by Jill Lepore
Bush’s presidency ended with a global economic collapse, the explosion of a time bomb that had begun ticking during the Reagan administration. Clinton’s administration had not managed to defuse that bomb; instead, it had contributed to the deregulation of the financial services industry by repealing parts of the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall Act. Like all financial collapses in the long course of American history, starting with the Panic of 1792, it seemed to come suddenly, but, looking back, it appeared inevitable.
Wall Street totters from the top. Most of the suffering happens at the bottom. The first to fall were financial services giants Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, which had been wildly leveraged in high-risk subprime mortgages. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, 14,164 in October 2007, had fallen to 8,776 by the end of 2008. Unemployment rose by nearly 5 percentage points. Home values fell by 20 percent. In the last years of Bush’s administration, nearly 900,000 properties were repossessed. Millions of Americans lost their homes.89
In yards once festooned with campaign placards, Bush/Cheney ’04 or “Kerry/Edwards: A Stronger America,” Foreclosure and For Sale signs waved in front of doors boarded with plywood. Here and there the tails of yellow ribbons fluttered from trees, in remembrance of soldiers. Here and there were staked flags, and signs painted red, white, and blue: Bring Our Troops Home. And still, in the faraway and troubled lands of Afghanistan and Iraq, the wars dragged on, seen occasionally on Americans’ flickering, hand-held screens in fleeting footage of ruin and rubble.
II.
BARACK OBAMA HAD a narrow face and big ears and copper-colored skin, and sometimes he spoke like a preacher and sometimes he spoke like a professor, but he always spoke with a studied equanimity and a determined forbearance. “We, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents,” he said in his inaugural address in 2009, speaking to the largest crowd ever recorded in the nation’s capital, more than one-and-a-half-million people, on a terribly cold Tuesday in January. The day of hope and change was a day of hats and mittens.
His voice rose and fell with the cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. and held fast with the resolve of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. People had driven for hours, for tens of hours, to see him sworn in. “I just feel like if you had the opportunity to be there for the Gettysburg Address or when Hank Aaron hit his historic home run, would you take it?” Dennis Madsen, a thirty-nine-year-old urban planner from Atlanta, told CNN. Eight-year-old Bethany Dockery, from Memphis, wore a pink hat and coat, and jumped up and down when Obama took the oath of office. “It makes us feel good,” her mother said, crying, “because we have a chance.”90
The time had come, Obama said, “to choose our better history.”91 For Obama, that better history meant the long struggle against adversity and inequality, the work that generations of Americans had done for prosperity and justice. His inauguration marked a turn in American history, but just around that bend lay a hairpin.
He’d wanted to be a writer. He’d written his first book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, when he was thirty-three, long before running for office. “His life is an open book,” his wife, Michelle, later said. “He wrote it and you can read it.” He’d been reckoning with race and inheritance since he was a little boy. “To some extent,” he once told a reporter, “I’m a symbolic stand-in for a lot of the changes that have been made.”92 But he’d also made himself that stand-in, by writing about it.
Obama’s mother’s father, Stanley Dunham, born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1918, was named after the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, whose books included In Darkest Africa, which was published right around the time that Obama’s father’s father, Hussein Obama, was born in Kanyadhiang, Kenya. During the Second World War, Hussein Obama worked as a cook for the British Army in Burma, and Stanley Dunham enlisted in the U.S. Army and went to Europe while, in Wichita, his wife, Madelyn, helped build B-29s for Boeing. Obama’s father, Barack Hussein Obama, was born in 1936; his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, in 1942. On September 26, 1960, the day Richard M. Nixon first debated John F. Kennedy, seventeen-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham met twenty-three-year-old Barack Hussein Obama in an elementary Russian class at the University of Hawaii. By Election Day, she was pregnant. They married on February 2, 1961, two weeks after Kennedy’s inauguration, in the Wailuku County courthouse. In twenty-one states, that marriage would have been illegal, as a violation of miscegenation laws that were not overturned by the Supreme Court until 1967, in Loving v. Virginia. Neither family approved of the marriage. As recorded on his birth certificate, Barack Hussein Obama II was born at the Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, in Honolulu, on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m.93
Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 drew the largest crowd ever assembled on the Mall. As a boy, living with his grandparents in Hawaii—his parents had divorced—young Barack Obama became a reader. He soaked up James Baldwin and W. E. B. Du Bois. “At night I would close the door to my room,” he later wrote, and “there I would sit and wrestle with words, locked in suddenly desperate argument, trying to reconcile the world as I’d found it with the terms of my birth.” After graduating from Columbia, he worked as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, planting roots in a city that had just elected its first black mayor. He joined a black Baptist church and began dating an ambitious young lawyer named Michelle Robinson, descended from men and women who had been held in slavery. At Harvard Law School, he worked as a research assistant for Laurence Tribe, who’d been looking for common ground between what appeared to be incommensurable arguments; this would become Obama’s signature move, too: reconciling seemingly irreconcilable differences.94
Not since Woodrow Wilson had Americans elected a scholar as president. At the University of Chicago Law School, Obama taught a seminar on race and law that amounted to a history of the United States itself, from Andrew Jackson and Indian removal through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, from civil rights to Ronald Reagan and affirmative action. Later, during the campaign, when the course syllabus was posted online, constitutional scholars from both the right and the left applauded its evenhandedness. Obama, as a professor, cultivated the values of engaged, open-minded debate: students were to be graded for their ability “to draw out the full spectrum of views,” for their display of “a thorough examination of the diversity of opinion” and for evidence of having broken “some sweat trying to figure out the problem in all its wonderful complexity.”95 By no means was it clear that what worked in a law school seminar room would work in Washington.
