Hillary Clinton’s new campaign memoir, What Happened, has been panned by critics for failing to take enough responsibility for losing the election to Donald Trump. Jonathan Allen noted at Politico that the book “devotes many more pages to casting blame in other directions.” The New Republic’s Sarah Jones wrote, “Hillary Clinton doesn’t get it.” But on one issue—her decision to deliver speeches to Goldman Sachs for enormous amounts of money—Clinton did get it. “Especially after the financial crisis of 2008-2009,” Clinton writes, “I should have realized it would be bad ‘optics’ and stayed away from anything having to do with Wall Street. I didn’t. That’s on me.”

Barack Obama, the president who presided over the regulation of Wall Street after the financial crisis struck, has seemingly learned the opposite lesson. On Monday it was reported by Bloomberg that Obama in August accepted $400,000 for a speech he delivered to Northern Trust Corporation, a wealth management bank. That was followed last week by a speech to the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. It had also been previously reported that Obama was receiving $400,000 from the bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald to speak at a health care conference later this month.

There are some major differences between Clinton’s situation and Obama’s. Clinton was ramping up to run for president in a decidedly anti-establishment year—“anger at the financial industry had been building for years,” Clinton acknowledges in her book—while Obama is returning to private life, with no clear political future. But while Clinton may have learned (too late) that Democratic leaders are under intense pressure to repair an image that has been tarnished by accusations of elitism and corruption, Obama doesn’t seem to have received the memo.

In fact, the way Obama has acted in his post-presidency suggests that he has still not fully grappled with the seismic shift of the last election. He appears to be operating in a world where Hillary Clinton was elected president, rather than Donald Trump, and nowhere is this clearer than in his puzzling decision to accept multiple exorbitant speaking fees from the 1 percent. (Having just signed a $60 million book deal with Penguin Random House, the Obamas do not need the money.)





It’s true that Obama’s choice to do so falls in the pattern of his immediate predecessors, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And as a private citizen, it’s all too understandable that one would accept such lucrative offers. If Hillary Clinton had won the election, the speeches probably would have raised hackles from progressives on the left and the usual detractors on the right, while largely being dismissed as the kind of thing that ex-presidents just do.