pundits by running a close second to the presumptive Democratic nominee, beating her in a number of states. Not until July 12, just two weeks before she won the nomination in Philadelphia, did he endorse the former secretary of state.74
In a video clip from October, the president allegedly told Clinton’s running mate, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), that he thought Trump was a “fascist.” Clinton said later that she never heard the president use the term “fascist,” but she did not doubt the president felt Trump had the characteristics of a fascist, and she agreed with him.75
In his fifty-minute address before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 27, interrupted repeatedly with applause and chants from the floor in which the delegates shouted out, “Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!” and “Yes We Can! Yes We Can! Yes We Can!” Obama first reminded the national audience listening to him of his administration’s accomplishments while he was in office. “By so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than ever,” he remarked. While he was not modest in taking credit for these achievements, he also attributed them to the hard work of the American people and reminded his audience of the work that still needed to be done: “more work for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, or paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty … for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.”76
Not surprisingly, most of the rest of his message was a ringing endorsement of Clinton and a harsh attack on Trump. What was surprising was how personal his remarks were. In both 2008 and 2012, Obama’s comments were directed at his opponents’ policies, not their personal characteristics. In 2008, he praised John McCain for his heroism during the Vietnam War, and in 2012 he had kind words to say about Mitt Romney’s health legislation as Massachusetts’ governor. But in 2016, the outgoing president did not mince words about Trump, whom he called “a self-declared savior,” who has left a “trail of lawsuits, and unpaid workers, and people feeling like they got cheated.” “He cozies up to Putin, praises Saddam Hussein, tells our NATO allies that stood by our side after 9/11 that they have to pay up if they want our protection,” he continued. He just offers slogans and cheers. “Ronald Reagan called America ‘a shining city on a hill.’ Donald Trump calls it ‘a divided crime scene’ that only he can fix.”77
The contrast between Trump and Clinton could not be sharper. Hillary “knows that this is a big, diverse country. She has seen it… . Hillary knows we can work through racial divides in this country… . Hillary knows we can insist on a lawful and orderly immigration system, while still seeing striving students and their toiling parents as loving families, not criminals or rapists… . It can be frustrating this business of democracy. Trust me I know it,” he added. “Hillary knows, too.”78
Michelle Obama also addressed the gathering. “When they go low, we go high,” she said, clearly referring to Trump and the Republican Party that just nominated him. “We fight to give everyone a chance.” “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again,” she concluded. “Because this right now is the greatest country on earth.”79
Both the Democrats and Republicans had decided to hold their conventions in July, so as not to interference with the summer Olympics that began in Rio de Janeiro in August. Both gatherings gave their candidates a boost in the polls. The Republicans held their convention in Cleveland from July 18 to July 21, the Democrats in Philadelphia from July 25 to 28. When Trump gave his acceptance speech, it attracted a larger audience than Clinton’s a week later, but for the other days, the Democrats attracted a larger audience than their rivals’ gathering, and the boost of 7 to 8 percent in the polls coming out of Philadelphia for the Clinton-Kaine ticket overshadowed the temporary 3 to 4 percent gain for the ticket of Trump and his running mate, Governor Mike Pence (IN). While Trump’s address was not well received by those watching it, Clinton’s message drew a favorable response. The Democrats also left their convention more united than the Republicans, many of whose elected officials, including Governor John Kasich (OH), did not even attend the convention, even though his state was hosting it.80
By the time of the conventions, Obama’s ranking in the polls had improved markedly. In one poll, 51 percent of the voters approved of his performance as president. Before the campaign was over, it rose to 58 percent. While some of his critics remained disenchanted with him, others began to write favorably. In a column that received considerable national attention, the conservative columnist for the New York Times, David Brooks, said that he would “miss Obama” when he left office. The president “radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him,” the columnist concluded while singling out Trump for lacking these same qualities.81
Following the convention, Obama went to Martha’s Vineyard, where he vacationed each August since becoming president. At the summer White House, he combined vacation, official duties, raising money for Clinton, and strategizing for the campaign that lay ahead. His role in the campaign was to concentrate on getting Blacks, Hispanics, and young people to vote in November. His duties as president limited how active he could be in the campaign.82
