Barack Obama at Sixty

I don't think I can do justice to assessing former President Barack Obama's importance to America as he celebrates his sixtieth birthday today. Commentators with a literary superiority that I can never hope to attain, like Peniel Joseph, are better at that.  And, in fact, I think this one sentence from Joseph's essay about Obama on CNN's Web site sums it up: "Barack Obama's enduring power is his ability to allow us to imagine ourselves as a better country, society and people."

Obama's political legacy is problematic to assess, since most of it got wiped out by Donald Trump and President Biden is currently spending a lot of time trying to rebuild it.  But his cultural legacy is much easier to define, and Joseph's comment allows us to recall how Obama, as President and as an elder statesman, holds a mirror up to us and enables us to see what we Americans could be as opposed to what we have been and what we are. America was able to see itself as a decent country because of the grace, tolerance, and prudence Obama displayed as President, and he continues to project that sense of decency in his post-presidential work in trying to lift people up and make people more aware of the challenges we face.   Good thing, since America was not the decent country we imagine - nay, fantasize - ourselves being in not just Trump's time in the White House but in the seventeen months between Donald Trump's announcement of his presidential candidacy and the day he "upset" Hillary Clinton.  (And by the way, that upset was no surprise to those of us who knew that giving Hillary the Democratic presidential nomination was a big mistake.)  The 2016 campaign brought to the fore not just our political divisions but our cultural tribalism and our social vulgarity, and Obama's wisdom was the only thing that held us together . . . until January 20, 2017.

Four years, one pandemic, one insurrection and several voting-registration laws later, we need Obama's wisdom and guidance more than ever because, as someone who broke barriers and set new standards for American greatness (sorry, MAGA guys) even while continuing to speak out for brotherhood and social justice, Barack Obama is still an important contributor to our national discourse.