In 1996, the professor sought a seat in the state senate and offered this bridge across the American divide: the Right had “hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility,” and the Left had ceded that ground and needed to gain it back, because a language of moral responsibility was what the whole nation needed, together. “We have to take this same language—these same values that are encouraged within our families—of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other—and apply them to a larger society,” he said.96
Obama brought together the language of the nation’s founding with the language of its religious traditions. Elected to the U.S. Senate, where he became its only black member, he was tapped to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He wrote a speech that drew as much on the Bible—“I am my brother’s keeper”—as on the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident”; and he recited both as prayers. (Like William Jennings Bryan before him, Obama had worked with a Shakespearean speech coach.) Part preacher, part courtroom lawyer, he electrified the crowd. “There are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes,” he said. “Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America.”97
Obama-mania began that night. He w
as young and handsome and glamorous; his rhetoric soared. Reporters, especially, swooned. Before he’d even taken his seat in the Senate, Obama was asked if he intended to run for president, a question he waved away. He did not enjoy his time in the Senate. If, after the end of his term, he stayed in Washington, he told a friend, “Shoot me.”98 He found bloody-minded partisanship maddening. Liberals were fools if they thought they could defeat conservatives by treating them like enemies. The American people, he insisted, “don’t think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced.” Instead, he went on, “they are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib, which violate our ideals as a country.”99
Obama ran for the Democratic nomination in 2008 with a slogan adapted from the 1972 United Farm Workers campaign of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, “Sí, se peude”: Yes we can. His resume for the job was thin. He ran on his talent, his character, and his story. Some people said he was too black, some people said he wasn’t black enough. In a heated and very close primary race against sixty-year-old Hillary Clinton, he benefited from having opposed the Iraq War, which Clinton, then in the Senate, had voted to authorize. And while Clinton began with deep support from African American voters and leaders, that support was squandered by her husband. Threatened by Obama’s poise and charm—a cooler, blacker, and more upright version of himself—Bill Clinton alienated black voters by accusing Obama and his supporters of deviousness: “I think they played the race card on me,” the former president complained.100
In an age of extremes, Obama projected reasonableness and equanimity in politics and candor about religion. His faith, he said, “admits doubt, and uncertainty, and mystery.” His belief in the United States—“a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles”—admitted no doubt.101 In a time of war and of economic decline, he projected the optimism of Reagan and held the political commitments, it appeared, of FDR.
Obama’s candidacy stirred an apathetic electorate. It also changed the nature of campaigning. Turnout in 2008 was the highest since 1968. Against the much-admired long-term Republican senator from Arizona, John McCain, who had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Obama won by more than nine million votes. He also defeated McCain on social media. McCain, seventy-two, a man of his generation, hadn’t yet grasped the power of new forms of political communication. Obama’s campaign had four times as many followers as McCain on Facebook, the social media juggernaut, and an astounding twenty-three times as many on Twitter. His digital team registered voters at a website called Vote for Change. His supporters, who texted “HOPE” to join his list, received three texts on Election Day alone. When he won, more than a million Americans received a text that read “All of this happened because of you. Thanks, Barack.”102
Obama had promised hope and change. He seemed, at first, poised to deliver both. He swept into office with majorities in both the House and the Senate and the wind of history at his back. It proved a fickle wind.
To address the global financial collapse that had torqued the markets during Bush’s last months in office, he asked Congress to approve a stimulus program of $800 billion that reporters dubbed the New New Deal. The Economist announced “Roosevelt-mania.” But Obama was no FDR. His administration did not prosecute the people whose wrongdoing had led to the financial disaster. His economic program rescued the banks, but it didn’t rescue people who’d lost their savings. During Obama’s first year in office, while ordinary Americans lost their jobs, their houses, and their retirement money, executives at Wall Street’s thirty-eight largest companies earned $140 billion and the nation’s top twenty-five hedge fund managers earned an average of $464 million.103
Obama’s biggest initiative was the Affordable Health Care Act, which passed the Senate at the end of 2009 and the House at the beginning of 2010 in a razor-thin, party-line vote, 219 to 212. It had been a century since American Progressives first proposed national health care. Hillary Clinton’s own proposal had failed, badly, in 1994. (Obama, inspired by a biography of Lincoln, who put his political rivals in his cabinet, had named Clinton his secretary of state.) But the win was diminished by the fury of the campaign to repeal it, a campaign begun even before the legislation passed.
