Opinion | Missing Barack Obama's Voice - The New York Times - 0 views
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Many progressives who came of age during the Obama presidency — myself among them — became disillusioned with its caution.
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Too many of us took for granted Mr. Obama’s uncanny ability to make sense of contrasting truths: the give and take of liberty and fairness in an economy; “the goodness of our nation” and its “original sin of slavery.”
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nd as Republicans blocked him in bad faith while inequality soared, we grew weary of his earnest civics of solidarity — the way he wove competing policy ideas into a narrative in which all of us were imperfect protagonists.
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But now we are older, and living through a deadly pandemic with a leader who embodies the antithesis of Mr. Obama’s empathy and rationality. Suddenly an Obama-style civics and the bipartisan-minded, competent technocrats of the Obama administration would be a godsend.
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Still, while the solutions devised by the technocrats Mr. Obama trusted may have been inadequate, he at least respected and relied on their expertise.
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I spoke to Mr. Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau, who in 2008 helped shape a message that excited both millennials and their more moderate parents.
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“On the Obama campaign,” he told me, “Every single day, every single speech we thought, ‘How do we make sure we are speaking to the anxieties people have about the economic inequality in this country while also speaking to the desires they have to pull ourselves together as one country, even though we disagree on a lot of things?’”
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“I don’t know if any of the 2020 Democratic candidates have effectively spoken to both of those anxieties.”
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Mr. Obama mastered a way of simultaneously validating people’s fears and anger while encouraging optimism and togetherness