Chapter 11
The Postpresidency
When George Washington completed his second term as president in 1796, he returned to his residence at Mount Vernon and spent the rest of his life as a successful plantation owner and businessman. In doing so, he followed the eighteenth-century republican ideal of politically disinterested private citizens engaging briefly in public service before returning to private life. He also set a precedent for his successors.1
Over time, this conception of presidential power gave way to an entirely different one, in which former presidents became increasingly public figures and an “office of postpresident” (something never imagined by the founding founders) emerged, complete with generous pensions for ex-presidents and their wives, substantial office space, free postage, funds to hire a staff and maintain an office, and discretionary funds for the former presidents.
The office of postpresident also became big business. Former presidents made millions of dollars writing and promoting their memoirs and other books, going on the lecture circuit and commonly earning between $200,000 and $500,000 an appearance. Presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton served on corporate boards and made millions more in the form of stock options and investments in the businesses on whose boards they served.2
Former presidents lent their names and joined together to raise millions of dollars for disaster relief, the most recent example being in October 2017 when all five living presidents appeared together and helped raise $31 million for hurricane relief following a series of devastating hurricanes in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. Beginning with Jimmy Carter’s postpresidency, they also established their own foundations and become involved in international philanthropy.3
As a former president, Barack Obama has engaged in all these activities. What has separated him from other ex-presidents has been that as President Donald Trump has destroyed most of what he intended as his legacy, launched personal attacks on him, and, most important, threatened, in his opinion, the very fabric of American society, the former president felt it increasingly necessary to assume a more active political role than other recent ex-presidents or what he intended for himself.
Obama the Private and Increasingly Public Citizen
Although Obama was concerned about his legacy and the nation’s future under a Trump administration, he was happy to leave the White House after eight difficult years as president. As he made clear in his final press conference on January 17, 2017, he intended to spend the first months of his retirement reconnecting with his daughters and his wife.4
The former president and first lady had already signed lucrative book contracts with a major publishing house for an estimated $65 million in advances ($55 million for Barack and $10 million for Michelle), far greater than the estimated $15 million advance to Bill Clinton and a lesser amount to Hillary for their memoirs. Obama rented a new office not far from the White House and began to hire a staff. He and Michelle also purchased a nine-bedroom home in the exclusive Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, DC, also not far from the White House, so that Sasha could finish her final year at the Sidwell School, where she and Malia had attended while their father was in the White House. Malia had been accepted to Harvard University but decided to take a gap year to travel with her parents and do an internship with Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, working out of his New York office before he was exposed and sentenced to prison for multiple cases of sexual abuse and rape of women.5
According to his senior adviser and lifelong friend, Valerie Jarrett, and the White House communications director, Jennifer Psaki, the former president intended to remain politically active, working to ensure that Americans had access to affordable health care, dealing with the problem of gerrymandering, and speaking out on behalf of the Dreamers. He also planned to write his memoirs, be a mentor to the next generation of Democratic leaders, and keep open lines of communication with Trump. Most of these activities, however, would be behind-the-scenes.6
During the spring of 2017, he took advantage of his life as a private citizen by globe-trotting, playing golf, and engaging in such other recreational activities as sailing, water-skiing, and kite-surfing in the British Virgin Islands, where he was the guest of the British billionaire Richard Bronson. He also took long family vacations in the Tuscan countryside and river-rafting on the island of Bali. In May, he met with Prince Harry to discuss “a range of shared interest, including support for veterans, mental health, conservation, [and] empowering young people.” The same month, he gave a speech for a reported $400,000 for the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, and secluded himself to write his memoirs on the French Polynesian atoll of Tetiaroa, once the private island of Marlon Brando, to begin writing his memoir before being joined by Michelle.7
A month earlier, Obama had made his first public appearance since leaving office at the University of Chicago. Reflecting on his roots as a community organizer thirty years earlier, the former president encouraged students and young activists “to take their own crack at changing the world.” When he said in his keynote address in 2004 “that red states or blue states, they’re the United States of America, that was [an] aspirational comment,” he added, “but … it’s one that I still believe.”8
Having pointed in his remarks to the problem of gerrymandering, the former president asked his former attorney general, Eric Holder, to head a task force to address the issue in preparation for 2020, when states would be redrawing the boundaries of their legislative and congressional districts. A few weeks later, he and Michelle unveiled plans for the Obama Presidential Center in the Jackson Park neighborhood of the South Side. The focus of the center, Obama said, would not just be a presidential library but helping to train “the next generation of leadership, so that they can take up the torch and lead the process of change in the future.”9
