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This story originally appeared in The Washington Post Aug. 20, 2020 At last, Obama let looseOpinion by Ruth Marcus Barack Obama went to the birthplace of American democracy to underscore the clear and present danger it now faces. The symbolism — Obama at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, stationed in front of a display of the Constitution — was not subtle, but this is not a moment for subtlety. It is a time to sound the alarm about President Trump and the terrible consequences of reelecting him. And so Obama did, as loudly as a former president ever has about someone who has held that office. Since Trump’s election, Obama has been notoriously reluctant to take Trump on, to the immense frustration of his base and some of his own advisers. He dispensed his criticism in strategically timed microdoses, “intent on following a wise American tradition of ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage,” as he said shortly before the 2018 election. On Wednesday night, Obama let loose. The speech was lacerating, unsparing, almost desperate. “Embrace your own responsibility as citizens to make sure that the basic tenets of our democracy endure,” Obama urged. “Because that’s what’s at stake right now: our democracy.” Four years ago, also in Philadelphia, Obama stood before the Democratic National Convention to proclaim himself “even more optimistic about the future of America.” On Wednesday, in the midst of a pandemic that has killed 170,000 Americans, there was no cheer. Hope and change gave way to fear and loathing. “I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies. I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care,” Obama said. “But he never did. For close to four years now, he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves. Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.” As if to prove Obama’s point, there was Trump, on cue, in petulant all-caps: “HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND GOT CAUGHT!” Which takes some nerve in a week when a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had been in league with a Russian intelligence agent. And, seven minutes later: “WHY DID HE REFUSE TO ENDORSE SLOW JOE UNTIL IT WAS ALL OVER, AND EVEN THEN WAS VERY LATE? WHY DID HE TRY TO GET HIM NOT TO RUN?” The “Presidents Club,” as Nancy Gibbs and my Post colleague Michael Duffy have written, is the world’s most exclusive fraternity. Democrat Bill Clinton consulted with a disgraced Republican predecessor, Richard M. Nixon, and forged an unlikely bond of filial friendship with the man he defeated in 1992, George H.W. Bush. They describe “the intense, intimate, often hostile but more often generous relationships among the once and future presidents . . . bound together by experience, by duty, by ambition and by scar tissue.” No longer. The three living Democratic former presidents — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama — all appeared at the virtual convention to urge the election of their party’s 2020 nominee. “You know what Donald Trump will do with four more years: blame, bully, and belittle,” Clinton said. But consider: Was there anything the three Democratic presidents said that the fourth living former president, George W. Bush, did not agree with? Neither of the Presidents Bush voted for Trump four years ago, and by all accounts, George W. Bush will not vote for him in November. It is too much to imagine that a former Republican president would endorse a Democratic nominee, but not too much to presume that Bush was privately cheering Obama on. Bush’s first secretary of state, Colin Powell, endorsed Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016; this year, he took the next step, addressing the convention in support of Joe Biden. “Today, we are a country divided, and we have a president doing everything in his power to make it that way and keep us that way,” Powell warned. Cindy McCain, the widow of the man Obama defeated for the presidency, spoke on a video about her husband’s deep friendship with Biden. But Obama’s rhetoric was extraordinary. As historian Michael Beschloss observed, “No former President before Barack Obama tonight ever felt compelled to say of his successor, ‘Don’t let them take away your democracy.’ ” Perhaps the closest historical parallel is Herbert Hoover, excoriating Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal at the 1936 Republican convention. Hoover framed the choice before voters in similarly apocalyptic terms, warning that the New Deal would lead to “the crippling and possibly the destruction of the freedom of men.” But Hoover was speaking, with perhaps understandable venom, about the man who had ended his own presidency. He had not been shy, even before the convention, about expressing his disdain for FDR. Most importantly, Hoover was wrong — then and in the eyes of history. Roosevelt was no menace to democracy. Trump is. He is outside the Presidents Club because he has placed himself outside the bounds of presidential behavior. He has forfeited his role, in Obama’s words, as “the custodian of this democracy.” The louder his predecessors proclaim that, the safer the country will be. |