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A key figure in the victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, former President Barack Obama will now have the ability to resize his place in the history of the US presidency. The publication of the first volume of Obama’s memoirs on the White House, “A Promised Land”, on the 17th, will highlight the subject, the object of his careful study.
It is rarely seen so clearly that history does not move in a straight line, but in a zigzag pattern, as in the wake of the Obama / Biden-Trump / Pence-Biden / Harris victories.
In November 2016, just days after Donald Trump’s surprising success, Obama gave his biographer David Remnick a long and thoughtful interview with “The New Yorker” magazine. He cited then-elected Senator Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, first on a list of people capable of carrying out the renewal of the Democratic Party.
New country icon
By his estimate, Barack Obama, the son of a black Kenyan and a white American woman of Irish descent, triumphed 20 years before the change in America’s demographic profile made it likely that a person with his multiracial heritage would occupy the White House. Chosen, he became an icon of the new country of the 21st century.
Obama was obsessively concerned with building and protecting a legacy, with being more than that icon. Asked in the interview, he estimated that, in eight years (2009-2017), he had completed 75% of his platform, and that Trump could destroy 15% of it.
You have correctly identified the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the law that makes health insurance accessible to low-income Americans, known as Obamacare, as the most likely target for demolition.
Obamacare was, yes, the main target of Trump and Trumpism. But not the only one by far. Since his debut in the White House, the Republican has dedicated himself to undoing the entire legacy built by Obama or with his participation: the nuclear agreement with Iran, the thaw with Cuba, the Paris Agreement. In this year’s campaign, he even spread the word that it was false news that an elite commando had killed terrorist Osama Bin Laden during his rival’s rule.
On the last Saturday of the 2020 campaign, October 31, Obama returned to the issue at rallies alongside Biden in Flint and Detroit, Michigan, in the heart of the de-industrialized and resentful United States that helped elect Trump in 2016. .
On the podium, the former president said that, ten years after starting the legislative and judicial battle against Obamacare, and amid a pandemic and the height of unemployment, Republicans had not yet presented an alternative for Americans to have health insurance.
Obama again toured the country reminding voters that, for eight years, Biden was always the last person in the Oval Office or Situation Room of the White House to hear before making a decision.
Barack Obama’s reputation for honesty, both personal and governmental, served as a Teflon that shielded Biden from suspicion raised by Trump’s corruption charges against Hunter Biden, the candidate’s son. Biden made values such as decency and honesty the essence of his message.
At the two rallies on Saturday, the only ones who ran this campaign together, Biden and Obama, who took off their masks just as they spoke to the crowd gathered at the drive-in, displayed a very different attitude to the toxic masculinity displayed by Trump. In his words and gestures, being a man means treating others with respect, taking care of your children, friends and community.
An appropriate image for someone who, in the Presidency, remained faithful to the discourse of national unity, of the country where blues (democrats) and reds (republicans) coexist in the space of democracy that is America. The speech that had brought him to the limelight at the Democratic National Convention in far 2004, before the era of extreme polarization and the Trump years. On January 20, the peacekeeping spirit returns to the White House.
