It is undeniable that the Republican Party blocked or curtailed most of Mr. Obama’s legislative efforts, but his commitment to bipartisanship also undermined and diluted his professed agenda. His efforts to “reach across the aisle” resulted in compromises that came at the expense of the Democratic base. In 2014, he cut nearly $9 billion from food stamps, for example, because Republicans had argued for cutting up to $40 billion. For those who relied on food stamps, this was a devil’s bargain.

And it was the inability or unwillingness of the Obama administration to seize the political mantle for change it had won in the election in 2008 that created the conditions for the emergence of Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter movement. Both of them focused on the systemic problems facing American society. The young people at the center of these movements demanded transformation, not just piecemeal reforms.

By the end of Mr. Obama’s first term, 95 percent of the financial gains of his economic recovery plan had gone to the richest 1 percent of the county. In the last decade, median income has stood virtually still. The inattention to Mr. Obama’s record, though, has meant that the conventional wisdom’s explanation for white voters’ defection from the Obama coalition is racist backlash, not economic hardship.

True, Mr. Trump manipulated white racial resentment and peddled the false notion that Mr. Obama was helping black voters at the expense of whites. Surely, however, there must be some connection between the financial stagnation of tens of millions of ordinary white people and the drop in life expectancy driven by opioid addiction, alcoholism and suicide. Economic anxiety is real even when it overlaps with racist pandering.

Of course, it’s not just white people who express their despair with extreme hopelessness. The suicide rate among African-Americans aged 10 to 19 is rising faster than that of any other group in the United States. Taken together, the moment seems grim, despite all of the chatter about the strength of the economy and the health of the stock market.

The reluctance to fully interrogate the Obama years also means that Mr. Obama continues to have outsize influence in the party — even as his cautious governing may have contributed to the disillusionment that played a role in producing Mr. Trump. It means that he is able to continue advocating for centrist politics as the guiding strategy for the party as it seeks to oust Mr. Trump. Last year, Mr. Obama weighed in on Democratic candidates’ proposals by saying, “The average American doesn’t think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.” But aside from his own electoral success, why is he the best judge of the political direction of the party? During his tenure, Democrats lost some 970 seats in state legislatures, 11 governorships, 13 Senate seats and 69 House seats. More Democratic state legislative seats were lost during Mr. Obama’s presidency than under any other president in modern history.

Meanwhile, Mr. Biden continues to frame his own candidacy as an extension of the Obama administration. It’s unclear what that means. Will it be a continuation of Mr. Obama’s financial policies that benefited the richest Americans, including bank and Wall Street executives who were bailed out in the 2008 financial crisis? Or of his dreadful immigration policies that earned him the label “Deporter in Chief” from immigrant-rights activists? Will it be the same kind of reluctance to take on issues of racial inequality for fear of being pigeonholed as beholden to black interests? Or will it be the never-ending overtures to Republicans in the spirit of bipartisanship?

Democratic leaders are making a risky bet that the winning formula in November is to highlight Mr. Trump’s scandals without doing anything that may make these leaders appear too liberal. In contrast, Bernie Sanders, whom I support, speaks to the deep desires for substantial change. The Sanders flank of the party is betting that a campaign fueled by big promises of transformative change will attract the tens of millions of disaffected nonvoters who may hold the key to victory.

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