On Tuesday, in a 12-minute video, former President Barack Obama re-emerged from his primary season dormancy to formally endorse Joe Biden, his former vice president and his party’s presumptive nominee. Millions tuned in online, nostalgic for the ballast of his familiar cadence. Many huddled at home as a global pandemic — one that in 2014 he warned could arrive — wreaks havoc, taking lives and evaporating livelihoods. The endorsement had the air of a warm-up; an act one, scene one in the effort to “make the case for Biden that Biden has had trouble making himself,” as Politico recently put it.

Mr. Biden has particularly struggled to generate enthusiasm among the young and the progressive — groups that were at the heart of the Obama coalition. Some might assume that Mr. Obama’s return will help address Mr. Biden’s generational challenges. But the former president has also had his own complicated relationship with young people since he became the nation’s leader in 2009.

Many progressives who came of age during the Obama presidency — myself among them — became disillusioned with its caution. Too many of us took for granted Mr. Obama’s uncanny ability to make sense of contrasting truths: the give and take of liberty and fairness in an economy; “the goodness of our nation” and its “original sin of slavery.” And as Republicans blocked him in bad faith while inequality soared, we grew weary of his earnest civics of solidarity — the way he wove competing policy ideas into a narrative in which all of us were imperfect protagonists.

Many critiques of the Obama years remain valid. But now its redeeming qualities are more readily apparent, as we live through a deadly pandemic with a leader who embodies the antithesis of Mr. Obama’s empathy and rationality. A man who attempts to ignore or erase all realities inconvenient to him and who seeks gain through bluffing when division, his first instinct, fails. Suddenly, an Obama-style civics and the competent, bipartisan-minded technocrats of his administration would be a godsend.