5

No You Can’t

‘Yes we can!’ came the chants of affirmation, as revellers streamed into Lafayette Square opposite the White House, waving the Stars and Stripes as if they were finish-line chequered flags, and holding aloft ‘Obama/Biden’ placards like golden trophies. ‘Yes we can!’

Washington can be a joyless city: one familiar with presidential comings and goings, one where passions tend to converge rather than originate. Yet when news spread through its streets that for the first time in the country’s 232-year history a black man would occupy a White House built by slaves, the capital erupted. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue became the impromptu venue for a street party. In the minds of the revellers who gathered at his gates, George W. Bush had already been evicted from the Executive Mansion. That night it was impossible to sleep for the ceaseless din of blaring horns. For those inspired by the young senator’s audacious candidacy, this was the moment, to borrow from Seamus Heaney, when hope and history rhymed.

Back in 1961, the year of Barack Obama’s birth, Washington remained for the most part a Jim Crow city in which racism was endemic: the rail terminus where Negro passengers arriving from the north were forced to leave their integrated carriages at Union Station to board segregated trains if they wanted to continue their journeys south; a place where the few black congressmen on Capitol Hill were barred from swimming in the ‘whites only’ members’ pool.

Even in 2008 it remained a dishearteningly segregated city, in which white residents tended to congregate in its north-west quadrant, a safe distance from the old black ghettoes. So the joyfulness was most keenly felt amongst Washington’s majority African-American population, who continued to be deprived of a lawmaker to represent them in the House of Representatives or the Senate – a constitutionally mandated act of voter suppression – but who would soon have a president to call their own.

Ahead of Election Night, I was told to prepare two reports that could run the instant a winner was declared: one for President-elect John McCain and one for President-elect Barack Obama. Since his defeat was all but inevitable, I didn’t even put pen to paper for the Arizona senator, although our coverage afterwards would reflect on how his decency and refusal to play the race card contributed to his own demise. Finding words to describe Obama’s victory posed a unique challenge, since they were freighted with so much history and would be broadcast all over the world, including in his father’s homeland in Kenya. From a personal point of view, it also felt like I was drafting the concluding chapter of a story I had been covering for much of my adulthood – a coda, in all honesty, that I often doubted would be composed in my lifetime.

The viability of an African-American politician as a presidential candidate was a subject of such personal fascination because I had spent years conducting research into the struggle for black equality. As part of that academic journey, I got to sit down with the leaders of the civil rights movement; to visit the climactic battlegrounds, like Birmingham, Alabama, where they fought to kill off Jim Crow; and to sift through the archives of the white supremacists, all of them southern Democrats, who fought such a rearguard action to uphold the system of racial apartheid. As a student in Boston, much of my time was spent at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston trying to make sense of why this supposed liberal icon had been a bystander to the great social revolution of his age. Fearful of opening up the schism within the Democratic Party over segregation and lacking moral seriousness, Kennedy downplayed civil rights and waited until his third year in office to push for meaningful legislation. Then it was primarily because a black rebellion threatened to overwhelm his presidency.¹

The Kennedy brothers had even tried to cancel the March on Washington, the setting for King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, because they feared a race riot in the heart of the nation’s capital. When march organisers refused, the White House ordered the biggest peacetime military build-up on American soil to guard against trouble, which meant heavily armed soldiers were on stand-by next to a fleet of helicopters as King held his audience spellbound with his paean to non-violence.

Kennedy’s inaction at the start of his presidency proved to be a political miscalculation of immense scale, for it set in motion a violent chain reaction that continues to this day. White supremacists were encouraged to believe they could prolong segregation, fuelling the defiance of racist reactionaries such as Governor George Wallace, who in his 1963 inaugural address cried ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’. In turn, black activists adopted more militant tactics and pressed for more radical reforms, such as affirmative action and reparations.

At the beginning of the 1960s, civil rights activists demanded equality: the right to be served at the same lunch counters, eat at the same restaurants, sit wherever they wanted on buses and trains and attend the same schools as whites. These goals had strong bipartisan and public support. Demands for affirmative action, however, were polarising. Even sympathetic white Americans found it hard to back reforms that gave the appearance of granting blacks preferential treatment.

When Kennedy entered the White House, there was an emerging consensus with growing cross-party support that segregation was morally untenable, and that black Americans should finally be granted a full menu of civil rights. Through his inaction and political faint-heartedness, he squandered this epochal chance to bring about a peaceful transition towards a more racially equitable country. Alas, that opportunity has never again arisen.

The paradox of the civil rights era for Barack Obama was that it cleared away legal obstacles impeding an African-American presidency, but also made it harder for Democrats to win. After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the road to the White House became strewn with the failed candidacies of northern liberals with strong civil rights records. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey, who had made his name at the 1948 Democratic convention with a blistering speech that sparked a ‘Dixiecrat’ walkout led by Strom Thurmond, became the first victim of the Republicans’ southern strategy. Four years later, George McGovern, who tried to make the Democratic Party more resemble multiracial America, could not even win his home state. Only southern Democrats prospered in presidential politics: Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and, many would still contend, Al Gore.

Obama was seeking to become not only the first black president, then, but also the first Democrat from above the Mason–Dixon line since Kennedy. And just as the civil rights era made it harder for him to win, so it also made it harder for him to govern because of the ultra-partisanship and polarisation that now prevailed.

To become a history-defying president, Barack Hussein Obama therefore became a history-denying presidential nominee. He decided not to locate his candidacy in the tumultuous decade into which he was born. Nor did he present his campaign as a continuation of the black struggle. Absent from his electrifying breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, where he rejected the notion of a blue-state America and a red-state America and argued instead for a United States of America, was any mention of the civil rights era. Likewise, he eschewed the accusatory vocabulary of black resentment and recrimination, and spoke instead of his parents’ ‘abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation’. In common with other contemporary black high-achievers, such as Oprah Winfrey and, at that time, Bill Cosby, he never confronted or threatened white audiences. His intention was to make America feel good, not guilty.

