Obama Reconsidered

I can’t tell you that I got especially agitated about Barack Obama’s 60th birthday celebration on Martha’s Vineyard. The man has the right to throw a birthday party. 

And yet, Maureen Dowd did get especially agitated about it all because she saw a guest list limited largely to celebrities and lacking very much political gravitas. The political operatives who had run the Obama campaigns and even the Obama presidency were ultimately excluded, in favor of rank celebrities. 

Could it be, Dowd must have asked herself, that we were all duped by a character actor who was pretending to be presidential but who really preferred the company of Hollywood’s A listers. 

Yes, we could.

It’s hard to stop thinking about the over-the-top fete the former president held at his Martha’s Vineyard manse for his 60th birthday. It is such a perfect taxonomy of the Obama arc.

As president, he didn’t try hard enough on things we needed. He was a diffident debutante with a distaste for politics. Post-presidency, he is trying too hard on things we don’t need. The culture is already swimming in Netflix deals, celebrity worship, ostentatious displays of wealth, not to mention podcasts. Did the world really need “Renegades,” his duet with Bruce Springsteen?

We already knew Obama gravitated to stars but it was disillusioning to see it on such a grand scale last weekend.

“I think the nouveaux riches Obamas are seriously tone-deaf,” said the authority on opulence, André Leon Talley. “We all love Beyoncé. But people have so many things to worry about with Covid, voting rights, climate warming. People are afraid of being evicted from their homes. And the Obamas are in Marie-Antoinette, tacky, let-them-eat-cake mode. They need to remember their humble roots.”

Obama was a cool cat as a candidate in 2008, but after he won, he grew increasingly lofty. Now he’s so far above the ground, he doesn’t know what’s cool. You can’t be cool if you diss the people who took risks for you when you were a junior senator — only a few years out from paying off your student loans — taking on the fearsome Clinton machine.

For Dowd, the bloom is off the Obama rose. Could it be that she and so many other Obamaphiles were duped by a slick presentation and a lack of political substance. Clearly, it felt like a wizard of Oz moment, when those who love Obama got a peek behind the curtain.

And then there is Matt Taibbi, from Substack, who offers a similar assessment of the Obama birthday bash, in his own inimitable style.

A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball. Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.

This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.

So much for the great American, a man whose follower claimed him to be their Savior, their veritable Messiah:

Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper class status they crave: us.

Taibbi considers the Obama handling of the financial crisis to be a portrait of raw corruption:

I was relatively a booster of Obama in 2008, but once assigned to cover the financial crisis found myself stunned at choices he made, beginning with the appalling decision to invite still-employed Citigroup officials to run his economic transition. This move led to one of the more breathtakingly corrupt deals in modern presidential history, one the press gave almost a complete pass. I heard about it from a senior Democratic Party official, a great believer in Obama who was flabbergasted by the lack of press attention and still I think hopeful on some level that the King simply didn’t know what was going on at his court.

Obama hired his close friend and Harvard law classmate Michael Froman, a protege of former Bill Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, to run his economic transition team. Froman was a Citigroup executive who made $7.4 million at the company in 2008 and did not resign when he joined the transition team. This is significant because less than a month after Obama’s election, on November 23rd, 2008, a deal was struck to give a $306 billion bailout to Citigroup, a deal negotiated in significant part by Timothy Geithner, another former deputy to Rubin.

Some background is required to understand the full depth of the betrayal. Rubin, along with Clinton and former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, had been instrumental in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, a 1930s law which prohibited the merger of commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies. In the 1990s, that law ostensibly stood in the way of the Citigroup merger, which united Salomon Brothers, Citibank, and Travelers.

I say ostensibly because the Citi CEO Sanford Weill simply concluded the merger extralegally, thanks to what was essentially a Papal indulgence from Greenspan, who temporarily blessed the deal in 1998 pending congressional action. With a big push from Clinton, Rubin, and Froman (who was Rubin’s chief of staff from 1997-1999), and tangentially Geithner (who also worked under Rubin in the Clinton Treasury), the Glass-Steagall Act was finally repealed via the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which legalized the Citigroup merger post-factum.

Once the Citi merger went through, Rubin and Froman immediately went to work at the new super-bank. Rubin was paid CEO wages at $115 million per year for a job Citi itself described as having “no line responsibilities.” Nonetheless, Rubin did have a senior position at the bank, which by 2007 had accrued $43 billion in toxic mortgage assets, a major part of the reason the company eventually needed a bailout.

Sorry for all the detail, but it does matter. Unless you subscribe to Taibbi's Substack you will not be able to find it. Taibbi concludes:

Despite all of this, when Trump was elected I again talked myself into the idea that the Obama would end up looking pretty good someday, especially compared to his successor. I reasoned that one of the president’s most important jobs was to be a model in personal comportment, and Obama, for all of his profound political disappointments, had managed an extraordinary trick as the nation’s first black president. Forced to walk a constant media tightrope, in which it was demanded that he show the patriotism and strength to lead troops on the one hand, but also had to head off stereotypes about angry black men by never rising to the bait over monster provocations like Trump’s birther rants, Obama showed immense public discipline:

From a personality standpoint, Obama is everything Trump isn't. He's in control of his emotions, thick-skinned, self-aware, ingratiating, strategic, and temperamentally (if not politically) consistent. A striking quality of Obama as president is that he did his job without seeming to need to take credit for things all of the time, which kept the political price down on many of his decisions… To use a hokey sports metaphor, he did his job in the manner of an offensive lineman: the less you heard about him, the better he was probably doing.

As for the impact of Obama on American politics, we do not yet have a full rendering. Taibbi offers some perspective:

Trump won in 2016 because America preferred someone who was already a pig to someone merely on the way to being one. The country didn’t reach that level of cynicism on its own. Disillusionment has a cost, and Barack Obama transforming from symbol of hope and possibility to whatever he is now — to a shallow, conceited, Fat Elvis version of a neoliberal washout — has been a hell of a blow, whether America’s ready to admit it or not.