“When I came into office, my working assumption was that because we were in crisis, and the crisis had begun on the Republicans’ watch, that there would be a window in which they would feel obliged to cooperate on a common effort to dig us out of this massive hole. And it only goes so far - to the present, that is, when the president, like the rest of us, watches uneasily over the final weeks of a very unsettling campaign that even he describes as a referendum on his presidency and the profound cultural changes that came with it. The timeline, too - essentially a litany of events, some major and others telling but trivial - is painfully selective (to us, and probably you). History depends on who gets to tell the story, of course, and while we took care in our choice of storytellers, the perspectives here are by no means complete (or unskewed). (That is, how will millennials remember the era in which they were so casually mocked, even as they remade the world with social media and an easy openness about gender?) Thankfully, we’ve had some help in putting together our time capsule, including from the president, who sat down in August with Jonathan Chait to discuss some critical moments of his tenure. In this issue, we’ve tried to create an inventory of those years and to think a bit about how they might look from the distance of history. We got our news from Facebook, debated consent, and took down Bill Cosby. The first iPhone was released during the 2008 campaign.
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There was a whole new civil-rights era, both for those whose skin color and for those whose love was long met by prejudice. Whether you noticed or not, our culture was shaken to its core. Each movement was met by a countermovement, and yet, somehow, both the left and the right were invigorated, watched over by a president marked so deeply by temperamental centrism even his supporters called him Spock. Every other week, it seemed, a new shooting. There was the tea-party rage and Occupy Wall Street. But however Americans end up remembering the Obama years decades from now, one thing we can say for sure is that it did not feel, at the time, like an unmitigated liberal triumph. The president still managed to get a ridiculous amount done, advancing an unusually progressive agenda.
More than “hope,” Obama’s candidacy promised “one America.” It is the deep irony of his presidency, and for Obama himself probably the tragedy, that the past eight years saw the country fiercely divided against itself.
An embodiment not just of the American Dream as it had been imagined by the Greatest Generation of his own maternal grandparents but of a new version, too, one that might be embraced by his daughters - global, utopian-ish, post-boomer, “post-racial.” The man who took that oath of office seemed cut from American folklore - a neophyte politician elected senator only four years before, a prodigious and preacherly orator from the “Land of Lincoln” and the South Side of Chicago of the Great Migration. But no president since at least LBJ, and probably FDR, has arrived in Washington at a moment of greater historic urgency than Barack Obama.
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