When he declared his presidential candidacy, Obama once more de-emphasised his colour, and made clear he was not a traditional black politician with a narrow agenda. It was entirely fitting that Shepard Fairey’s ‘Hope’ poster rendered him in red, white and blue, rather than his natural skin colour. Obama’s vision of a post-partisan country, however, would prove just as illusory as the dream of a post-racial America. In becoming the first black president, Obama overcame history, but could not escape it.

The symbolism of Obama’s victory made it a grand epic of American history. In an election that witnessed the highest turnout since 1968, the scale was also impressive. Of the 33 Democrats to seek the presidency since 1828, only three had secured a higher percentage of the vote. The freshman senator, who beat John McCain by nine million votes, was also the first Democrat in 32 years to win a majority of the popular vote.

In an election in which the share of ballots cast by white voters was the lowest in US history, people of colour made a decisive contribution – African-American support leapt from 88 per cent in 2004 to 95 per cent for Obama.² Yet he also attracted three million more white voters than John Kerry, and performed well in working-class communities devastated by the Great Recession. Even without the black Democratic vote banks of Detroit and Milwaukee, he would have won Wisconsin and Michigan. Also he comfortably took Macomb County, on the outskirts of Detroit, the spiritual home of Reagan Democrats. In a startling historical turnaround, this skinny guy with a funny name, as Obama called himself, also won three former slave states of the Old Confederacy: Virginia, Florida and North Carolina.

This was not just an emphatic personal victory. The Democratic Party enjoyed its best performance since LBJ’s landslide in 1964. The blue wave that washed across so much of the country gave the party a net gain of 21 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. The Democrats could boast that rare thing: unified government with a filibuster-proof supermajority of 60 seats to boot.³

Despite such an emphatic victory, some within the conservative movement viewed Obama as an illegitimate president, a Muslim infiltrator born supposedly in some Kenyan shanty. After the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, mangled Obama’s swearing in, the White House even took the safeguard of repeating the oath of office to thwart any legal challenge to his lawfulness.

During his inaugural celebrations, the new president tried to evoke the post-partisan spirit of his debut speech in Boston. On the eve of his swearing in, he attended a dinner held in honour of John McCain.⁴ At a concert on The Mall, Garth Brooks, the Republican country and western superstar, was asked to perform. To deliver the invocation, Obama invited the right-wing evangelist Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church in Orange County, an opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. His inaugural speech, which was unexceptional by his standards, was a sermon of national reconciliation. ‘On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.’ Yet the Obama rallying cry of ‘Yes we can’ instantly ran into the Republican counterblast of ‘No you can’t’.

On the night of his inauguration, which had drawn 1.8 million people to the National Mall, 15 Republicans gathered at the Caucus Room restaurant in Washington, including congressmen Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Newt Gingrich. Together, they plotted the downfall of the Obama presidency.

‘If you act like you’re in the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,’ said McCarthy, who earlier in the day had asked Obama for his autograph. ‘We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.’

Close to midnight, as the four-hour meal drew to a close, Gingrich delivered a St Crispin’s Day-style pep talk. ‘You will remember this day,’ he said. ‘You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.’⁵

Meeting Republican leaders at the White House shortly afterwards, Obama presented them with a choice: they could take marching orders from Rush Limbaugh or join him in governing. He also reminded them of his sweeping mandate. ‘Elections have consequences,’ he pointedly told the Republican House whip Eric Cantor, ‘and at the end of the day, I won.’

Already, though, the Republicans had decided upon a strategy of total opposition.⁶ Days later, House Republicans voted unanimously to block Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, a display of obstructionist solidarity in which conservatives rejoiced. At a GOP congressional retreat in Virginia afterwards, when television footage of the vote was shown on a big screen, lawmakers joined in a standing ovation.

‘I know all of you are pumped about the vote,’ crowed Cantor. ‘We’ll have more to come!’ Then the Indiana congressman Mike Pence played a scene from the movie Patton, showing the general at his most bellicose. ‘We’re going to kick the hell out of them all the time. We’re going to go through him like crap through a goose.’⁷

From the outset, then, the aim was to go through Obama like crap through a goose, starving him of any bipartisan successes that would help secure re-election. ‘The single most important thing we want to achieve,’ Mitch McConnell later admitted to the National Journal, in a quote exemplifying the partisan pig-headedness, ‘is for President Obama to be a one-term president.’⁸

Though still a novice in the ways of Washington, Obama was never naïve enough to think the Republicans would lend him much support. Nor was he a political fantasist. Nonetheless, he was taken aback by the one-sided stimulus package vote, coming as it did in the midst of an economic crisis that still threatened to unravel the capitalist system. ‘I just thought that there would be enough of a sense of urgency that at least for the first year there would be an interest in governing,’ he reflected later. ‘And you just didn’t see that.’⁹

From the beginning of his presidency to the end, the GOP took obstructionism to unprecedented levels. Senate Republicans filibustered 30 of Obama’s district court judges – 17 more than all of his predecessors combined.¹⁰ Between 2009 and 2010, cloture, a guillotine motion aimed at halting filibusters, had to be invoked 63 times – more in two years than the total for the seven decades between 1909 and 1982. This trend had been in motion for decades. In 1960, as the journalist Ed Luce has noted, just 8 per cent of bills were filibustered. By 2008, it was 70 per cent of legislation.¹¹ These blocking devices became the accepted tools of politics. Even on matters of mutual concern, such as reducing the national debt, cross-party cooperation broke down. During a temporary truce in January 2010, Republicans and Democrats created a bipartisan deficit-reduction task force, the Conrad–Gregg Budget Commission. Only a few months later, however, Mitch McConnell and other Republican co-sponsors abruptly withdrew their backing, for the simple reason that Obama indicated his support. Republican senators, rather than allow the president to burnish his post-partisan credentials, voted against a resolution they themselves had co-sponsored. Little wonder Obama’s White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, took to calling Washington ‘Fucknutsville’.

