In the early 2000s, a liberal in America had two go-to sources of televised relief from the presidency of George W. Bush. The first was the sanity-preserving satire of The Daily Show, and the second was the bittersweet escapism of The West Wing. I remember in the years right after college getting the DVDs of West Wing episodes in the mail in their red Netflix sleeves and watching President Bartlet and company wrestle with ethical dilemmas, take ideas seriously, and strive for decency, all of which were an appreciated break from the calamity unfolding in the real-world White House.
In the Trump era, somehow Jon Stewart is (thankfully) back at his desk, but there is no West Wing. I sometimes stream the show now like a podcast, background noise while doing chores around the house, and what I feel is nostalgia, not escapism. It’s nice to remember a time when Bartlet seemed like a plausible alternate timeline, but an escapist fantasy has to be somewhere in the vicinity of reality to work.
What we do have, in flashes, is the Obama presidency. Two stories in the past few days have highlighted the role those eight years play for many Americans today. First, and most obviously, the opening of Obama’s Presidential Center, which was a celebration of the hope and pride many Americans felt for their president and their country during those years. At least until we get past Trump, the center stands as a monument to what was, a reminder that not so long ago we were better than this.
The second is the Iran deal, such as it is, that Trump is trying to sell to America and to his own party. It joins the bibles, the steaks, the university, as another miserable product hawked by a shameless salesman. Every discussion of it demands comparison to the JCPOA, President Obama’s agreement with Iran that Trump denigrated and quickly tore up, which was far stronger. It turns out that competent, patient, and strong leadership delivers better results than impulsivity and ignorance.
So now, instead of looking to a fictional president for relief, we look backward to a past one — fittingly, one who both inspired and reflected The West Wing.
I’m not immune to that. The problem is that Bartlet was not a great president, and neither was Barack Obama.
Looking back at the show, what did President Bartlet accomplish? Eight years in office and not much changed. Typically, it was all his staff could do to maintain a steady course and handle the crises of the moment, and the show presented that as extraordinary achievement. Some of that is the demands of writing a contemporary political drama; any major accomplishment on Bartlet’s part would have pulled the show away from the reality it needed to track, and crises of the moment serve to fill in a twenty-two episode season.
But part of it is the low expectations of post-Cold War, end-of-history America. The dragons — existential threats abroad, national sins at home — had been slain or caged, and so the job of the presidency was stewardship: keep the trains running, put out fires, and make progress at the reasonable rate expected of an index fund.
And that was the moment Obama entered. A presidency is many things, but if you ask people today to list his signature accomplishments (apart from the extraordinary achievement of being the first black president), you’re likely to get:
- The Affordable Care Act
- Recovery from the Great Recession
- Killing Osama bin Laden
With honorable mention to the JCPOA, DACA, and the Paris Agreement.
Every one of those was a true accomplishment that took the work of talented, dedicated, and supremely competent public servants. The fact that Trump has systematically undermined them — pushing (thankfully, unsuccessfully) to repeal the ACA and ransacking the Department of Health and Human Services, using tariffs and a war of choice to drive the economy back to recession, starting a war that seems to have entrenched and emboldened the strongest anti-American power in the Middle East, withdrawing from the JCPOA and Paris Agreement, and of course waging war on America’s immigrants, is a tragedy.
Still, the standard for presidential greatness is higher, and in my view met by only two: Lincoln and FDR. These were presidencies that understood their moments and brought superhuman effort and a willingness to break convention to meeting them, in the process dramatically increasing American strength and defining new eras of the American story. By any measure, the Obama presidency did not approach that mark. In fact, it positively missed it: Obama came into office on the promise of Hope and Change, because that was what a directionless nation craved. The failure of an incremental, caretaker presidency to fulfill that promise contributed, in my view, to the migration of many voters to another figure who promised change. One might argue that it wasn’t Obama’s fault, but accepting the presidency means accepting blame.
I say all this as someone who was an early and devoted Obama supporter. I was an intern on his 2004 Senate campaign and hit the road to volunteer for his run in several states in 2008. I was also a federal prosecutor during his administration, and was glad to see his portrait and Eric Holder’s on the wall each morning when I got to work.
But, even in 2008 I wasn’t expecting greatness. I wrote:
For me, this election was not the search for a savior, but an experiment in this modest question: can a person of both intelligence and integrity win the White House? I don’t expect anything superhuman, just the common honesty, decency, and capability that one can find everywhere but politics, and especially the presidency.
Obama is a good, capable, and extraordinarily impressive man, and he easily cleared that bar. I sympathize with everyone who says “still my president,” casting their minds back to that hopeful time. But, particularly as some 2028 Democratic hopefuls want to appear Obama-esque, much as Obama himself appeared Kennedy-esque, let’s not allow nostalgia to crowd out vision. Let’s set our sights higher.