DISSENT: The Obamanauts
Former Obama campaign staffers like Joy Reid making waves in media…
Obama: An Oral History 2009–2017
by Brian Abrams
Little A, 2018, 526 pp.
West Winging It: An Un-presidential Memoir
by Pat Cunnane
Gallery Books, 2018, 320 pp.
Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward
by Valerie Jarrett
Viking, 2019, 320 pp.
Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House
by Alyssa Mastromonaco with Lauren Oyler
Twelve, 2017, 256 pp.
Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump
by Dan Pfeiffer
Twelve, 2018, 304 pp.
The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House
by Ben Rhodes
Random House, 2018, 480 pp.
We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama
ed. by E.J. Dionne Jr. and Joy-Ann Reid
Bloomsbury, 2017, 384 pp.
West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House
ed. by Gautam Raghavan
Penguin, 2018, 336 pp.
What is the defining achievement of Barack Obama? For a time, it seemed it would be his foreign policy: the Paris Agreement, diplomatic relations with Cuba, and getting Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program. When Trump got elected and those deals got undone, it seemed it would be the Affordable Care Act. But after plummeting for several years, the uninsured rate among adults has begun to creep back up. Obama did avert a second Great Depression, but history is not kind to averters: with time, what didn’t happen tends to get eclipsed by what did. And what did happen under Obama is a recovery that was slow and weak. Black homeownership rates, which took a major hit during the financial crisis, are the lowest they’ve ever been.
Maybe, then, Obama will be remembered for the fact of his election (though he and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett claim that getting a black man elected was nothing compared to getting the healthcare bill passed) and creating a brand of neoliberal multiculturalism for party elites to use and enjoy in years to come. Yet the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the failure of Kamala Harris to dominate the 2020 campaign threaten that inheritance. So perhaps Obama’s most important legacy will be one of productive disappointment: energizing a multiracial coalition of young voters whose subsequent disaffections with Obamaism and inclinations toward socialism are today remaking the left.
Since the 2016 election, many members of the Obama administration have written their memoirs in the hope of defining that legacy. In addition, more than a hundred men and women who worked in and around the White House have given their reminiscences to Brian Abrams, who has composed a remarkably fluid oral history of the Obama years. We’ve not yet heard from the man himself. While it’s not unprecedented for the president’s men and women to get the first word, the effect of his silence and their volubility is to decenter a presidency that, more than most, was centered on one man and his words. Obama had an uncanny ability to make sense of his place in history, to narrate what it was that he was doing. His politics had its limits, but they were often, and often knowingly, self-imposed. No matter how circumscribed the view, Obama managed to conjure a sense of what lay beyond it. With one exception, none of his people has that sense of time or place. They’re bound by a perimeter that is not of their making and that lies beyond their ken.
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Three writers wrestle with Obama's racial legacy
During both of Obama’s terms, and even before, a visible minority of black activists—some prominent, some not, and from different age groups—have criticized their president out loud when they felt their community slighted. They have been, and still are, disappointed because, they say, most of what they have gotten from him is shallow symbolism, while other constituency groups have gotten attention to specific, targeted policies. It seems like a long time ago since those days in 2008 when Barack Obama represented so much to so many, particularly those in the black, sometimes radicalized, grassroots: A new black history was visible, with new opportunities and new freedoms possible.
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