The battle over the Affordable Care Act, ‘Obamacare’, revealed the extent to which the GOP had become the ‘Party of No’. Rather than negotiate with the White House to shape and alter the legislation, Republican leaders opted for blanket opposition. Not a single GOP senator lent support. The debate also illustrated how far the GOP had lurched to the right. Republicans likened Obama’s plan to European-style socialism, but it was not dissimilar to the alternative to ‘Hillarycare’ they had proposed in the early 1990s. Besides, the model for Obamacare was ‘Romneycare’ in Massachusetts, authored by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney.

The viciousness of the healthcare debate marked a new low in political discourse. When in September 2009 Obama outlined his heath proposals to a joint session of Congress, he became the first president to be heckled from the floor of the House. ‘You lie!’ shouted the Republican congressman Joe Wilson, a howl that prompted a death stare from Nancy Pelosi. When Obamacare was debated, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx of North Carolina railed, ‘I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist.’¹² At a mammoth rally on Capitol Hill in November, demonstrators brandished placards depicting the president as Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, The Joker from the Batman movies and Adolf Hitler. Some even carried photographs of Holocaust victims from the gas chambers of Dachau.¹³

In the wake of Goldwaterism, the Reagan Revolution and the Republican Revolution of the ’90s, Obama’s first year witnessed the fourth wave of conservative radicalisation: the emergence of the Tea Party. The rebellion began in February 2009 in the most improbable of settings, the business news channel CNBC, when the financial commentator Rick Santelli delivered a scorching rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange railing against the Obama administration’s plan to grant assistance to ‘loser’ homeowners facing foreclosure. ‘We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party,’ he shouted at the camera. When the clip went viral, aided by prominent coverage in the Drudge Report and a new social networking site called Twitter, the Tea Party came into hurried existence.

A linear descendant of the Know Nothing movement and the People’s Party from the nineteenth century, it was an amorphous amalgam of deficit hawks, constitutional originalists, ‘birthers’, opponents of ‘crony capitalism’, Second Amendment advocates, web-savvy conspiracy mongers, militiamen, evangelical absolutists and right-wing eccentrics with a penchant for dressing up in the tricorn hats and powdered wigs of Revolutionary-era patriots.

Mainly white, older and male, they were united by their hatred of government, taxation, immigration and Barack Obama. The young president personified so much of what to them was alien: cool rationality, preachy secularism, Harvard elitism and metropolitan polish. Then there was his race. Not all of its members had a problem with a black president, but many did. At the first national Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, drew cheers when he claimed that Jim Crow-era voting laws would have made it almost impossible for him to win. ‘People who could not even spell the word “vote” or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House,’ he dementedly inveighed.¹⁴

On the eve of President Obama’s first anniversary in office, the insurgency claimed its first quarry when activists in Massachusetts helped produce an upset in the special election held to replace the late Senator Ted Kennedy. The Republican Scott Brown’s victory was steeped in symbolism, for it came in the birthplace of the original Tea Party, in the seat of the Senate’s great liberal lion and in a Democratic stronghold that prided itself on being the only state not to vote for Richard Nixon in 1972. Almost overnight, the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate, which meant the filibuster became even more of a lethal weapon.

Just two days after the shock result from Massachusetts, conser­vatives scored an even more portentous victory. In another 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United decision granting corporations, non-profits and unions unlimited political spending power in elections. With the post-Watergate legal barriers removed, political action committees known as ‘super PACs’ and ‘dark money’ non-profit groups which did not have to disclose their donors could now spend millions.

At the time, the expectation was that corporations and, to a lesser extent, unions would flood politics with money. In actual fact, a relatively small number of super-wealthy donors unleashed a tidal wave of dollars. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of all the money raised by super PACs came from 100 wealthy donors: the new plutocrats. Therefore, Citizens United turned the wealth gap in US society into an influence gap in US politics.

Members of the progressive super-rich, such as George Soros, the San Francisco hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, backed Democratic candidates and liberal causes. The right-wing billionaires David and Charles Koch funded grassroots movements such as the Tea Party, a practice that became known as ‘astroturfing’. This plutocratic populism was evident, too, in the political activities of Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson and the reclusive hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, an early investor in Breitbart News and co-founder of the data-focused political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, who became Trump’s biggest financial backer. The aim of all these right-wing billionaires was to make the Republican Party even more conservative, and to turn more of the country red. In the 2010 elections, the first after the Citizens United ruling, a massive infusion of dark money at the local level helped the GOP capture so many state legislatures.¹⁵

In handing down its Citizens United ruling, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court once again seemed to be appropriating the constitution as much as interpreting it. So aggrieved was President Obama that during his 2010 State of the Union address he breached Washington etiquette and directly rebuked the black-robed justices ranked before him.

‘With all due deference to separation of powers,’ he said, ‘last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.’ As the justices shuffled uncomfortably in their front-row seats, he continued on with his reprimand. ‘I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities.’¹⁶ In hindsight, Obama’s warning seems clairvoyant.

The Tea Party movement was loosely organised and intentionally non-hierarchical, but a figurehead emerged nonetheless: Sarah Palin, the former Alaskan governor, who was seen by her legion of fans as the one bright light of John McCain’s bleak 2008 campaign. Her blistering convention speech, where she asked in her folksy twang what was the difference between a Rottweiler and hockey mom (lipstick was the answer), instantly made her a right-wing pin-up.

