“Where is Barack Obama?” asked the plaintive headline atop Mark Leibovich’s recent essay in The Atlantic. It all but pronounced the former president AWOL in a time of terrific tumult, a shirker ignoring Donald J. Trump’s “democracy-shaking, economy-quaking, norm-obliterating action.”
“No matter how brazen Trump becomes, the most effective communicator in the Democratic Party continues to opt for minimal communication,” Leibovich wrote in the piece posted June 8. “His ‘audacity of hope’ presidency has given way to fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.”
Ouch.
Obama made his whereabouts known Tuesday night, entering to thunderous applause at The Bushnell theater in Hartford, across the street from the state Capitol where an estimated 9,000 people had gathered three days earlier in a day of national defiance and protest.
Obama was not there to answer alarms sounded on social media and amplified by Leibovich. He was honoring a booking with a venerable venue for thinkers and artists, the Connecticut Forum. The 44th president of the United States arrived in crisp charcoal slacks, white shirt open at the collar and a dark blazer. There was neither cape nor cowl.
He spoke as a teacher, albeit one warning of a frightening flirtation with autocracy.
“If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to what we understood — and not just my generation, at least since World War II — our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work,” he said.
Obama challenged law firms and universities not to cower in the face of threats and intimidation but did not offer himself as more than an observer. In his only other substantive public appearance since Trump returned to the White House, a night of conversation on stage at Hamilton College in April, Obama had signaled against expecting more from him.
“It is up to all of us to fix this,” Obama said then. “It’s not going to be because somebody comes and saves you.”
On Tuesday night, in conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson, Obama spoke of conflicts and commitment, of the sacrifices of John Lewis and the other civil rights marchers brutalized on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma more than a half-century ago.
“To me, that contest on the Edmund Pettus Bridge is as important a battle as Concord and Lexington and Appomattox,” Obama said.
But over nearly 90 minutes, Obama played by the unwritten rules of the ex-presidency, offering commentary that was sharp at times but oblique. He spoke harshly of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, two pretenders at winning at the ballot.
Trump’s name never passed his lips.
Obama, 63, the youngest of the three living former presidents, said the prosperity and relative ease of life in postwar America, especially after Vietnam and the passage of civil rights laws, smoothed the path for many to be socially conscious.
“If you were relatively privileged to have been brought up in the United States of America during this period, you could be as progressive and socially conscious as you wanted, and you did not have to pay a price,” he said. “You could still make a lot of money. You could still hang out in Aspen and Milan and travel and have a house in the Hamptons and still think of yourself as a progressive.”
“And now things are a little different. Your commitments are being tested, not the way Nelson Mandela’s commitments were tested, where you go to jail for 27 years,” Obama said. “You might lose some of your donors, if you’re a university. And if you’re a law firm, your billings might drop a little bit, which means you cannot remodel that kitchen in your house at the Hamptons this summer.”
He barely touched on recent events. He spoke as Trump hinted at a direct U.S. military role in Israel’s unfolding war with Iran, called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” threatened its supreme leader with death and, quite separately and casually, insulted the president of France and the grieving governor of Minnesota.
Cox Richardson, the former president’s interlocutor for the event, is a professor of American history at Boston College and a commentator on contemporary American politics on social media and a newsletter on substack that Obama praised for a clear-eyed view of what’s fact and fiction.
She did not press Obama on the desires of some to see him more active or on his view of the limits of being an ex-president and member of a party struggling for a direction and new leadership.
Five days ago, a call-to-action essay Cox Richardson delivered on YouTube was titled, “Now is the Time to Take Sides.”
She recorded it on the day when Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., was wrestled to the ground as he interrupted the press conference of the Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in Los Angeles. But it was less what security did than what Noem said that set off the professor.
Noem asserted, “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”
Cox Richardson saw that as an ominous marker of things to come, namely the use of force to undermine a democratically elected mayor and governor.
“I won’t say it’s a wake-up call, because a lot of us have been awake for a long time,” she said on YouTube. “It is a sign for those people who were not, perhaps, paying close attention, or were hoping that Trump was not going to do the things like that. People like us were saying he was going to do that. In fact, he is going to do it. And now is the time for people really to take sides.”
That was not fodder for conversation Tuesday.
Instead, she said, she wanted to end on a “note of hope” and asked about his foundation’s mission.
“I would love if you could tell us what advice you’re giving those young scholars to enable them to be optimistic about their future, and about the future, and maybe about our future,” she said.
“Yes, I’m still an optimist,” he said. “I’m still the hope guy.”
The premise of his foundation is that leaders are nurtured and encouraged, which requires breaking from the cocoons of contemporary digital life and finding community. It means, he said, engaging with those who agree with you on little.
“It is important to be impatient with injustice and cruelty, and there’s a healthy outrage that we should be exhibiting in terms of what’s currently happening, both here and around the world,” he said. “But if you want to deliver on change, then it’s a game of addition, not subtraction, which means you have to find ways to make common ground with people who don’t agree with you on everything but agree with you on something.”