On September 13, the president made his first campaign appearance in Philadelphia. Before a large and rollicking crowd, he spoke for forty minutes describing Trump as “a phony champion of the working class,” and a dangerous charlatan, while extolling Clinton’s qualifications to be president. He seemed most energized when calling out the Republican candidate. “This is not me just going through the motions here,” he said. “I really, really, really want to elect Hillary Clinton.” He also ridiculed Trump for his admiration of Putin. “Could you imagine Ronald Reagan idolizing somebody like that?” he asked.83
A few days later, he addressed a dinner of the Black Caucus in what one commentator called “his most passionate speech EVER.” “All the progress we’ve made is at stake in this election,” the president stated. “My name might not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot. Tolerance is on the ballot. Democracy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot… . I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election,” he concluded.84
Obama remained relentless in his attacks on Trump. When, in October, it looked like Clinton was going to win easily over her Republican opponent, and he began to complain that the presidential election was being rigged against him, the president told Trump to “stop whining.” At a White House news conference, he said, “I have never seen in my lifetime, or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have ever taken place.” And winding up the campaign at a huge rally for Clinton in Philadelphia on November 8, he commented, “I’m betting that America will reject a politics of resentment and a politics of blame. I’m betting that tomorrow, you will reject fear, and you will choose hope. I’m betting that the wisdom, decency, and generosity of the American people will once again win the day.”85
Obama lost the bet when, on November 8, voters elected Trump to succeed him even though Clinton won the popular vote. The Republican candidate won by about 44,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 11,000 in Michigan, and 23,000 in Wisconsin. The difference of about 78,000 votes in those states could have changed the outcome of the election. Although the reasons for Clinton’s defeat are complex, one thing is clear. Had the same number of those who voted for Obama in 2012 cast their ballots for Clinton in 2016, she would have won the electoral college as well as the popular vote. Obama’s legacy would have been secure. No wonder that Michelle Obama blamed the Democratic defeat on those nonvoters in 2016.86
According to his national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, the president “went through stages” following the election. His immediate instinct was to try to lift the spirits of his staff who were trying to comfort each other about the totally unexpected outcome of the day before. Interrupting a senior staff meeting in the office of his chief of staff, Dennis McDonough, he told them how proud he was of what they had accomplished serving in the White House and the bright futures they had ahead of them.87
That afternoon, he and Vice President Biden appeared in the Rose Garden to reassure the nation that Trump’s victory was part of the natural ebb and flow of politics in a democracy and that he remained optimistic about the future. He had called Trump at 3:30 a.m. to congratulate him on his victory and to make clear he would help him in the transition to a new government in any way he could, just as his predecessor, President Bush, had been gracious and helpful in his own transition to the White House. “Now, it’s no secret that the president-elect and I have some pretty significant differences,” he said. “But remember, eight years ago President Bush and I had some pretty significant differences… . And one thing you realize quickly on this job is that the presidency and the vice presidency is bigger than any of us.” The president also stated that Trump’s victory speech indicated that he wanted what was best for the nation. “I was heartened by that,” he remarked.88
The president said much the same things the next day after meeting with the president-elect and at a wide-ranging press conference he held on November 14 before he left on a trip to Germany, Greece, and Peru to attend a meeting with leaders of other Pacific Rim countries. Between the election and his press conference, one of Trump’s spokesmen announced that the ultranationalist, Steve Bannon, would be playing a prominent role as a senior adviser to the new president. When asked at the news conference whether, in light of the Bannon announcement, Obama still thought Trump was qualified to be president, he hedged his bet a little. “Donald Trump will be the next President,” he remarked. “And it will be up to him to set up a team that he thinks will serve him well.”89
Despite trying to portray Trump’s election in the best possible light, he regarded it as a personal repudiation, which, he feared, endangered his entire legacy as president. In a postelection analysis of the election, Rhodes placed much of the responsibility for Clinton’s defeat on Russian interference in the election, including the Trump campaign’s collaboration with the disgraced former CIA intelligence officer, Julian Assange, who stole, and released to the public, highly classified documents before fleeing the country. Among the things the Russians did was to give Assange emails they had hacked from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) making clear that its chairman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL), had showed favoritism for the Clinton campaign. In this way, the Russians hoped to sow discord among the Democratic rank-and-file.90