The more the sneering left mocked her – for reportedly thinking Africa was a country, for not being able to name the newspapers she read each morning, for claiming that being able to peer across the Bering Strait at Russia from her Alaskan home vested her with foreign-policy experience – the more the right adored her. A self-styled ‘mama grizzly’, Palin railed against the ‘lame-stream media’, radical Islam, bicoastal elites, political correctness and dangerous leftists, like Obama.

At a time when celebrities were becoming politicians, Palin followed the same path trod by Jerry Springer by becoming a politician who turned into a celebrity. More than five million viewers tuned in for the debut of her 2010 reality TV show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, which was produced, inevitably, by Mark Burnett. The publication of her 2009 autobiography, Going Rogue: An American Life, which sold a million copies in less than two weeks, again demonstrated her star power.

The press, though disparaging, could not get enough of her. ‘We love Palin,’ confessed Politico’s Jim VandeHei and Jonathan Martin, two of Washington’s most influential political weathermen. ‘For the media, Palin is great at the box office.’¹⁷

More than just a politician, Palin became a phenomenon. With reporters displaying their customary better-story bias, the Republican presidential nomination seemed hers for the taking. Like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, she became another proto-Trump.

Partly because of the presence within its ranks of so many racist crackpots, it was tempting to write off the Tea Party as a ‘white panic’, the last hurrah of elderly white voters who felt their culture was under attack from minority groups. It seemed to be a throwback, more representative of the past than the future. In the 2010 congressional midterms, however, the Tea Party showed it had become the most potent force in US politics by powering a second Republican revolution bigger even than the first. In the largest switch in seats since the 1948 election, the GOP gained seven seats in the Senate and a staggering 63 seats in the House. President Obama, in something of an understatement, described it as a ‘shellacking’.

Just as significantly, the Republicans flipped six governorships and 20 state legislatures, which gave the party a licence to gerrymander when it came to mapping out the boundaries of congressional districts after the 2010 US Census. This they did, with flagrantly unrepresentative results, in Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, Texas, New York, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Virginia, which made it much harder for the Democrats to win back the House. Not until 2018 did Nancy Pelosi return as Speaker.¹⁸

The New Year started on an even uglier note, reviving memories of the political violence of the ’60s and early ’70s. During a constituent meeting held in a parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, a white skinhead gunned down six people, including a federal judge, and shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in the head at point-blank range. As the congresswoman fought for her life, it emerged that Sarah Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC, had drawn stylised crosshairs on a map targeting Democratic lawmakers who supported Obamacare. Although no link was established between the graphic and the gunman, Giffords’s congressional district in Arizona was on this provocative ‘hit-list’. Palin’s response to the accusation of incitement demonstrated once again how crazed public discourse had become. She called it a ‘blood libel’, an anti-Semitic canard.

In Washington, the attempted assassination of Giffords brought a brief halt in hostilities. At the State of the Union address two weeks later, Republican and Democratic lawmakers cast tradition aside by intermingling on the benches. Yet the comity of bipartisan ‘date night’, as it was called, proved fleeting. 2011 was the third consecutive year that Congress failed to pass a budget and had to rely on what were called continuing resolutions. In the 112th Congress, no Democrat in the House was more conservative than a Republican and no Republican was more liberal than a Democrat, ending the long tradition of ideological overlap.

No longer was it a case of the centre not being able to hold. There was not much left of the centre. The Blue Dog Coalition of centrist congressional Democrats, which could boast more than 50 members in 2008, dwindled to the low teens. Its moderate conservative counterpart, the Main Street Partnership, was also in meltdown.

Ahead of the 2012 midterm elections, one of the last surviving Rockefeller Republicans, Olympia Snowe of Maine, unexpectedly announced her retirement. After 33 years on Capitol Hill she could no longer stomach what she described as ‘an atmosphere of polarisation and “my way or the highway” ideologies’.

Other moderates faced Tea Party primary challenges, the favoured method for terminating the careers of compromise-seeking heretics. The Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, a lawmaker since 1976, who was acclaimed for his genial bipartisanship, was defeated by the little-known insurgent Richard Mourdock. Lugar had voted in favour of Obama’s first two Supreme Court nominees, backed immigration reform and supported certain restrictions on gun ownership. Yet this long history of reaching out across the aisle with Democrats became his Achilles heel. On the right especially, acts of bipartisanship had become politically ruinous.

The retirement, voluntary or enforced, of moderates who could cut deals had been a recurring problem ever since the greatest generation started to leave the stage. Now it was central to the country’s crisis of governance. Pragmatists were pushed aside by radicals, Tea Partiers who joined together in what was dubbed the ‘Suicide Caucus’, an 80-strong rump that dragged the Republican Party even further to the right.

Moderate Democrats also tired of the putridness on Capitol Hill. In 2010, the telegenic Indianan Evan Bayh, who was often spoken of as a potential presidential contender, announced he would not be seeking a third term with a retirement speech that doubled as an indictment of Congress. ‘There are better ways to serve my fellow citizens,’ he said wearily.¹⁹ On Capitol Hill, there was ‘too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving’. This was now a common refrain. In 2014, the father of the House, Congressman John Dingell, retired, after a 59-year run that began during the Eisenhower administration. ‘I find serving in the House to be obnoxious,’ he said. ‘I know how to build legislation from the centre,’ he added, lamenting a skill that was now largely redundant.²⁰ The destructive forces in US politics were becoming more powerful than the restraining influences. Increasingly, the Senate aped the ugliness and scrappiness of the House. The moderate middle was a thing of the past.

