When Barack Obama was elected president for the first time, I was still living in England. Had I been in the United States, and eligible to vote, I would not have voted for him. But I remember thinking nevertheless that it was a remarkable — even a beautiful — thing that, just over four decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the people of the United States had elevated a black citizen to the highest office in the land. Martin Luther King spoke of the Declaration of Independence as a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. That an African American could now be chosen to lead the federal government struck me as a solid indication that, at long last, that initial vow had been substantiated.
I still think that. Which is one reason, among many, why I regret that I cannot stand the man. Periodically, we are treated to a reasonable stretch of silence, and I begin to wonder whether I was unfair to him while he was in office. And then he comes back, says something profoundly irritating, and reminds me exactly why I was so irked by him in the first instance. Now, as then, when Obama speaks, I am left looking around in astonishment at other people, trying to determine whether they, too, can see that the whole edifice is a ball of hype and gamesmanship. You know what I’m talking about: that Apollonian affect — that studied, above-it-all mien, which, even when he was president, allowed him to engage in bare-knuckle politics while pretending that he was a detached, innocent bystander whose only concern was for the forgotten middle.
Comments