Barack Obama Let Us Down
The Audacity of Nope
Chip Somodevilla / Getty
If Obama had never gotten into office, would anything be different?
Obama is leaving office tomorrow, and although I am nauseated to see Trump take over, Obama’s incoming departure does not crush the soul. He sailed into office in 2008 planning to change the world. He didn’t. I believed in him, and so did millions of Americans, and other people across the world. He let us down.
No amount of eloquence or woke references can get around this fact: tunnel underneath, it is there, climb over it, and it remains. It is the fact you cannot ignore or erase. Defenses of him are charmless exercises in moving the goalposts. He. Did. Not. Deliver.
I don’t care if attacking Obama makes the Right happy. Accountability is the mainspring of democracy.
In 2008, Wall Street got away with it. Wall Street got away with it. Wall Street got away with it. If I repeat myself, it’s because this minor incident is slightly important. It doesn’t matter that it is eight years later. This fact is crucial not just because crime went unpunished, or because it revealed the truth of our society—that it is a support system for the one percent, and nobody else matters. It matters because the escape of the bankers showed who Obama is. Anyone who tries to explain away Trump and Brexit without referring to this fact is joking.
Wall Street got away with it. Are you tired of me repeating this fact? Maybe this rhetorical trope is tedious to you. Perhaps you think I’m doing it to score points. I am. I still can’t believe it happened, and I am still angry about it.
Wall Street got away with it.
Wall Street got away with it.
Wall Street got away with it.
Everything about Obama must be judged on this basis. When Obama had a free hand to do whatever he wanted, he appointed to his administration the very same people who had designed The Crash. What does that tell you about him? Can you blame that on the Republican Party?
Wall Street got away with it. Those six words sum up everything hollow and false about the politics that he represents. It wasn’t just about one crime. The Crash, and everything which came after it, points with a trembling finger to the broken order in which we live, work, and dwell. Our institutions and rule of law are discredited. What Iraq didn’t finish, The Crash did. All the broken promises which followed can be glimpsed in the larger shadow of the failure to fix our system.
Dominic Cummings, one of the British princes of darkness who masterminded the Leave Campaign, said 2008 was a root of Brexit:
“This undermined confidence in Government, politicians, big business, banks, and almost any entity thought to be speaking for those with power and money. … Over and over again outside London people would rant about how they had not/barely recovered from this recession ‘while the politicians and bankers and businessmen in London all keep raking in the money … All those amazed at why so little attention was paid to ‘the experts’ did not, and still do not, appreciate that these ‘experts’ are seen by most people of all political views as having botched financial regulation, made a load of rubbish predictions, then forced everybody else outside London to pay for the mess while they got richer and dodged responsibility. They are right. This is exactly what happened. … In the 1930s Britain put people in jail because of what happened in the 1920s. We should have done the same after 2008.”