The president refused to speak out against Russian interference because he did not want to look as if he were interfering in the election on behalf of Clinton, but he was concerned enough that he confronted Putin on the issue during a G20 summit in China. He ordered the FBI to investigate Russian interference in the election. Within the White House, he also conducted a separate, high-level investigation into Russian meddling, which later issued its own report condemning the Russian activity, and recommending sanctions against Russia, including expelling thirty-five Russian officials identified as being spies and shutting down two Russian properties suspected of being involved in undermining the 2016 elections. A report of the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in 2020, however, that Obama’s response to Russian meddling in 2016 had been flawed. “Frozen by ‘paralysis of analysis,’ ” was its major finding.91
Obama’s trip to Europe and Peru was mostly for official business, but he also intended it to be a “farewell visit” before his presidency ended. In Berlin, he met with leaders of Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and Spain. He also made a separate trip to Greece, where he visited the Acropolis and other historic sites and met with its leader, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. In his meetings with the European leaders, he tried to reassure them that Washington’s commitment to NATO and its European allies would remain strong, amid increasing concerns that Trump would reverse his policies on everything from security to global warming. The announcement of the president-elect’s intention to appoint Bannon as a senior adviser, his comments calling climate change, “a hoax,” and his appointment of Myron Ebell, a well-known climate change denier, to head his EPA transition team alarmed Europe’s leaders.92
In an address from Athens, the president recalled that ancient Athens gave birth to the first form of democracy. Down to the present, the flames of democracy have “never died,” the president continued. “As you may have noticed, the next American President and I could not be more different. We have very different points of view, but American democracy is bigger than any one person… . Progress follows a winding path … but as long we retain our faith in democracy … our future will be okay.”93
In Germany, the president held a press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel, with whom he had forged a close working relationship, including five earlier meetings with her. When asked about Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether he thought Trump would support strong sanctions against Moscow, he was more circumspect in his reply than earlier. “I don’t expect that the president-elect will follow exactly our blueprint or our approach,” he stated, “but my hope is that he does not simply take a realpolitik approach and suggest that if we just cut some deals with Russia, even if it hurts some people,” matters will be fine. “I am encouraged by the President-elect’s insistence that NATO is a commitment that does not change.”94
In Lima, Peru, Obama met with leaders of twenty other Pacific Rim countries at the annual meeting of APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Countries). As he had stressed in Europe, he emphasized to the APEC leaders the benefits of globalization and free trade. For him, the issue was not about choosing between protectionism and free trade, but about making “sure that the benefits of the global economy [were] shared by more people and that the negative impacts, such as economic inequalities, [were] addressed by all nations.” Implicit in his message was a rejection of Trump’s announced intention to reject most international agreements, including even the Paris Agreement on climate change and the TPP, which had been a cornerstone of Obama’s shift from the Middle East toward South Asia, and which, he hoped, would be confirmed by the APEC meeting.95
The meeting proved to be a bitter disappointment for the president. He failed to get the confirmation he wanted. In truth, the TPP was probably doomed even before Trump’s election. Many of the countries that agreed to the TPP were overwhelmed by the size and strength of China’s economy and concluded that their best hope for economic prosperity was to strengthen their ties with China rather than to challenge it economically by tying their futures to the politics and whims of the United States. Among these states were Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines whose interests in the South China Sea were being challenged by Beijing, but they also included Australia, which wanted to establish a Chinese-led trade pact that would include Asian countries from Japan to India but not the United States.96
Clinton’s defeat in November, which many of the leaders at APEC interpreted as a repudiation of the president, made him appear as merely a figurehead, whose presence was overshadowed by those of Chinese president Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Even his arrival in Lima was greeted by five thousand anti-TPP protestors, while Putin, who was widely admired in South America, was welcomed by large, cheering crowds. At the APEC meeting, the members formally rejected the TPP. Its defeat represented a major victory for China, leaving an enormous power vacuum in the Pacific, which it intended to fill.97