Just as Gingrichism failed to throw up a credible candidate in the 1990s, so too the Tea Party struggled on the presidential stage. On Memorial Day weekend in June 2011, Sarah Palin launched what looked to all intents and purposes like a campaign for the White House when she appeared in a black helmet and leathers on the back of a Harley-Davidson at the traditional Rolling Thunder biker rally in Washington, the full-throttled start of a One Nation tour around the country. Then it was on to Manhattan, where she sat down for pizza with her fellow media-monger Donald Trump – a photo-op ridiculed by the Big Apple tabloids because she used a knife and fork to cut her slice. By October, however, she had decided against running.

Deprived of its Alaskan Evita, star-struck movement conservatives were forced to consider less appealing alternatives. The Tea Party favourite Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman who could almost have been Palin’s twin sister, won that summer’s Iowa straw poll, an early popularity contest, but faded almost immediately afterwards. This set the pattern for the Republican race, where frontrunners faltered the instant they hit the front.

In a televised debate, the Texas Governor Rick Perry shot himself in both eel-skin boots when he failed to remember which three government departments he planned to shutter. ‘Oops,’ he muttered in a brain freeze mercilessly replayed for days afterwards. Later he became Energy Secretary in the Trump administration, heading up a department he had wanted to abolish.

Next came the fringe candidate Herman Cain, a little-known former pizza executive who, in addition to being flummoxed by rudimentary foreign-policy questions, was hit by allegations of sexual harassment. Newt Gingrich, making his first presidential run, briefly topped the polls until he was blasted by a blitz of negative advertisements from his Republican opponents – karmic payback, perhaps, for trading in so much negativity throughout his career. Then came an improbable surge from Rick Santorum, a washed-up former Pennsylvania senator best known for equating homosexuality with incest. Like a speed-skater watching from the rear as faster rivals crashed out, Santorum had not yet lost his balance by the time of the Iowa Caucus and pulled off an unexpected victory – thus proving what has now become an iron-clad rule of the GOP nominating process, that winning Iowa is a predicator of ultimate failure.

Almost by default, Mitt Romney, an establishment favourite who four years earlier had been the runner-up to John McCain, ended up as the nominee. The Tea Party grassroots regarded the former governor of Massachusetts as a dangerous moderate, a slick well-financed RINO, a Republican in name only. To overcome their antipathy, Romney ditched the common-sense moderation of his gubernatorial career, including his landmark achievement, ‘Romneycare’, and portrayed himself as a hardliner on immigration. As well as calling for the construction of a fence along the southern border, he appointed the controversial sheriff Joe Arpaio as the chair of his Arizona campaign. A pragmatic governor became a faux-right candidate, but so weak was his opposition that he eventually wrapped up the nomination at the Texas primary in May.

That night, Romney appeared alongside Donald Trump at a fundraiser at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, an event that attracted controversy because, in the days before, the billionaire had renewed his specious birther attacks on Barack Obama, claiming he had not been born in Hawaii. Ahead of their meeting, the Obama campaign ran an attack ad asking why Romney had not condemned the birther conspiracy theories and taken a stand against ‘the voices of extremism’. Trump’s birtherism, however, had become more mainstream within the conservative movement. A poll conducted in 2009 suggested 58 per cent of Republicans did not believe Obama was born in the United States or were not sure.²¹ As Romney’s visit proved, Trump was no longer an outlier. The owner of the Miss Universe pageant had become an important judge in this quadrennial Republican beauty contest.

After winning the Republican nomination, Romney followed the now familiar route of tacking towards the centre, presenting himself as a CEO with the business acumen to kick-start the economy. Briefly he surged ahead in the polls, after the first television debate in September when a bored-sounding Obama gave the impression of wanting to be almost anywhere else on the planet – a display of presidential petulance worse even than George H. W. Bush’s glance at his wristwatch (not that there was a single image to capture it, which would have been replayed for days afterwards). Romney’s momentum came to a shrieking halt, however, when a leaked video from a high-dollar fundraiser showed him bemoaning ‘the 47 per cent who are with him [Obama], who are dependent on government, who believe that they are victims’. Thereafter, it was easy to paint him as a heartless vulture capitalist.

In the election, Obama for a second time polled more than 50 per cent, becoming the first president since Reagan to win both his presidential bids with a majority of the popular vote. Romney, by unhappy coincidence, received a 47 per cent share. The Republicans, who only 20 years earlier were thought to have a lock on the White House, had now lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.

Within conservative circles, two wholly different explanations for Romney’s defeat took hold. The Republican National Committee’s official autopsy called for greater outreach amongst Hispanic, black, Asian and gay Americans if the party was to avoid plunging over a demographic cliff. Nativists within the conservative movement, however, reached the contradictory conclusion. Instead, they advanced the ‘missing white voter’ hypothesis. Romney had lost, they posited, not because of black and Hispanic support for Obama but because too many white voters had stayed at home – a shortfall of five million voters from 2008. Rather than being too conservative, Romney had not been conservative enough. Mono-culturalism not multiculturalism offered the way forward.

Back in 2012, however, this remained a minority view. It seemed Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, was the coming man, or maybe his mentor Jeb Bush, whose wife was Hispanic and whose speech announcing his candidacy three years later was delivered partly in fluent Spanish. In the upper reaches of the party, the notion that the GOP would turn to a candidate who launched his campaign by describing Mexicans as rapists was unthinkable. However, the mood amongst the grassroots was fractious. No longer were conservative activists prepared to countenance an establishment favourite as their presidential nominee. After the two Bushes, Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney, they were looking for someone dramatically different. A Palin, or something close. One of them.

