Obama returns to the DNC with a chance to rescue his legacy from Trump

Shortly before the 2016 election, President Barack Obama told supporters that he would consider it “a personal insult” if America chose a bombastic reality television star who trafficked in racist conspiracy theories and stood against everything that he had spent eight years building.

America did it anyway. “This stings,” Obama confessed afterward.

Four years later, Obama returns to the national stage Wednesday night seeking vindication. After watching President Donald Trump systematically demolish many of his achievements, Obama has almost as much at stake in this year’s campaign as his former vice president and his party’s 2020 presidential nominee, Joe Biden, does — a second chance to redeem his legacy and prove to history that Trump’s election was an anomaly, not a permanent repudiation.

On the line is not just the opportunity to restore programmes and international agreements that Trump abandoned and bolster those that remain threatened but also to rewrite the narrative about America and its values according to Obama. The storyline that Obama and his allies promoted for years was that his election as the first Black president and a leader of a new generation demonstrated a fundamental change in the country. Instead, he left behind a nation that, on some level at least, elevated his polar opposite.

“Each president kind of begets the next guy,” William Daley, who served as Obama’s White House chief of staff, said in an interview before Obama’s convention speech, to be delivered in front of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. “He’s got to clarify what about him didn’t beget this guy. Why did the eight years not change the country when we thought in ’08 things were different?”

This time around, Obama’s vehicle for validation happens to be the same man he gently eased aside for the Democratic nomination in 2016 in favor of Hillary Clinton, the woman Obama himself had defeated in 2008 by telling the country that she was a relic of the past. Many Democratic drinking sessions in the interim have been consumed by the what-if guessing game over what would have happened had Obama anointed Biden instead. It is an exercise the former president himself finds unproductive, according to advisers, and there are plenty of reasons to suspect that Biden would not have been able to overtake Clinton.

Still, it has left the 44th president addressing a Democratic convention he had never expected — not nominating Clinton for a second term but wrapping his arms around his vice president to present him as the antidote to Trump’s toxic brand of politics and, even at 77, the rightful heir to the Obama record.

“There is a deep belief by not just Obama, but many people who have worked for him, that we can recover from four years of Trump, but the damage from eight would be irreversible,” said Jen Psaki, who served as Obama’s White House communications director. “That urgency from Obama is powerful. He has also been pretty clear that he doesn’t see a Biden administration as a replication of his own as much as an opportunity to build on progress.”

While he had a 36-year record in the Senate before becoming vice president, Biden has focused far more on the eight he spent in the White House, ostentatiously cloaking himself in the former president’s mantle and citing his service to Obama as a way to appeal to liberals, younger voters and especially African Americans who helped him win key primaries.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, June 25, 2015.

Little wonder. Obama remains one of the most popular figures in American life. A new poll by Politico and Morning Consult found that 58% of Americans have a favourable view of the former president, the highest rating of any of the 28 political figures tested other than his wife, Michelle Obama, who topped him with 60%. Biden, by contrast, was seen favorably by 46% and Trump by 39%.

Even so, history has shown that presidents cannot always transfer their personal popularity to others, as Obama was reminded in 2016. And while he has deep affection for Biden, advisers said the former president harbors his own concerns about his former vice president’s chances this year. He had originally picked Biden as his running mate in 2008 as a governing partner, not as a putative successor, and he never groomed any younger figure to follow, leaving the party in 2016 with weathered leadership.

That has left many in his party anxious for him to play the bigger role that until lately he has resisted. Obama has been reluctant to fully engage with Trump or the campaign, only occasionally emerging from his Washington home where he is still writing his overdue memoir to take on the current president as he did energetically during the 2018 midterm elections and as he had begun to do this year.

“We have no moral voice today — no Martin Luther King, no Nelson Mandela, no John Lewis, no Eleanor Roosevelt,” said Susan Dunn, a presidential historian at Williams College. “Obama could retake that moral role — and not just reclaim his own legacy and not just denounce Trump for reversing all of Obama’s policies and achievements. He’d have to play a more active role in American life as a voice of moderation and decency.”

Obama’s determination to see Trump defeated may be even more powerful than his desire to elevate Biden. After all, Trump spent years peddling the lie that Obama might have been born in Africa and has spent much of his presidency unravelling whatever he could of Obama’s legacy. In recent months, the president has twisted the facts to accuse the former president of “spying” on his 2016 campaign and even suggested his predecessor had committed “treason,” a crime that carries the death penalty.

But Obama was not planning to dwell on that in his convention speech, veering away from personalising the confrontation between presidents, aides said Wednesday. Instead, they said, he planned to use his platform to validate Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California; assail Trump’s handling of the coronavirus and economy; and argue that democracy is on the line.

“For Obama, I think this moment isn’t about his legacy or specific policy differences,” said Chris Lu, who managed Obama’s first-term Cabinet. “It’s really about Trump’s repudiation of our common values as Americans and the assault on democratic norms and institutions.”

Obama is not likely to urge a return to the past when he was president but may instead seek to call on the country to move forward, advisers said. “I would guess that Obama is thinking less about what he has at stake in this speech than what he feels the country has at stake in the election,” said David Axelrod, a senior strategist on his two presidential campaigns. “He truly believes democracy as we know it is on the line, and I expect to hear that urgency.”

As for Trump, his fixation on Obama is as strategic as it is visceral, according to his own advisers, stemming from a need to chip away at his predecessor’s popularity and, in the process, disqualify Biden.

“I think the president sees Biden’s strongest card is that he worked for Obama,” said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax and a friend of Trump. “If Joe’s going to hang his hat on Obama’s record, then this president is going to show that Obama wasn’t as good as you thought.”

Obama and his team have spent some of the last four years asking where things went off track; wondering how a Black president could leave the country more racially polarised, according to polls, than it had been in years; and questioning their own understanding of his place in history.

In private conversations with aides after the 2016 election, Obama called Trump a “cartoon” figure but wondered whether they had misjudged the mood of the country and their own accomplishments. “What if we were wrong?” he asked one aide at the time. “Maybe we pushed too far. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

Some have second-guessed Obama’s failure to take more decisive action to counter Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election. Frustrated that Republican congressional leaders would not join him in a public warning, fearing that he would play into Trump’s hands and convinced that Clinton would win anyway, Obama left it to other administration officials to tell the public, and he waited until after the election to punish President Vladimir Putin with sanctions and diplomatic expulsions.

“Obama’s presidency lost a great deal of luster because of Trump’s surprise victory,” said David Greenberg, a presidential historian at Rutgers University. “Obama’s retreat from world leadership, which emboldened Putin, encouraged Russia to meddle in the 2016 election.”

A bipartisan Senate report released this week confirmed that Russia intervened in the 2016 election with the goal of helping elect Trump and that Trump’s campaign was willing to be helped, even if the special counsel, Robert Mueller, did not find enough evidence to allege a criminal conspiracy. Trump has rejected such conclusions, dismissing the Russia episode as a “hoax” drummed up by Democrats and “deep-state” actors to smear him.

For Obama, then, Wednesday was a point to move beyond that, to correct what he sees as the mistake of four years ago. The speech, of course, is just a speech — just one night out of 75 left until Nov 3. “What could salvage Obama’s legacy isn’t this speech,” said Greenberg, “but whether Biden wins.”

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