The Promise and Limits of Hope and Change
What Obama could and could not accomplish and what it may tell us about where we're going
This is the third in a series of occasional posts about rebuilding democracy after Trump. You can read an overview of the series here.
On November 4, 2008, flanked by his young family and surrounded by almost a quarter-million emotional supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park, 47-year-old Barack Obama told the nation that “change has come to America.”
In one respect this was obviously true. A country where slavery was enshrined in its original Constitution had chosen a Black man to lead it out of the Great Recession.
At the time, Obama’s election appeared to validate the theory that a changing electorate was destined to usher in a new progressive era. In Washington circles, perhaps the most celebrated version of this demography-is-destiny argument appeared in the 2004 book The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, which made a compelling case for why population growth among groups with progressive leanings would eventually put an end to what at the time had been a quarter-century of right-leaning governance.
Obama’s eight years may have marked the sunset of the Reagan-Bush-Bush era, but they were followed by a decade of political churning characterized by three consecutive change elections set against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s reactionary politics. The coalition that twice elevated Obama to the White House did not endure beyond his administration like it had for Reagan, FDR, McKinley, Lincoln, Jackson and Washington—presidents who birthed a new regime.
Years later, in repudiating the argument he had made in his book, Judis noted the Democratic majority he had predicted was unraveling from the abandonment of white working-class and middle-class voters who are distrustful of government and dislike spending and high taxes. When Democrats struggle to win these voters they struggle to win elections. And in 2024, Democrats also experienced erosion with young male and Latino voters, some of which was attributable to a drop-off in interest from 2020.
Why did these voters abandon or lose interest in Democrats?
We can look for answers in what Obama did not change—in what he could not change, given the time in which he served.
Obama took office in the midst of a generational economic crisis. He inherited the controversial and unpopular Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—widely known as the Wall Street bailout—which had passed a skeptical Congress under emergency conditions in the waning days of the Bush administration. Over time, the economy gradually improved, and while a Democratic Congress passed high-profile financial regulations and consumer protections, Obama’s administration was not unfriendly to Wall Street (and Wall Street was not unfriendly to his re-election campaign).
Perhaps this wouldn’t have mattered so much if the recovery had been swift and robust, or if the administration had criminally prosecuted Wall Street CEOs who engaged in fraudulent acts, or if the casino mentality that precipitated the crisis hadn’t endured beyond the bailout.
Maybe that would have felt more like change.
But Obama faced resistance from status quo forces. We saw this in his devotion to an elusive bipartisanship that for years had been idealized in Washington groupthink to the detriment of liberal policymaking, leading Obama to seek quixotic partnerships with Republicans who had sworn to make him a one-term president.
We saw it in the pressure he faced from Republicans to balance the budget without raising taxes, a ploy they used effectively during the Reagan era to box in Democrats who hoped to expand social programs.
And we saw it in the sausage-making machinations of Obama’s heaviest lift—his effort to reform the healthcare system. Obamacare was a historic piece of legislation that extended health insurance to tens of millions of Americans, but it also revealed the enduring strength of industry forces that precluded Obama from delivering on his promise of universal coverage despite the Democratic party at one point holding a filibuster-proof Senate majority.
The process that produced the Affordable Care Act didn’t resemble the swift lawmaking of the first months of the New Deal. Obama didn’t have the latitude to remake the economy like FDR did after years of depression had discredited economic elites.
Yes, there was change. But people were telling pollsters they were unhappy.
Gallup’s measure of satisfaction with the way things were going in the United States hovered in the twenty to thirty percent range for much of Obama’s presidency, and never rose above 38%. It was a period marked by discontentment more than hope.
This chronic disaffection surfaced in unexpected ways during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton found herself in a tense nomination battle with Bernie Sanders while Donald Trump was trampling the Bush dynasty and dispatching with a host of traditional Republican candidates on his way to a presidential nomination so unlikely that the Huffington Post initially dismissed his candidacy as a sideshow and exiled coverage of it to the entertainment section.
Sanders, the Democratic Socialist who caucused with Democrats but hadn’t identified with the party prior to seeking its presidential nomination, focused on economic inequality—on the millionaires and billionaires (as he is fond of saying) who benefit from a system that was decimating those working class and middle class voters that Judis would later acknowledge were deserting Democrats. He tellingly won primaries in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Wisconsin.
Clinton, of course, was a historic candidate in her own right, promising to smash the highest glass ceiling in the world. And her campaign platform, bearing the inclusive title Stronger Together, addressed income inequality as well, while embracing the changing demography that twice propelled Obama. But she was also the candidate of continuity, Obama’s hand-picked successor who was associated with the policies of the status quo.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump was waging a right-wing reactionary campaign that may be best remembered for his nativist Build a Wall sloganeering but also advocated for populist measures like universal health care and massive infrastructure spending while opposing trade agreements.
Of course, Trump was never interested in policies that might have benefitted the middle class at the expense of the rich, and now in his second presidency voters are figuring that out. Trump’s preferences are authoritarian. He spent the first months of his second term establishing a kleptocracy.
So much for populism.
In his embrace of autocracy, Trump has foreclosed the possibility of a right-wing populist realignment, just like Hillary Clinton’s defeat eight years ago appears to have closed the door on the economic policies of the 80s, 90s and aughts. Joe Biden’s presidency suggested as much. Biden’s approach to the economic dislocation he inherited was bolder than that of his former boss, as Biden advanced a much larger stimulus than Obama (with narrower congressional margins), then didn’t get to stick around long enough to see his policies fully take root. Trump returned and upended Bidenomics, but it stands as a possible harbinger of what could follow.
If we think about the economic and cultural drivers of our politics over the past decade, the fault lines have been between those who want to resolutely address economic inequality and those who do not, and between those who would empower groups who have historically been denied a seat at the table and those seeking to protect the privilege of the white, male, Christian and straight populations.
Those who embrace a changing America but are associated with the economic policies of the past era, like Hillary Clinton, have been rejected at the polls. The prospect of right wing populism that promotes reactionary nativism but tackles economic inequality was rejected by Donald Trump in favor of a reactionary nativism paired with economic policies that advance the wildest dreams of the privileged few at the expense of everyone else.
If Trump is successful in making his regime permanent, this is where we will land.
And if he isn’t?
It would leave space for some version of the one approach that remains untried, the approach that was impossible politically in the old regime—attacking economic disparities while embracing the emerging majority minority America.
To make this possible requires an earthquake strong enough to propel a new era of nation building—an earthquake of the sort that followed the country’s most disruptive moments.
Barack Obama didn’t have an earthquake. The Great Recession was dislocating, but it didn't dislodge the forces of the prevailing political era.
It is why Barack Obama was not FDR.
And now? What happens next will depend on how much damage Donald Trump leaves in his wake.
Damage.
Damage has always figured prominently into how much latitude the electorate gives the individual they choose to pull the country out of a debilitating crisis. And it’s going to figure prominently into the politics of renewal after Donald Trump.
No, Barack Obama didn’t get to be FDR. But depending on how the Trump administration plays out, the next president might.
UP NEXT: The political physics of destruction and repair, or how Trump could make progressive change possible.
I might as well face it: We can’t do much to reform government unless we can reform American culture. In a culture where the people tend to support one another, “universal healthcare” and “welfare state” are not dirty words — they are expected obligations from the government. Progressive values have to be passed on from generation to generation; it cannot just be a passing phase. If America is not capable of having a good culture, then I hope to get a country with a culture that is more welcoming for me.
Please keep writing these thoughtful pieces, Matt. We need the perspective of history to understand what is happening right now, and what may be possible in the future, which gives us hope and a reason to persist, to not give up on our country.