Last year, in May, when he announced a new partnership with Netflix, he revealed he and Michelle’s production company would be called Higher Ground. In July, just after Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki, Obama gave his most extensive public remarks, the annual Mandela Lecture, in Johannesburg, and his subject was the populist backlash to globalization, which he said, “first came from the left but then came more forcefully from the right.” He never mentioned Trump by name.

In that speech, while cataloging the litany of authoritarian trends and making obvious references to the ways that he believes Trump has debased American politics, nonetheless his prescription was defined by anti-radicalism. He decried equally “unregulated, unbridled, unethical capitalism” and “old-style command-and-control socialism” in favor of traditional American liberalism, “an inclusive market-based system.” In case he wasn’t clear that populist demagoguery can come from either ideological direction, he added, “So those who traffic in absolutes when it comes to policy, whether it’s on the left or the right, they make democracy unworkable.”

This clinical detachment was on display the following day as well, when he hosted a town hall event for his foundation. Obama was asked by a young woman from Cameroon about how he decided on which political party to join. Obama’s answer was broad and sweeping in its view of America’s two parties and barely hinted at the common view among Democrats that the Republican Party under Trump is a radical outlier that should be vilified.

“In the United States,” Obama said, speaking in the slow and deliberate style that was the basis for comics who mimicked him, “there was a time where I might have been a Republican because Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. And at that time it was the Republican Party that was opposing the expansion of slavery in the United States. Today, it’s the Democratic Party that reflects the values that I spoke about at the Mandela Lecture yesterday. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that will always be the case. It doesn’t mean that in every instance I have agreed with the Democratic Party platform, but broadly speaking, when you look at who’s been concerned about broad-based economic growth, who’s been concerned about civil rights, who has been most supportive in making sure that women are treated fairly in the workplace, who’s supported collective bargaining, who has been most concerned with environmental issues, including climate change. Right now, that happens to be the Democratic Party. And again, that wasn’t always the case. There used to be more variation and different ideological views even within the parties so you might have more flexibility.”

This odd tangent, delivered by someone with less impeccable progressive credentials, might be attacked from the left as a kind of false equivalence, a statement about the two parties that is so abstract that it drains the very real differences between them today. But one way to make sense of it, as well as his “whether it’s on left or the right” warning of the day before, is that Obama has come to see the threat to stability differently now: Although the peril is more acute today from the right, his own party needs to be on guard against an absolutism rising on the left, which also happens to be the source of the attacks on his own legacy.



‘The Biden people ask, “Why won’t Obama say something?”’

Obama stayed away from campaign politics at the start of his post-presidency, but by the fall of 2018, when a wave was building and hundreds of his former administration officials were running for office, he dove in headfirst, endorsing dozens of candidates, a group from across the country that he described in non-ideological terms as “diverse, patriotic, and bighearted.” He focused on races that would help Holder’s redistricting project and many swing areas where party leaders knew he would be an asset.

According to several people close to him, his experience campaigning during 2018 made him even more convinced that Democrats had to be careful not to mistake the passion and excitement on Twitter for candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for where the public was ideologically, especially in the coming general election against Trump.

A close family friend told me, “Remember he ran to the right of Hillary in 2008 on a lot of issues, and because he happened to be young and new on the scene and he happened to be African American, people just assumed that he would be running as a community organizer. And the reality is, on many issues he was running equal to or to the right of her. His politics are not strong left of center. I mean it's left, but he's nowhere near where some of the candidates are currently sitting, at least when he got himself elected.”

A close Obama adviser added: “There's a whole big country out there, so don’t just go to a rally and everybody's cheering and you think that that's always the pulse of the country. Those are just the people who showed up to hear you.”

While Trump’s early assault on American political norms created a cottage industry of “Where’s Obama?” outcry on the left, Obama’s own view, perhaps a bit self-serving, was that the more he became the face of his party, the less of a chance it allowed for new faces to emerge. And once the Democrats took over the House and the enormous Democratic presidential field began to emerge, the demands for him to weigh in on everything receded. These days when his staff brings him ideas, issues, outrages that he might address, Obama always asks a simple question, “To what end?” More often than not, he stays mum.

And then Joe Biden announced he would run for president. Presidents have always struggled with how much to support their vice presidents. At one level, a Biden win would be a profound vindication, an almost direct restoration of the Obama administration. But Obama had already passed over Biden for Hillary Clinton in 2016. With Biden out of the race in 2020, the psychodrama of their relationship and the intrigue about Obama’s assessment of Biden could have been avoided. Obama’s commitment to non-interference would have seemed less fraught.

Biden, Obama told people close to him before Biden even entered the race, would have to “earn” it. There would be no endorsement. (Biden has said he never asked for one.) Besides, he liked to say, fighting it out in a tough primary is what made Obama a strong candidate for the general election.

Last year, Obama let it be widely known that he would not make his preference known or, in the phrase that his close advisers frequently use, “put his thumb on the scale.” It wasn’t just Biden who was disappointed. Holder was particularly wounded that his close friend wasn’t more encouraging of his own ambitions. ”He’s still pretty sensitive about it,” said someone close to Holder. “He was really frustrated about having arrived at the decision not to run. Holder couldn’t get in because Biden and Holder have the same set of people. Once Biden was getting in then Eric couldn’t get in. So that frustrated Holder. It blocked him. And Biden has turned out the way they all feared, and that’s really frustrating to Eric.”

Over the past year, Obama and his closest advisers were clinical in their assessments of the candidates. They discussed doubts about Kamala Harris’ appeal to African Americans. Obama was deeply skeptical about the prospects of Mayor Pete Buttigieg. During their West End meeting, he was complimentary about Steve Bullock’s record as a governor and frank about his challenges: “Nobody knows who you are,” he told him.

When it comes to Sanders, I asked one close adviser whether Obama would really lay himself on the line to prevent a Sanders nomination. “I can’t really confirm that,” the adviser said. “He hasn’t said that directly to me. The only reason I'm hesitating at all is because, yeah, if Bernie were running away with it, I think maybe we would all have to say something. But I don't think that's likely. It's not happening.” (Another close Obama friend said, “Bernie's not a Democrat.”)

As for Warren, the candidate who has tried to bridge the worlds of Sanders and Obama, Obama’s relationship with Warren is famously complicated. Back in early 2015, when Warren was considering running for president and started to excite progressives, Obama said privately that if Democrats rallied around her as their nominee it would be a repudiation of him—a clear sign that his economic decisions after the Great Recession had been seen as inadequate. There are very few former senior Obama officials in Warren’s campaign.