Returning to live in America in the summer of 2013 after a long hiatus, it was obvious something was amiss. The country appeared to have lost its energy. Barack Obama seemed strangely listless, punch-drunk, perhaps, after being pummelled for so many years by the GOP and Fox News. The urgency and idealism of his 2008 campaign had given way to a languid and directionless presidency. Obama appeared before us now in amputated form, or as a faded poster, to borrow the Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s pithy line from the GOP’s 2012 convention. Obama’s lethargy also fuelled the narrative of US decline. After all, so much of the world had expected this captivating young president to bring about a national rebirth.

Washington was even more sulphurous. The partisan line-drawing I had covered during the Clinton and Bush years had become partisan trench-digging. The sense of renewal I witnessed on the night of Obama’s victory was replaced by the stench of democratic decay. Hopes in the White House that back-to-back victories would ‘break the fever’ never materialised. The temperature further rose. The Republicans maintained their grip on the House, even though the Democrats increased their majority in the Senate, which meant the 113th Congress ended up being even more dysfunctional than the 112th. 2013 was the least productive year in Congress since World War II. Understandably, public confidence in Congress sunk to a new low, with just a 7 per cent approval rating, the lowest Gallup had ever recorded and another indicator of institutional deterioration.²²

That year Republican attempts to destroy Obamacare, which had been validated by the electorate at the 2012 presidential election and upheld by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, led to the first government shutdown in almost 20 years. For 16 days, the federal budget was held hostage, as Republicans made delaying or defunding Obamacare the condition for keeping open the government. Senator Ted Cruz conducted a solo filibuster lasting more than 21 hours, which made a global laughing stock of ‘the world’s greatest deliberative body’ by quoting Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham.²³

With Congress gridlocked, the first anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting came and went without any legislative action on further regulating the sale of firearms. Even the death of 20 first-graders and five teaching staff could not bring about an epiphany on gun control. A compromise bill to expand background checks and impose certain restrictions on semi-automatic weapons was defeated in the Senate by Republicans and four Democrats from pro-gun states (Alaska, Arkansas, Montana and North Dakota). Astonishingly, it attracted 12 fewer votes in the Senate than the attempt in 2004 to renew the assault weapons ban.

America had decided the worst school shooting in its history should not impinge on the right of would-be killers to purchase military-style semi-automatic weapons to murder as many victims in as short a timeframe as was possible. After the vote, Obama, who described Sandy Hook as ‘the hardest day of my presidency’, appeared in the Rose Garden with the tearful mothers of the six- and seven-year-old victims. Gabby Giffords, who had not yet regained her full power of speech, was also at his side. This, he said solemnly, was ‘a pretty shameful day for Washington’.²⁴

The battle for gun control revealed Obama’s strengths and weaknesses. Multiple shootings were the occasion for some of his finest orations, in Aurora, Sandy Hook and Charleston. But his failure to advance even small, incremental reforms showed also how he failed to master the cold grammar of congressional relations. Often, he had to rely on his vice-president, Joe Biden, an old Capitol Hill hand, to negotiate with GOP lawmakers. His obvious disdain for the political game did not go down well in a capital obsessed by the political game.

On gun control, the NRA remained dominant, and benefited from its decades-long campaign to turn the Second Amendment, which was drafted by the framers to protect the rights of militia, into the constitutional basis for individual gun ownership. Up until the late 1960s, it had been looked upon as the forgotten amendment, because it was so obviously obsolete. Yet the NRA brought it back from the dead. Its crowning moment came in 2008, with the landmark Heller ruling, when for the first time the Supreme Court concluded that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. Once again, in a 5–4 vote, the right-leaning Supreme Court had shown itself to be the conservative movement’s most valuable ally.

The country as a whole was experiencing one of its periodic funks. That July, black fury once again broke loose following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighbourhood-watch volunteer who killed an unarmed African-American teenager, Trayvon Martin, by shooting him in the heart. ‘No justice, no peace’ was the chant, as demonstrators poured onto the streets of New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland and Atlanta. ‘It’s marching time, ladies and gentlemen,’ declared Martin Luther King III, as he urged protesters to converge on the National Mall for the 50th anniversary of his father’s March on Washington.²⁵ It was a hashtag, however, that galvanised young activists: #BlackLivesMatter.

Much of the country had little sympathy for the parents of Trayvon Martin. Even less so when Obama said his son would have looked like the teenager. This slain young man thus became a pawn of polarisation. As African-American lawmakers took to the floor of the House of Representatives dressed in the kind of hoodie he wore that fatal Florida night, a paper mock-up of that garment was marketed online as a gun-range target. Zimmerman even auctioned off the firearm he used to kill the teenager, marketing the pistol as ‘an American firearm icon’ and ‘piece of American history’. Reportedly, it sold for $250,000.²⁶

New York, where we made our home, was in a slump. All over the city were signs of decline. The decrepit subways. The rail tunnel under the Hudson River, damaged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, in which high-speed trains were reduced to a slow-motion crawl. The antique terminals at La Guardia, described by Vice-President Joe Biden as ‘Third World’, which had fallen decades behind high-tech airports in China and even India. Flying into the United States from the eastern hemisphere felt like time-travelling. The global power shift from America to Asia was perceptible, too, in Times Square, where China’s Xinhua News Agency rented a giant electronic screen that towered over the Coca-Cola ad below.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 12-year reign, which was about to come to an end, was credited with making the city safer, cleaner and more environmentally friendly – there were bike lanes, smoke-free restaurants and a glorious High Line, an exquisitely designed park along a disused elevated railroad that became a much-copied model for urban renewal.