The decision to build the center in Jackson Park stirred considerable controversy from the local community, which felt the project would disrupt the neighborhood. The community also wanted more input on its construction, including pledges that a large portion of the workers hired to build the center would be from the local neighborhood. Others criticized the former president for not building it in the more impoverished and distant part of the South Side, which had suffered severely as a result of the closing of steel mills that once had provided well-paying jobs. Because of the federal regulations on operating presidential libraries, the former president had to raise private funds, estimated at $1 billion, to build the center and to provide a partial endowment for its operation.10
Although Obama intended to follow the precedent of former presidents to keep their conflicts with their successors private, he became increasingly irked by Trump’s early acts and accusations as president, such as when he charged his predecessor with having, during the 2016 campaign, wiretapped the Trump Tower in Manhattan, the home and offices of Trump and his real estate organization. After a lengthy investigation, the Justice Department confirmed that there was no evidence to support the now president’s made-up charges.11
Eight months into his presidency, Trump also released the private letter that the outgoing president had written him just before leaving office. It had become customary in recent years for those leaving the White House to write a letter to their successors offering their thoughts and suggestions about their experiences as president. These letters were not normally released until near the end of their terms in office. They were intended to offer their support to the new president and to be turned to during trying times.
Instead, Trump leaked Obama’s letter to him. In it, the outgoing president warned his successor “to sustain the international order” and to be kind. Trump described the letter sarcastically as “long” and “complex,” although he also added that he found it “thoughtful” and appreciated the time the former president took to write it. According to Jennifer Psaki, now one of Obama’s staff members, the former president “was not happy,” by the leak of the letter. “He thought it was cheesy.”12
Although Obama still did not mention Trump by name, in September 2017 he criticized the president on Facebook for rescinding the Dreamers program (DACA) calling his decision “cruel.” Later he warned the Republican Party that its efforts to undo the ACA would cause “real suffering.” “If Republicans could put together a plan that is demonstrably better than the improvements we made to our health care system … I would gladly and publicly support it,” he stated. The former president also campaigned successfully for two Democratic candidates for governor in the off-year elections in November, Phil Murphy (NJ) and Ralph Northam (VA). He even reported for jury duty in Chicago but was not selected to serve.13
Following his speech to Cantor Fitzgerald in April, the former president made at least eight more speeches in 2017, collecting more than $1 million for three speeches he delivered at separate Wall Street firms. He also visited China, India, and France, where he met with all his former counterparts, but where his main purpose was to deliver speeches to a group of business organizations for undisclosed sums of money. In 2018, he and Michelle signed a deal with Netflix to produce a set of films and series for their new production company, Higher Grounds Productions.14
Coming under growing criticism, even from his progressive allies, for profiting on his status as a former president, Obama justified his speaking engagements by stating that he needed to raise money for his center and that his speaking engagements were “true to his values” and allowed him to contribute $2 million to jobs-training programs for low-income Chicago residents. After signing his agreement with Netflix, he issued a statement in which he remarked that by dealing “with issues of race and class, democracy and civil rights, and much more, we believe each of these productions will educate, connect and inspire us all.”15
On September 1, 2018, he delivered a eulogy at the funeral of his opponent in the 2008 presidential race, Senator John McCain. In his remarks, the former president took another indirect swipe at Trump, who had not been invited to the funeral, by denouncing self-aggrandizement in politics, remarking that McCain “understood that if we get in the habit of bending the truth to suit political expediency or party orthodoxy, our democracy will not work.”16
When the campaign for a new Congress and a number of governorships began in earnest soon thereafter, Obama lashed out directly at Trump. In a major speech at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, the former president broke with the normal deference paid by previous presidents to incumbents by calling Trump “a threat to our democracy.” “I’m here today,” he said, “because this is one of those pivotal moments when every one of us … needs to determine just who we are, what it is that we stand for. And as a fellow citizen, not as an ex-president … I’m here to deliver a simple message, and that is that you need to vote because our democracy depends on it.”17
Although the story of America has been one of progress, he continued, there has always been a “darker aspect” to America’s story, a backlash against change. “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years.” He even accused his successor of bigotry and racism, recalling when Trump, a month earlier, called right-wing sympathizers at a deadly rally, which a small group of Nazis held in Charlottesville Virginia, “good people” along with the counterprotesters. “We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination,” the former president said. “How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?”18
Despite Obama’s attacks on Trump, his real purpose was to get his young audience to vote in November.