Disappointed once again, Obama returned to Washington to complete the last two months of his administration. By this time, the coalition of forces the president had put together from more than sixty countries to fight ISIS had slowly rolled back the terrorist organization, reclaiming over 30 percent of the territory it had occupied in Iraq and 30 percent it had claimed in Syria. Plans were already underway to push the remaining ISIS forces in Syria back to Raqqa and then to retake the city in what was expected to be costly house-to-house fighting. Preparations were even more advanced for retaking Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, whose occupation by ISIS posed a threat to Baghdad, 250 miles to the south.98
On January 10, 2017, the president delivered a “Farewell Address” to the American people. Instead of delivering it from Washington, DC, as his predecessors had done, he decided to give it to a packed audience at McCormick Place, a huge convention center on Lake Michigan, only a few miles from Grant Park, where in 2008, he had delivered his victory speech before an audience estimated at 250,000. Intending his farewell to be a major address, akin to George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796, he began to prepare the speech, most of which he wrote himself, at the beginning of January. He continued to work on it, even on the flight from the nation’s capital to Chicago.99
Obama’s valedictory combined nostalgia about his political career going back to his first job as a community organizer in his adopted city of Chicago with his hopes about the future. Many of his remarks were similar to ones he had made throughout his presidency, including the importance of early education for underprivileged children, the need for retraining workers displaced from their jobs because of new technology, and the ongoing problems of economic and racial inequality. Another point he made was how automation threatened to divide the nation, creating inequality that was the principal driver of cynicism and polarization. As he had done throughout his presidency, he emphasized the importance of a nation built on an expansive and inclusive middle class. For all “the real progress” made during his two terms in office, he said, “we know it’s not enough. Our economy doesn’t work as well or grow as fast when a few prosper at the expense of a growing middle class, and ladders for folks who want to get into the middle class.”100
The heart of his address was his comments about the fragility of democracy and the need of all Americans to protect and strengthen its core principles. While mentioning President-Elect Trump by name only once at the beginning of his speech and remarking at its conclusion that he was “even more optimistic about this country than when we started,” he was clearly concerned about the nation’s future under Trump’s leadership. “Our Founders argued, they quarreled, eventually they compromised… . But they knew that democracy does require a basic sense of solidarity,” he emphasized. “We weaken the ties of democracy when we allow our political dialogue to become so corrosive that people of good character aren’t even willing to enter into public service: so coarse with rancor that Americans with whom we disagree are seen not just as misguided but as malevolent.”101
On January 18, just two days before his term ended, Obama gave a final presidential press conference. Among the points he covered was his decision to pardon Chelsea Manning, a former army private who was serving a thirty-five-year sentence for leaking hundreds of thousands of military incident logs, which described the abuse of detainees and an increase in civilian deaths during the Iraq war, and his decision not to veto a UN Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements on the West Bank.102
The outgoing president also took swipes at the president-elect for his stated intention to ease sanctions against Russia in exchange for cutbacks in its nuclear weapons program and his claims of “fake news.” The sanctions were imposed on Russia, he said, because of its encroachments on Ukraine independence, not because of its nuclear weapons, and he defended the White House press corps with whom he had often been at odds, even taking issue with proposals being floated by the incoming administration to move the daily briefings and reporters’ workspaces out of the White House and to change other White House press traditions. “I have enjoyed working with you,” he said to the reporters in the press room. “Having you in this building has made this workplace better.”103
While also acknowledging the importance of debating different points of view, he distinguished between that and positions that challenged the nation’s core values, such as by challenging the free press, setting up barriers to keep people from being able to vote, and rounding up “kids who have grown up here and for all practical purposes are American kids.” Reports of widespread voter fraud, he stated, were, indeed, “fake news.” Finally, he made clear that while he intended to remove himself from the political arena, he was fully prepared to reenter the political fray if he thought the nation’s “core values were being challenged.”104
Obama’s farewell address and final press conference were a fitting end to his entire presidency. Future historians and Obama biographers will evaluate his place among US presidents. Presidential historians have regarded only three presidents as being “great presidents”: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. What all three presidents had in common was that: (1) they led the country through three of its most critical times, when the nation’s very future was at risk; (2) absent their unique leadership skills, the country might not have survived in its present form; and (3) as a result of their leadership, the nation emerged more united and stronger than when they first assumed office. They were both consequential and transformational.