However, the billionaire mayor had turned the Big Apple into a rich man’s fiefdom, where the green-aproned storm troopers of gentrification – the checkout staff at Whole Foods – helped transform down-at-heel neighbourhoods into high-rent havens. Skinny skyscrapers constructed for the super-rich grew skyward like stubborn and sinewy weeds, disfiguring Manhattan’s cityscape and serving as emblems of the vertiginous disparities of wealth. Safety deposit boxes in the sky, they were dubbed, because so many were purchased as investment properties by absentee owners. Architecturally, some even looked like safety deposit boxes in the sky. In this modern-day tale of two cities, more than a fifth of New Yorkers now lived below the poverty line, while 50,000 residents were homeless.²⁷

That sticky summer, the politics of New York seemed trashy, unserious, even unhinged. In the battle to succeed Bloomberg, Anthony Weiner, a disgraced former congressman forced to resign his seat after mistakenly sharing with his followers on Twitter ‘dick pics’ meant for his mistress, was the frontrunner. Now he was hit by scandal again, after it emerged he had conducted a torrid affair with a woman he had never even met – a digital dalliance which underscored how much of modern-day life played out on smartphones rather than in person.

The details, chronicled by tabloid reporters seemingly paid by the double entendre, were enthralling. Weiner used the nom de plume Carlos Danger. His paramour was a ‘Bible Belt bad girl’ christened with what sounded already like a porn name, Sydney Leathers. Then there was Weiner’s wronged wife, Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s closest aide at the State Department, who was often referred to as the former First Lady’s ‘second daughter’. One of my first assignments after arriving in New York was to cover her ‘stand-by-my-man’ news conference, where, quivering like a traumatised sparrow, she told a gaggle of baying Big Apple hacks, ‘I love him, I have forgiven him, I believe in him.’

While the Clinton connection added a certain frisson, none of us in the room that afternoon had the slightest inkling of how Weiner’s online antics, and his wife’s laptop computer, would eventually become a dramatic storyline in the 2016 presidential election. Nor yet did we comprehend how victory in the New York mayoral election of Bill de Blasio, a Park Slope progressive who became the main beneficiary of Weiner’s self-sabotage, presaged the Democratic Party’s shift to the left and the rise of another Brooklynite, Bernie Sanders.

It was not just Washington and New York. Signs of waning were everywhere. Detroit, the once-great Motor City, was forced that summer to file for bankruptcy, the largest municipal insolvency in US history. In nearby Flint, residents were being poisoned by the drinking water, the kind of story I would have expected to cover in the poorer parts of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar in India. The Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, the spiritual home of the gospel of prosperity that had fascinated me as a teenager, had filed for bankruptcy.

The spirit of America had changed. Arriving in California all those years ago, I was struck by the assuredness of the American compact, the belief that hard work would be rewarded with upward mobility and a higher standard of living. That truth had always been self-evident. Now, though, surprisingly few parents believed their children would lead more abundant lives, a gut sense borne out by a welter of statistics. A man in his thirties was now earning 10 per cent less than his father at the same age in the mid-1980s.²⁸

The language, once so bold and hopeful, had become more defensive. People spoke of economic security – keeping down a decent job that came with healthcare and maybe a few other fringe benefits – rather than economic advancement. I was struck by the absence even of modest aspirations – the aim of upgrading a car, buying a slightly larger house, or even taking the family out each week to eat at a cheap and casual restaurant such as Applebee’s. So many Americans seemed to be living hand to mouth, pay cheque to pay cheque.

No longer was the focus on the nice-to-haves of middle-class life – a boat on the lake, a second car in the garage, the chance to visit London or cruise the Caribbean. Dreams had been downsized, or abandoned altogether. The Cadillac was now an object of envy rather than emulation. Figures released at the end of the summer showed that income inequality had actually reached its highest level since 1928. By 2014, the richest 1 per cent of Americans had accrued more wealth than the bottom 90 per cent. As Warren Buffett commented, ‘There’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years and my class won.’²⁹

The ‘1 per cent’. Now there was a nomenclature to describe the super-rich, after the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz published an essay ‘Of the 1 per cent, by the 1 per cent, for the 1 per cent’ in Vanity Fair, the parish pump of the international jet-set. Perhaps the most searing critique yet of globalisation, it set out how international trade deals benefited multinational corporations by fostering ‘competition between countries for business’. This drove down taxes on multinational corporations, weakened health and environmental protections and undermined workplace rights, including collective bargaining. Politicians of all shades, argued Stiglitz, were complicit. After all, most Washington lawmakers were ‘members of the top 1 per cent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 per cent, and know that if they serve the top 1 per cent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 per cent when they leave office’.³⁰

‘We are the 99 per cent’ had become the rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which first emerged in 2011 and drew so many activists to its tented encampment in Lower Manhattan’s financial district. The criticism of protesters that the Obama administration was packed with ‘Corporate Democrats’ who were too cosy with Wall Street had a radicalising effect on the left, just as the big government conservatism of the Bush administration had fuelled the Tea Party on the right.

The young were especially agitated, and understandably so. Going to college was now firmly associated with indebtedness, which was especially off-putting for teenagers from lower socio-economic groups during a period of wage stagnation. Between the end of the Reagan and Obama presidencies, the cost of attending higher education rose eight times more than wages.³¹ Student loans now made up the largest proportion of non-housing debt, edging out credit cards and car financing. This was especially problematic because degrees were now a prerequisite of attaining so many well-paid jobs.

Nor were America’s great universities any more the blast furnace of social mobility. A study of 38 colleges, including Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth, showed students from the top 1 per cent income bracket occupied more places than the offspring of the bottom 60 per cent. At Harvard almost a third of incoming students were the sons and daughters of alumni. American academia had lost the swagger I recalled from my days as a visiting scholar at MIT. Instead, it tiptoed on eggshells. The fear of offending people seemed now to override freedom of speech. Stultifying self-censorship had become a bar to academic pluralism. There was a near phobic fear of cultural appropriation. On closed-minded campuses, tales abounded of political correctness that truly had gone mad, such as the students at Mount Holyoke College who cancelled plans for a production of The Vagina Monologues because it discriminated against women without vaginas.³² The identity politics of the ‘woke left’ became easy to mock and caricature, handing a gift to the Fox News right.

