Chunk 39: Please come Barack!

It was my birthday this week, so my wife gifted herself 750+ pages of silence by buying me Barack Obama’s new book, “A Promised Land”.

I don’t have to read it to know that I’ll love it. Watching and listening to American’s 44th president on the promotional trail has made me realise just how much I’ve missed him.

Yes, he’s articulate and charming, but it’s the simple clarity of his ideas that continues to resonate with me so strongly.

Like in this one interview, where he spoke about how the Republicans have grown their voter base by keeping middle-aged white men riled up all the time. To which Obama asked: what exactly do middle-aged white American men have to be so upset about? It’s not like they’re the ones who have spent years being marginalised on account of their skin colour (like blacks and Latinos), their gender (like women), their sexuality (like LGBTQI) or their economic circumstance (like the poor).

It’s a wonderful question - more an insight, really - and one of the reasons I bet the Republicans are glad that Obama is constitutionally prohibited from running for a third term in office.

In another interview, he sat down with the comedian/satirist, Stephen Colbert, who asked Obama specifically about this scene, when the incoming and outgoing presidents first met in 2016 …

I’m paraphrasing slightly, but the interview went something like this:

COLBERT: That photo opportunity after y’all had your conversation in the Oval Office, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time - I’ve talked about the president a lot for four years - I’ve had my fill. But that was a chilling moment for me to watch, because I perceived in that moment the dignity of the office, or rather, the trappings of dignity and status that falls upon the person who holds that office in that moment. And I had an emotional flash of all the ways that could be abused over the next four years. Were you having a similar feeling in that moment?

OBAMA: Yeah. Yeah, it was a concern.

COLBERT: And were those concerns borne out over the next four years?

OBAMA: Exceeded.

Wow.

I mean, just wow. Exceeded his expectations of abusing the dignity of the office. In that one exchange, Obama lands the single biggest blow anyone could make of the Trump presidency, and why his legacy will forever be soiled: the man was more interested in being president than in doing president.

As I’ve “chunked” about before, there’s a reason they call being POTUS the hardest job in the world. It doesn’t matter how much of a natural you are at something, you still have to put in the work. I mean, even Tiger Woods practices.

You need look no further than Trump’s actions - or lack thereof - towards America’s Covid-crisis post the 3 November election to sum up his time in office.

After months sprouting that they were “turning the corner”, the case rate has now never been higher, and President-Elect Biden, although having no constitutional authority until he’s inaugurated on 20 January, is already acting like he’s the one in charge.

Obama has witnessed Biden up close and under pressure more than anyone, and swears by his resolve. That’s good enough for me.