Thus the thrust of his remarks was familiar and threefold: (1) a plea for mutual understanding even among those of opposing political views, (2) a call for bipartisanship in the legislative process, and (3) the importance of the November elections. He rejected the view of his more progressive friends that things in the country had gotten so bad that Democrats had to “fight fire with fire.” In his opinion, “the more cynical people are about government, and the angrier and more dispirited they are about the prospects for change, the more likely the powerful are able to maintain their power.”19
The importance of bipartisanship followed from the same logic. “We believe that in order to move this country forward, to actually solve problems and make people’s lives better, we need a well-functioning government,” Obama continued. “We need cooperation among people of different political persuasions. And to make that work, we have to restore our faith in government. We have to bring people together, not tear them apart.”20
Democracy worked and change was possible only if all eligible voters held to their principles and cast their ballots. As a cautionary note to young voters and others who might expect major change overnight, the former president repeated what he had said throughout his career about the incremental nature of change. “Better is good. That’s the history of progress in this country,” he noted. “Not perfect. Better.”21
Following his speech at the University of Illinois, the former president and Michelle hit the campaign trail. Using different versions of the same message he just delivered in Urbana-Champaign, Barack held campaign events with Democratic candidates in California, Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, two of which (Ohio and Pennsylvania) had voted for Trump in 2016. Michelle participated in registration rallies as part of “When We All Vote,” a nonpartisan group promoting voting in the 2018 election.22
In a record turnout in November for an off-year congressional election, the Democrats gained control of the House winning 40 seats from the Republicans. They also gained 7 governorships, 5 state legislative chambers, and 333 state legislative seats. More women and more Muslims won congressional seats than ever before. White suburbs throughout the nation that historically voted Republican cast their ballots for Democrats. The only disappointment for Democrats was that Republicans not only held onto the Senate, they gained two seats as four Democratic incumbents—Bill Nelson (FL), John Donnelly (IN), Claire McCaskill (MO), and Heidi Heitkamp (ND)—and two Republicans—Dean Heller (NV) and Martha McSally (AZ) were defeated in their bids to hold onto their seats. Although President Trump called the results of the 2018 elections “a tremendous success,” most commentators regarded them a major victory for the Democrats and a resounding defeat for the president that boded ill for his chances of being reelected in 2020.23
Obama since the 2018 Elections
In the two years between the congressional elections of 2018 and the election of former vice president Joe Biden as president of the United States, Barack Obama has remained active both privately and publicly. Privately he published in November his memoir, A Promised Land (2020). He and Michelle, whose own memoir, Becoming, was published in 2018 and became an instant best seller, have continued to make millions of dollars on the lecture circuit. With a fortune estimated as high as $40 million, the Obamas purchased a seven-thousand-square-foot mansion on Martha’s Vineyard. The former president has also contributed an undisclosed portion of his money to the construction and endowment of the Barack Obama Presidential Center, whose architectural plans call for the construction of a multistory presidential library, and smaller structures to house the Obama Presidential Museum and the Obama Foundation.24
Of Obama’s undertakings, none has interested him more than the Obama Foundation, which he established in 2014. Besides overseeing the establishment of the presidential center, the foundation sponsors a large array of programs. Reflecting his background as a community organizer, each of them is intended to promote local community organization and participation.25
Two of these programs are the Obama Foundation Scholars Program and My Brother’s Keeper (MBK). The Scholars Program brings to Chicago a small group of twenty-five to forty community organizers and civic innovators from around the world. At the foundation, they take a curriculum that combines academic, skill-based, and hands-on learning. In collaboration with the University of Chicago, they have the opportunity to receive a master’s degree focused on international development and policy. They are also able to participate in an initiative at Columbia University in which faculty and researchers from Columbia partner with governments, nonprofits, and other groups “to try to find solutions to real-world problems.”26