Other presidents who received high marks for their leadership have been consequential and transformational, except during less perilous times. Much to the chagrin of President Clinton, Obama referred to Ronald Reagan as a transformational president even though he was at odds with most of his policies. Whether Obama will be regarded in that way remains to be seen, but there is little doubt he was a consequential one, taking office during a major economic crisis at home and a failing war in Iraq abroad, and ending it with rising racial tensions and an obstructionist Congress at home, climate change worldwide, and China’s emergence as a superpower in Asia. How he responded to each of these issues was consequential. His election as the first African American president was also as significant as John F. Kennedy’s election as the first Catholic president. Passage of the ACA changed the dialogue over health care so that the question became not whether the federal government had the obligation to provide health care for most Americans but to what extent and in what form. His support of the LGBT movement and of gay marriage was also consequential if not transformational. However historians and others may rank Obama among the nation’s presidents, he will not be relegated to the ash heap of failed and inconsequential presidents.
This biography of the forty-fourth president also provides ample reason to believe that he will rank alongside Truman and Eisenhower as one who did more to improving the lives of most Americans than any other post–World War II presidents. He did so, moreover, while managing to maintain the United States as the pillar power of the world, notwithstanding mistakes he may have made, especially in terms of his misunderstanding of the Arab Spring beginning in 2010, his intervention in Libya, and his questionable response to the Syrian Civil War. He did so through a mixture of conservatism, pragmatism, and progressivism.
This alchemy was shaped by his own experience as a multiracial child who was abandoned by his father at a young age, raised as a young boy by a single parent who was often away from him, grew up in a multiethnic society, had an Indonesian stepfather and a multiethnic half sister, was educated briefly in a Muslim school, was taunted when he was living in Indonesia because of his mixed race, and was brought up as an adolescent by loving and supportive, but white, grandparents.
His education at a highly competitive private school, and his two years as a student at Occidental College also played an important role in shaping his political outlook. The same can be said about his experience at a more mixed, but much larger, Ivy League university, where he read deeply about race and political theory and came finally to identify himself as Black. His experience as community organizer in Chicago was also formative.
So were his years as a law student at Harvard Law School, where he studied constitutional law with Lawrence Tribe, one of the nation’s leading authorities on the Constitution, who regarded him as one of his two best students, and his election as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, which gave him his first national exposure.
As Obama later recalled, his experience as a community organizer convinced him of the importance of local organization and participation in bringing about needed change. It also persuaded him about the need to go to a leading law school to learn the intricacies of the law and make the political connections he considered necessary to make change happen. His decision during law school to forgo a highly desirable clerkship, perhaps for a Supreme Court justice, in favor of an internship with a prominent Chicago law firm indicated that his interests were not in making money as a future partner in a leading Wall Street law firm but being politically active in Chicago. The same was true about his decision after law school to decline a position with the Chicago law firm where he had been a summer intern and where he met his future wife, Michelle Robinson, in favor of accepting a position with a smaller firm, whose specialty was defending clients involved in civil rights cases. At the same time, he taught constitutional law and a course on race theory as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
Exactly when Obama decided to seek elective political office is not clear, but by the time he decided to run for the Illinois state senate in 1995, he had made important political connections, including with retired senator Paul Simon, who was so impressed by this young and obviously talented African American that he encouraged him to run for office. Alice J. Palmer, the incumbent senator whom he sought to replace after she decided to run for Congress, endorsed him for her seat. During his campaign, he proved how determined and ruthless he could be when he declined to withdraw from the race even though Palmer, who lost her congressional bid, asked Obama to withdraw so she could run again for her seat, and then successfully challenged the number of signatures on Palmer’s petitions and those of his three other Democratic opponents seeking the safe Democratic seat. As a result, he ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, assuring his victory in November.
