This review of Obama’s memoir shows how Obama came to see the obstructionism of the GOP as a reaction to the election of the first Black president and how it unleashed the racist beast. But he also sees something else that I think is extremely important: Trump is them and they are him. Does Biden see that too? God, I hope so:
The timeliest reflections, however, come when Obama delves into the politics of Washington, particularly the work he put into negotiations with Republicans like Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell and then House Speaker John Boehner. But that introspection also offers a window into how Obama saw the opposing party change from his 2008 campaign to when he handed over the White House to Trump in 2017
Obama writes that he “wonder(s) sometimes” about whether 2008 Republican nominee John McCain would still have picked Palin if he had known “her spectacular rise and her validation as a candidate would provide a template for future politicians, shifting his party’s center and the country’s politics overall in a direction he abhorred.””I’d like to think that given the chance to do it over again, he might have chosen differently,” Obama writes. “I believe he really did put his country first.”
Obama’s views of his successor come through clearest in his recounting of the period in 2011 when Trump was fanning the racist lie that Obama was not born in the United States.Trump’s antics were seen initially in the White House as a joke. But Obama writes he came to regard Trump’s media ubiquity and characteristic shamelessness as merely an exaggerated version of the Republican Party’s attempts to appeal to White Americans’ anxieties about the first Black president — a sentiment he said “had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center — an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology.Trump, who Obama said phoned the White House in 2010 to offer his assistance helping plug an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (he was turned down), had determined that saying or behaving in ways previously seen as distasteful or unacceptable now earned him constant media attention.
“In that sense, there wasn’t much difference between Trump and Boehner or McConnell. They, too, understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true,” he writes, adding: “In fact, the only difference between Trump’s style of politics and theirs was Trump’s lack of inhibition.“
When Obama, against the advice of his advisers, released his long-form birth certificate during an appearance in the White House briefing room, he said he told young staffers afterward: “We’re better than this.”
Obama’s views on the changing Republican Party are infused into all aspects of the book. When the former president writes about his trip to India in 2010, he links the themes of rising illiberalism in a conversation with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the rise of the Tea Party in the United States.
Domestically, too, Obama writes that the more confrontational Republican Party impacted some of the day-to-day decisions he made as president, especially when it came to dispatching then vice president Joe Biden, now the President-elect, to Capitol Hill to negotiate on his behalf.
“One of the reasons I’d chosen Joe to act as an intermediary — in addition to his Senate experience and legislative acumen — was my awareness that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do,” Obama writes.
Biden often made a hash of those negotiations, you’ll recall and Harry Reid was apoplectic at his intrusion into the 2011 budget talks. He “trusted” Mitch. Let’s hope good old Joe hasn’t forgotten the hard lessons they learned then and now. Republicans will not be his partners.
I’m glad to see that Obama recognizes that there is no daylight between Trump and the Republicans. And since Biden will no doubt be staffing his administration with many Obama veterans (Ron Klain is a superb choice to be the chief of staff) who are very well aware that the GOP has become a malignant, radical faction that they will have to work around.
Kevin McCarthy has reportedly said that the candidates who won house seats this cycle were those who clung to Trump not those who withdrew from him. Trump’s loss has not broken the fever. And that’s because it’s not about Trump. He’s just the living symbol of what they’ve been for a long, long time.