The purpose of the program is to provide the scholars “with the tools they need to make their efforts more effective, to identify innovative solutions to complex global problems, and promote change through values-based leadership.” Another is to establish close relationships among those in the program, who meet with Obama to discuss their work. While in the program, they receive a stipend and have all their expenses, including air travel, paid. Several groups of scholars have successfully completed the program and returned to their communities.27
As described earlier, MBK was a program based on Obama’s long-held belief that education and support beginning at an early age, were foundational to the success of minority children living in impoverished conditions. As he remarked in an interview on NPR in December 2016, the “only way we live up to America’s promise is if we value every single child, not just our own, and invest in every single child as if they’re our own.” Moved by the killing in 2012 of Treyvon Martin, he enlisted a group of businesspeople, clergy, athletes, and celebrities, to mentor and support young minority men.28
By improving life’s prospects for young men of color, through programs of local community activities and support, and funded in part by grants from the foundation and others from the private sector, MBK was intended to close the gaps in educational achievement and labor force participation between young men of color and young white men of the same ages.29
Although the former president never explicitly said so at the time he established MBK, he regarded the program as an alternative to Black Lives Matter (BLM), which, as we have seen, became a national movement following the death in 2014 of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In a statement in October 2015 following the conclusion of a White House forum on criminal justice, the president defended BLM, remarking that the protests were giving voice to problems happening only in African American communities.30
While Obama appreciated the fact, however, that BLM sought to end incidents of police brutality and killings through acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, he was concerned that the movement was unprepared to sit down with elected officials and find some common ground with these officials once they were ready to meet with the activists. BLM had a “responsibility to prepare an agenda that [was] achievable,” he told a group of BLM spokesmen whom he met at the White House. He also believed problems with the police were part of the larger problem of injustice in the criminal justice system, which required significant structural changes that could only take place over time. That is why he regarded MBK, with its long-term goals and gradual approach to change, a better alternative for the minority community than BLM.31
In May 2020, Obama issued a statement in strong support of BLM following the brutal killing by a police officer in Minneapolis, of George Floyd, while under arrest for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill. Videos of the incident showed the officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, causing his death by asphyxiation. Coming in the wake of other incidents of police killings of African Americans, Floyd’s death set off huge demonstrations throughout the United States and in Europe in support of BLM. “This shouldn’t be ‘normal’ in 2020 America,” the former president said in response to what happened in Minneapolis. “If we want our children to grow up in a nation that lives up to its highest ideals, we can and must do better.” 32
In an interview in November with the Washington Post opinion writer and MSNBC commentator, Jonathan Capehart, the former president strongly condemned the police for what he called Floyd’s “killing.” The interview with Capehart was part of a series of interviews he gave to promote A Promised Land. Afterward, Capehart commented on the memoirs. On issues of race, he said, what he found “especially refreshing” about A Promised Land was the former president’s “unsparing observations and honest assessments of race in America and on his administration… . Obama summed up the collective exasperation of Black Americans when he wrote that he ‘was frustrated with the constant need to soften for white folks’ benefit the blunt truths about race in America.’ ”33
Floyd’s death occurred in the midst of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that was sweeping the world and killing more than 120,000 victims in the United States by the end of July. It affected especially minorities living in poor neighborhoods and the elderly with preconditions such as diabetes or a history of pneumonia. Obama was incensed by Trump’s total lack of leadership in response to the pandemic and his total insensitivity to the BLM movement, even accusing peaceful protestors of being looters and vandals because of random cases of violence and business break-ins immediately following Floyd’s death. Calling for “law and order,” Trump threatened the use of force to suppress the demonstration. As for the coronavirus, Obama was furious that the president even refused to be a role model for the nation, such as by wearing a mask and social distancing. “More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge,” the former president said of Trump’s administration during an online commencement address in May to graduates of historically Black colleges and universities.34
“Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy—that’s how little kids think,” Obama added in a second online speech a week later for graduating US high school students. “Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way—which is why things are so screwed up.” In a telephone call leaked about the same time, the former president also described the US government’s coronavirus response “as an absolute chaotic disaster.”35
Intending to highlight Trump’s lack of leadership during a critical period for the nation, he announced in May his support for his former vice president, Joe Biden, as the next president of the United States. Despite calls for the former president to assume a more active role during the crowded Democratic primary season, which at several points threatened to divide the party into warring parties, he remained on the sidelines, refusing to endorse anyone even when it appeared that Senator Bernie Sanders, whose political views were to the left of his own, might get the nomination. Only after a strange twist of circumstances, including a strong endorsement by the Black majority leader of the House, James Clyburn, which led in March to Biden’s becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, did Obama publicly endorse him.36
Even then the former president waited a month before making his public endorsement. Behind the scenes, however, he worked the phones in an effort to get Sanders and the other Democratic candidates, who had not yet rallied behind Biden, to endorse him publicly. In the twelve-minute video he issued in April endorsing Biden, he had high praise for Sanders, calling him an “American original” and “a man who has devoted his life to giving voice to working people’s hopes, dreams and frustrations.”37
In the video that the Washington Post described as “part endorsement and part political blueprint,” Obama also called on Americans to have “a great awakening” behind Biden in November. Without mentioning Trump by name, he crafted his endorsement of Biden in a way that was also an attack on the incumbent. “Pandemics have a way of cutting through a lot of noise and spin to remind us of what is real, and what is important,” he remarked. “This crisis has reminded us that government matters. It’s reminded us that good government matters.”38
During the campaign, the former president made numerous stops on behalf of the Biden campaign, concentrating especially in Florida and Georgia, where he sought to get Blacks and other people of color to vote in November. Almost everywhere he went, he attacked Trump for his inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic, taking him to task, for example, for failing to have those attending White House events to mask or practice social distancing and saying that the president had “turned the White House into a hot zone” for the virus. At another campaign stop, he accused the president of being “jealous of COVID’s media coverage.”39
On November 3, Biden won a decisive victory over Trump gaining over 81 million popular votes and 306 electoral college votes to his opponent’s 74 million popular votes and 232 electoral college votes. Although he lost in Florida, he won a narrow, upset, victory in Georgia. How much Obama contributed to bringing out the state’s large Black vote is impossible to know. Certainly, Stacey Abrams, who lost narrowly in her 2018 bid to be Georgia’s first Black governor and the nation’s first Black female governor, was instrumental in organizing the Black community. But wherever he went, the highly popular former president attracted large crowds in parking lots, where wearing masks and social distancing were practiced and where the crowds responded repeatedly to his remarks by waving flags and banners and beeping their car horns.40
Still only fifty-nine years old as of December 2020, the former president can be expected to have one of the longest postpresidential careers in the nation’s history. Although he campaigned actively in Georgia after the November elections in support of the Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, in a special January 2021 runoff election for the state’s two US Senate seats, he can also be expected to devote much of his time to the work of his foundation. Likewise, he will continue to remain on the lecture circuit, complete his memoirs, write other books, and be involved with his production company, Higher Grounds Productions.41
How active Obama will remain in politics after January is harder to say, especially since President-Elect Biden has become the new leader of the Democratic Party and the former president’s desire since leaving office has been to withdraw from the political scene. Given his popularity and his other activities, however, it is hard to believe that he will be other than a major public figure, at least for the foreseeable future.