Even as a state senator, Obama had higher political ambitions, displaying political hubris when in 2000 he challenged the highly popular incumbent congressman, Bobby Rush, in his bid for reelection and was then thrashed at the polls. As state senator from 1996 to 2004, when he resigned after being elected to the United States Senate, he became known for his hardball political tactics, but compiled an impressive record of political accomplishments, especially after the Democrats gained control of the Senate following the 2000 census. The senator widened his political connections, meeting with local political officials and community leaders as he traveled throughout the rural, and heavily Republican, areas of southern Illinois. He also became friends with US Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) of Springfield, who introduced him to many of the individuals he met on his travels.
Although much of the rest of Obama’s political career came about as a result of his own talents and skills as a campaigner, luck also played an unusually strong role in his meteoric rise from such an obscure state senator in 2000 that he could not even get a ticket to be on the Democratic convention floor at its nominating gathering in Los Angeles, to being the keynote speaker at the convention in Boston four year later, and then the Democratic nominee in Denver and president-elect four years after that. Encouraged by Senator Durbin to join him in the Senate by running in 1994, he had the way cleared from him when, first, the incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald (R), announced that he would not run for a second term and his predecessor, Carol Moseley Braun (D), also said that she would not contest the race.
The state senator still faced an uphill fight in the Democratic primary against the favorite, Dan Hynes, but Hynes was so disgraced by a sex scandal that when the votes were counted in the primary, Obama defeated him by more than a two-to-one margin. Another sex scandal, this time involving his Republican opponent in the general election, Jack Ryan, who was running a strong campaign against him, forced Ryan to withdraw his candidacy.
Unable to find any important Republican to run against the Democrat, the Republican State Committee turned to an outsider, Alan Keyes (R-MD), who established legal residence in Illinois only three months before the election and whose radical views on such issues as abortion, and gun control all but assured his defeat. In 2004, Obama gained the largest statewide victory for any candidate in Illinois history.
Luck, talent, and his considerable reputation already among party professionals as a rising Democratic star led the presumptive Democratic nominee in 2004, Senator John Kerry, to ask him to deliver the keynote address that vaulted him into the national political scene and led him two years later to challenge Hillary Clinton, the favorite for the Democratic nomination in 2008. In what became a brutal seesaw campaign in which both sides resorted to nasty accusations against the other, the first-term senator’s skillful use of technology and his decision to campaign even in the smaller, historically Republican, mountain states of the West led to his nomination as the Democratic presidential nominee. Running as the candidate of hope against the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain (AZ), he outsmarted McCain in his response to the nation’s economic recession and, according to the polls, won the three debates against him, each one by a larger margin than the one before. In November, he was elected as the nation’s forty-fourth president, the news of which was greeted by outbursts of emotion throughout the nation, including the massive crowd of cheering and crying people gathered in Grant Park.
The problem that Obama faced from the time he became president-elect was that while Americans expected the incoming administration to institute a program of major progressive legislation shortly after he took office, that was never a possibility, in part because of Republican determination not to let it happen, but also because of the president himself. While his message as a candidate was one of hope and promise of change from the policies of the Bush administration, he never said it would happen during the first year of his administration or even during his term as president.
For Obama, progress was incremental, not linear. As a pragmatist as well as a progressive, he was willing to compromise in order to bring about change. Perhaps his greatest legacy as president was passage of the ACA, which was predicated on keeping the existing system of health care, including maintaining the private system of health insurance and loose regulation of the pharmaceutical industry. That measure disappointed those Americans who wanted a more significant program of national health insurance. It also angered other Americans who thought the act went too far in requiring that every American be insured or were opposed to any form of a national health program.
As an economic conservative as well as a pragmatist and a progressive, Obama sought to bring about change to the nation’s failed banking system, not by allowing the nation’s major banks to fail, as a number of liberal economists and spokesmen advocated, but by working closely with bank leaders to save the banks, albeit under tighter controls and regulations.
From the time Obama entered politics, he sought to reform existing institutions rather than uproot them. This was why so many of those who voted for him in 2008 and even in 2012 were disappointed by the outcome of his administration and turned in 2016, not to someone who was likely to carry on his legacy but to one who gave every sign, even as a candidate, that he was out to destroy it, but campaigning with the same message of hope Obama used in his two runs for the presidency: “Make America Great Again.”