The day before Obama’s inauguration, Fox News launched a new program hosted by a radio talk show celebrity named Glenn Beck. Beck compared Obama to Mussolini. He turned his television studio into an old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse, with chalk and a blackboard, and oak desks, and lectured his viewers about American history, and how everything Obama stood for was a betrayal of the founding fathers. If Beck’s campaign was different from Alex Jones and the truthers, it drew on the same animus and exploited the same history of racial hatred. In March, Beck launched a movement called 9/12, whose purpose was to restore the unity Americans had supposedly felt the day after the attacks on the Twin Towers. Opponents of Obama’s economic plan and of health care reform called for a new Tea Party, to resist the tyranny of the federal government. In the spring of 2009, Tea Partiers across the country held rallies on town commons and city streets, waving copies of the Constitution. They dressed up as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, in tricornered hats and powdered wigs, knee breeches and buttoned waistcoats. They believed American history was on their side. They wanted, in words that would later become Donald Trump’s slogan, to make America great again.
With the Tea Party, the conservative media and the conservative movement merged: the Tea Party was, in some ways, a political product manufactured by Fox News. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who’d gained a place in the national spotlight when McCain named her as his running mate in 2008, signed a one-million-dollar-per-year contract with Fox, and then began speaking at Tea Party rallies. Glenn Beck began holding Founders’ Fridays. Fox News host Sean Hannity began invoking the Liberty Tree.104
But the Tea Party was much more than a product of Fox News; it was also an earnest, grassroots movement. Some Tea Partiers cherished the NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, or cared deeply about prayer in schools, or were opposed to same-sex marriage. Some held grievances against globalization, about immigration and trade deals, echoes of fears from the isolationist and nativist 1920s. Most had plenty of longstanding populist grievances, about taxes, in particular, and their objections to a federally run health care program, like the plans for such a program, dated back more than a century.
Tax Day protests held on April 15, 2009, marked the birth of the Tea Party movement, which countered Obama’s call for change with a call for a return to the principles of the founding fathers. In the twenty-first century, the Tea Party married nineteenth-century populism to twentieth-century originalism. As populists, they blamed a conspiracy of federal government policymakers and Wall Street fat cats for their suffering. As originalists, they sought a remedy for what ailed them in a return to the original meaning of the Constitution.
Not irrelevantly, the movement was overwhelmingly white and it imagined a history that was overwhelmingly white, too. This is not to say that Tea Partiers were racists—though many liberals did say this, often without the least foundation—but, instead, that the story of American history had been impoverished by not being told either fully or well. Whole parts, too, had been rejected. “The American soil is full of corpses of my ancestors, through 400 years and at least three wars,” James Baldwin had written in 1965. Wrote Baldwin, “What one begs American people to do, for all sakes, is simply to accept our history.”105 That acceptance had not come.
If most Tea Partiers were mainly worried about their taxes, a few really did object to the changing nature of the Republic, on the ground that it was becoming less white. They objected to the very idea of a black president. It was as if they had resurrected Roger Taney’s argument from Dred Scott in 1857, when he ruled that no person of African descent could ever become an American citizen.
“Impeach Obama,” their signs read. “He’s unconstitutional.”106
IN DECEMBER 2010, sixty-nine-year-old Vermont senator Bernie Sanders delivered an eight-and-a-half-hour speech on the floor of the Senate—without eating or drinking, or sitting down, or taking a bathroom break. He had no audience but the cameras. Sanders wasn’t speaking to his fellow senators; he was trying to reach the public directly, through social media. “My speech was the most Twittered event in the world on that day,” Sanders said later.
Sanders, born in Brooklyn in 1941, had been a civil rights and antiwar activist at the University of Chicago, leading sit-ins against segregated housing on campus and working for SNCC. After Chicago, he moved to Vermont, where he ran for mayor of Burlington. He took office the same year Reagan was inaugurated. Ten years later, he went to Washington as Vermont’s only member of Congress. There were perks to being the only socialist in Congress, he told the New York Times. “I can’t get punished,” he said. “What are they going to do? Kick me out of the party?”107 Sanders’s career in the Senate began in 2007—Obama had campaigned for him in 2006—and had been undistinguished. But during the recession, he emerged as one of the few prominent people in Washington, a city flooded with money, willing to speak about poverty.