I, Obama: Our Insufferable Ex-President

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

When Barack Obama was elected president for the first time, I was still living in England. Had I been in the United States, and eligible to vote, I would not have voted for him. But I remember thinking nevertheless that it was a remarkable — even a beautiful — thing that, just over four decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the people of the United States had elevated a black citizen to the highest office in the land. Martin Luther King spoke of the Declaration of Independence as a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. That an African American could now be chosen to lead the federal government struck me as a solid indication that, at long last, that initial vow had been substantiated.

 

I still think that. Which is one reason, among many, why I regret that I cannot stand the man. Periodically, we are treated to a reasonable stretch of silence, and I begin to wonder whether I was unfair to him while he was in office. And then he comes back, says something profoundly irritating, and reminds me exactly why I was so irked by him in the first instance. Now, as then, when Obama speaks, I am left looking around in astonishment at other people, trying to determine whether they, too, can see that the whole edifice is a ball of hype and gamesmanship. You know what I’m talking about: that Apollonian affect — that studied, above-it-all mien, which, even when he was president, allowed him to engage in bare-knuckle politics while pretending that he was a detached, innocent bystander whose only concern was for the forgotten middle.

 

People often say that the primary problem with Barack Obama was that he was racially divisive. I’m not sure this is true. Certainly, he had his moments — the “acted stupidly” (about the police involved in the Henry Louis Gates incident) and “if I had a son” (about the Trayvon Martin shooting) mistakes among them — but, overall, I was never especially bothered by his record in that realm. Indeed, insofar as Obama discussed race, he did so in the same manner as do other elite progressives with whom I disagree. Sure, I don’t like it. But that isn’t a problem with him so much as a problem with the movement to which he belongs. America was not a racial paradise before Barack Obama came into office, and it is not a racial paradise now that he’s been out for a decade. If I were to compile an audit of the reasons why that is the case, the presidency of Barack Obama wouldn’t make the list.

 

No, the problem with Obama was that he was politically divisive — and in ways that were rendered particularly infuriating by the insistence of his acolytes that he was just a plucky technocratic moderate who wished devoutly to find compromise with the other side. Barack Obama was — and, indeed, Barack Obama is — no such thing. On the contrary: He is a committed ideologue and a partisan brawler who, by dint of his considerable talents, has worked out how to hide both of those traits from the average member of the public. Where Bill Clinton was a moderate (at least after 1994), Barack Obama merely played one on TV. He would posit “the one hand,” and then posit the “other,” and then, however objectively ludicrous the spatial characterization might be, place himself right in the middle of the dispute. When he meant “Democrats,” he’d say “democracy.” When he meant progressivism, he’d say “common sense.” Even when he was doing something self-evidently grotesque — suing nuns for declining to provide contraception, for example, or supporting abortion up to the moment of birth — he’d coat his position in six tubs of treacle. If you could see it, it was infuriating.

 

He’s still doing it. Having spent years opposing gerrymandering on the grounds that it had led to a status quo in which “our parties have moved further and further apart, and it’s harder and harder to find common ground,” Obama went all in on Virginia’s recent attempt to turn a 51–46 state into a state with ten Democratic representatives and one Republican representative. By trying to overturn the state’s constitutional prohibition on gerrymandering, he said in one of the many TV ads, radio spots, and mailers in which he appeared, Democrats in Virginia were simply trying to “stand up for our democracy.” And who couldn’t be for that?

 

A few days later, Obama weighed in on the news that an armed left-wing extremist had been prevented from killing people inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — including the president, the vice president, and members of his cabinet — by playing the humble observer. “Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner,” Obama wrote on X, “it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy.”

 

Which sounds nice, unless you understand that, by the time that post appeared, the would-be shooter’s manifesto had been published in its entirety by every news outlet in the country, and that it was abundantly, irrefutably, inescapably clear that the perpetrator had been engaged in political terrorism. The target, the manifesto confirmed, was “administration officials,” along with the “Secret Service,” “Hotel Security,” and “Capital Police” and “most everyone” else if they got in the way. Why? Because in his view, the administration is full of “criminals” and the president is a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” In some circumstances, “although we don’t yet have the details” is a virtuous and necessary prefatory statement. Here, it was hardball politics at its most cynical. Obama understood that, rightly or wrongly, his “side” would be blamed for the actions of the perpetrator. So he hastened to muddy the waters and to replace the specific actions of a specific man with the abstract concept of “violence.” It was irritating. And typical.

 

Much has been made in the press of the supposedly dramatic break between the Obama presidency and the Trump presidencies, but I don’t consider the two men to be as far apart as many others seem to. Often in American history, the voting public swings sharply away from the style of the exiting president and consciously chooses his polar opposite to replace him. Thus, at various points, have we moved from Woodrow Wilson to Warren Harding, from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter, from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, from George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton, and so forth. One might be tempted to include Obama and Trump in this list. But how different are they, really?

 

Both men were treated as celebrities by the public and the press, and as messianic figures by their boosters. Both men offered the country an us-vs.-them politics (Obama, famously, said that Mitt Romney was “not one of us”). Both men consciously centered attention on the executive branch, with Obama vowing that “where Congress won’t act, I will” and Trump suggesting that “I alone can fix it.” Both men were extraordinarily partisan, reflexively tribal, and wont to cast their opponents as an existential threat to the country. Both men relied on the tactic of “stray voltage” to distract the media from the administration’s core issues. Both men had a conception of what a “real American” looks like — in Obama’s case, the problem was people who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment”; in Trump’s, the problem is literally anyone who doesn’t like him — and they focused on those people to the exclusion of everybody else. The biggest difference I can detect is that Trump likes to display his ego, whereas Obama liked to disguise his. But badly disguised egomania is still egomania. Had it wished to, the American electorate could have responded to Barack Obama’s two terms by selecting Scott Walker or Martin O’Malley as his successor. They didn’t though, did they?

 

Which, ultimately, makes Barack Obama something of a tragic figure in American life. Without doubt, he has a lot going for him. He is intelligent. He is tall. He is attractive, albeit in an easily caricaturable sort of way. He has a lilting voice. Unlike Bill Clinton, he did not embarrass the country by carrying on with the interns; unlike Trump, he did not behave like a narcissistic lunatic while performing his official duties; and unlike Joe Biden, he did not spend half of his time in the White House decaying before the cameras. As a classically liberal conservative, I was never destined to approve of Obama’s politics. But I could plausibly have liked the guy.

 

I don’t. Meet the old boss. Same as the new boss.