Unlike other establishment figures, the former president isn’t scared to associate with the party’s left flank.
Barack Obama has been out of office for more than a decade and is prohibited by the Constitution from running for the presidency again. But he remains a central figure in the Democratic Party.
This is even though Obama’s ultimate legacy is still uncertain—far more than that of many ex-presidents. He made history as the first African American president, an achievement that owed much to his extraordinary charisma and political instincts. And he remains the only Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win a majority of the popular vote more than once.
But the fact that Obama was succeeded by Donald Trump has cast a shadow over the Democratic titan’s tenure. Further, Obama’s successors as party leaders have all failed. He helped clear the field for Hillary Clinton in 2016, which ended with Trump’s election. In 2020, he worked behind the scenes to consolidate mainstream Democrats behind his former vice president, Joe Biden. Although Biden won the presidency, his term ended in disaster—and a second Trump presidency—as he pursued reelection despite visible signs of cognitive decline.
Trump ran in 2016 on popular dissatisfaction with Obama’s style of centrist leadership—frustration that was not confined to the MAGA fringes. The populist left, exemplified by Bernie Sanders, also felt Obama was too eager to shore up the status quo and had missed the chance y to push for much more populist economic policies in the wake of the Great Recession.
One of Obama’s critics during his presidency was an assistant professor at Columbia named Abdul El-Sayed. In 2012, El-Sayed wrote an article for The Huffington Post that distilled the left’s case against Obama. He lamented, “This leader has perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people from our shores than any other president before him, and the list of his failures goes on.”
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Since then, El-Sayed has moved into public service. Now, he is the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, running on the slogan “Money Out of Politics, Money in Your Pockets, Medicare for All.” Accordingly, El-Sayed has tempered his criticism of Obama. Earlier this month, he addressed a reporter’s question about his past comments by asking,
“Do you love your dad? Do you agree with everything your dad has ever done? It’s a normal thing to love somebody, to really appreciate all that they’ve done, and to say, ‘Hey, here’s some things I would have done differently.’ But they still did some important things to create opportunity for you. There is no world in which I get to run for office without somebody like President Obama.
El-Sayed’s friendlier words have been notably matched by Obama’s embrace of the younger politician. On Saturday, Obama went to Michigan to deliver a terrific stemwinder in support of El-Sayed and Joycelen Benson (the state’s Democratic candidate for governor).
The speech proved that Obama has lost none of his skills as a rousing orator. He might be a retired politician, but he’s not a retiring one. He still has a remarkable ability to work up a crowd and to land well-aimed jabs at his foes, remarks that hit with force because they are delivered with preternatural confidence.
Much of Obama’s speech, not surprisingly, was taken up with decrying Trump’s failures—from the betrayal of Trump’s promises to both avoid new wars and to lower prices, to the president’s corruption and gaudy self-celebration. In a passage that seems to have particularly upset Republicans, Obama noted that Trump
is very focused on home renovation. He should be on HGTV. Guy is building a ballroom that is bigger than the White House, paved over the rose garden, paved it over, put a helicopter pad on the south lawn, and then there is just gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold? I mean, he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a cheesecake factory. It’s just gold everywhere. He is clearly not focused on lowering prices for you. People will come in to talk about the Iran war and talk about lowering prices.
Obama characterized Trump’s presidency as being riddled with “chaos and cruelty and corruption and incompetence.” There were also some cutting remarks about defense secretary Pete Hegseth being “laser focused on important matters like the jawline and testosterone levels of our troops and live-streaming executions.”
This verbal shelling of the Republican administration is to be expected, although the sheer elan of Obama’s delivery was welcome.
What was more noteworthy was the subtext of the speech, where Obama implicitly acknowledged El-Sayed’s populism as the proper successor to his own politics.
Obama endorsed this agenda by saying, “Abdul is fighting for change, real change. Change that will bring an end to this war. Change that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket. Change that will finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guaranteed quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” To be sure, Obama stopped just short of saying “Medicare for all” but only by slightly rewording the demand.
El-Sayed is not the only left candidate Obama has endorsed. He has also backed Angie Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, in Florida’s Senate race.
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Commenting on Obama’s endorsement of Nixon, David Sirota, former advisor to Bernie Sanders, wrote that “I think Obama’s incrementalism & establishment deference turned promises of hope and change into more of the same and created conditions for Trump’s ascent. But I’m genuinely glad he’s now helping candidates who embody a more populist politics & ideology than his own.”
Obama’s willingness to support populist left candidates sets him apart from prominent centrist Democrats like political strategist James Carville, Center for American Progress president and former Biden aide Neera Tanden, and Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait, all of whom seem to fear progressive politics more than MAGA. These are all figures inordinately obsessed with disciplining the progressive left, and sometimes even calling for it to be purged from the Democratic Party.
In a recent interview with Bill Kristol, Carville said, “I would rather the Republicans keep the House by five than the Democrats win by five, because if that happens, they’re hostage to the DSA.” One can’t help but admire Carville for being so honest in laying bare, in such self-defeating terms, his core commitment: He would rather lose to Republicans than be part of a coalition where the populist left plays a prominent role.
Obama, despite his own very checkered history, doesn’t share in this folly. He fully knows the dangers of Trump and MAGA. Moreover, he seems to have accepted the critique of the populist left that the best way to defeat Trumpism is by more forceful economic populism.
Obama will never again hold office, but he still has an important role to play: not just as a critic of Trump but also as a model for his fellow centrists. His message to them is to give up the politics of the past and embrace the rising strength of progressivism.
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