In early 2008, Barack Obama annoyed many liberals when he said that President Reagan (but not President Clinton) had “changed the trajectory of America.” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait no doubt will irritate many conservatives by suggesting Obama has done the same over the past seven-plus years. In a piece for the March 21 issue, Chait commented, “Obama hasn’t so much moved from the center to the left as he has moved the center to the left,” and speculated that Republicans may be “forced to acknowledge him as a legitimate and even popular president.”
Chait contrasted Obama’s tranquility with the GOP’s disarray: “There is something fitting about the denouement of the Obama presidency. A Republican Party that began his administration with tea partyers in tricorn hats, Glenn Beck chalkboard rages, government shutdowns, and Mitt Romney diatribes against the 47 percent is culminating in meltdown. The contrast between the president and his antagonists is visibly one not just of worldview but of temperament. Reasoned negotiation is the foundation of his political style.”
From Chait’s piece (bolding added):
Republicans…may now find themselves forced to acknowledge [Obama] as a legitimate and even popular president, the spokesman for the country they never acknowledged he could be. Obama’s approval ratings have edged into positive ground…Unemployment has fallen below 5 percent, and…wages have begun to rise…The opposition party, which has heretofore usually confined its bouts of extremism to legislative stalemates, has undergone a very public descent into orange-haired madness. All this suggests the possibility that, in the twilight of his presidency, Obama may finally be occupying the place he has always craved: the center of American politics.
…Obama hasn’t so much moved from the center to the left as he has moved the center to the left, redefining it in the process…
…Obama, having run an administration shockingly free of major scandal, [is] flexing his elder-statesman muscles in subtle, interesting ways. The other day, after rowdy clashes in Chicago led Donald Trump to cancel a planned rally…a sober president pleaded for calm and normalcy…
…The racial resentment that drove opposition to [Obama] is now chewing up the Republican Party, while the president has displayed a visible comfort with his own racial symbolism…In 2015, Obama actually visited Kenya, without fearing this would make Americans believe he had been born there. This month, he hosted the cast of Hamilton and held a public rap session. He seems to have realized that white racial resentment has become the Republican Party’s problem, not his…
There is something fitting about the denouement of the Obama presidency. A Republican Party that began his administration with tea partyers in tricorn hats, Glenn Beck chalkboard rages, government shutdowns, and Mitt Romney diatribes against the 47 percent is culminating in meltdown. The contrast between the president and his antagonists is visibly one not just of worldview but of temperament. Reasoned negotiation is the foundation of his political style.