Though his country was exhausted by wars that never seemed to end, President Obama continued to pay lip service to the language of American greatness underpinned by military might.

‘America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs,’ he claimed during his 2012 State of the Union address. ‘Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn’t know what they’re talking about.’ Hillary Clinton in 2010 had even proclaimed ‘a new American moment’. However, as the locus of global economic activity shifted from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific, the United States showed unmistakable signs of a loss of influence. Strategically, it was overextended, and struggling financially to maintain its military dominance. The 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance admitted as much when it conceded the US military could no longer wage two wars simultaneously in different parts of the world.³³ That same year, the US National Intelligence Council projected that, by 2030, no country would be a hegemonic power. ‘Pax Americana – the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945 – is fast winding down.’³⁴

The summer of 2013 provided a gruesome illustration of America’s retreat from the world. It came in Syria, when the Assad regime launched a nerve-agent attack in the suburbs of Damascus that killed hundreds of civilians. This murderous infringement of Obama’s ‘red line’ warning against the use of chemical weapons made a US military response almost inevitable. Yet even after pictures emerged of the corpses of asphyxiated children lying shoulder to shoulder on hospital floors, the president failed to carry through on his threat.

Obama claimed afterwards he was ‘very proud’ of his decision not to bomb Syria, because it rejected the orthodoxy that America always had to respond militarily to underline its power.³⁵ However, it was the biggest foreign-policy climb-down of his presidency, and also one of the most consequential of the past 50 years. It showed how his post-Iraq foreign policy mantra of ‘Don’t do stupid shit’ all too often meant ‘Don’t do anything at all’. After all, American hegemony had rested over the decades on the deterrent effect of the presumption that the United States was always ready to use force.

Whenever reproached, Obama had a habit of dishonestly framing foreign-policy questions and presenting false choices. Critics of his inaction in Syria were accused of being warmongers intent on wading into another Middle Eastern quagmire. This was an unfair mischaracterisation of those – including senior members of his own administration – advocating graduated responses, such as the enforcement of no-fly zones or the creation of humanitarian corridors to deliver aid and evacuate civilians.

In Syria, the void left by America was filled by Russia. Vladimir Putin became a key Middle East power player. Moreover, he was emboldened to annex Crimea, which redrew the map of Europe – and maybe to keep interfering in the 2016 presidential election. America’s precipitate withdrawal from neighbouring Iraq also contributed to the rise of ISIS, a terrorist group Obama mistakenly likened to a junior varsity team, whose caliphate came to encompass land in both countries.

Had Assad not been allowed to massacre so many of his countrymen and -women with such impunity, the refugee crisis would not have been so severe. By the end of the Obama presidency, the Syrian civil war had created five million refugees, and produced an influx of asylum seekers into Europe that fuelled the rise of the populist right. Television coverage of columns of refugees making their way through Europe in 2015 contributed to the ‘leave’ result in the Brexit referendum, in which Britons voted to take back control of their borders. In turn, Brexit provided a fillip for Donald Trump, who claimed, falsely, that he predicted the outcome the day before during a trip to Scotland, even though he didn’t touch down in Britain until the following morning, when the result was known. Obama’s mishandling of Syria contributed not only to the rise of Islamic State but also to the resurgence of nativist populism.

Despite America’s mounting problems, and the inability of Washington to fix them, elections continued to produce the same gridlock. In the 2014 midterm elections, the Republicans were rewarded once again for their obstructionism, achieving their best nationwide result since the pre-New Deal days of the 1920s. In the House, the GOP won its largest majority since 1928. It regained control of the Senate for the first time since 2006. It also controlled more state legislatures than at any time since the late 1920s.

I was in Kentucky that night, partly because Mitch McConnell, the obstructionist-in-chief, was thought to be vulnerable. Yet he comfortably won re-election, and vowed again to keep thwarting the White House. His coup de grâce came when a vacancy opened up on the Supreme Court, after the death of the celebrated conservative jurist Antonin Scalia. McConnell held up Obama’s proposed replacement, Merrick Garland, a centrist in his early sixties who was among the more benign candidates that the president could have picked, for almost a year, and blocked him from ever sitting on the court.

The big-name Republicans to lose their seats that election season were victims of fellow Republicans, demonstrating once again how lawmakers were often most vulnerable to challenges from members of their own party. Most startling was the primary defeat of Eric Cantor, the House majority leader and presumed heir to the Speakership, who was beaten by a little-known Tea Party insurgent. Over the years we had grown used to moderates being ousted by hardliners in primaries, but Cantor was a staunch conservative and the prime architect of the GOP’s total opposition strategy against the Obama White House. Even one-time flame-throwers were now vilified for being part of the political establishment. Hardliners were being ousted by candidates who were even more extreme.

The Democrats were decimated, and now occupied fewer state positions than at any time during most of the previous 100 years.³⁶ Whereas in 2009 they had controlled 59 per cent of the state legislatures, by 2017 that figure was less than a third. Over the course of the Obama presidency, the Democrats suffered a net loss of 11 senators, 62 House seats, 12 governorships and 958 seats in state legislatures.³⁷ No president in modern history had lost so many state legislative seats. Obama had neglected to build up his party, focusing instead on his personal political operation. As a result, the Obama coalition, with its young, multicultural base, had not become the new Democratic coalition. The character of the party also continued to change. Continuing the trend from the Clinton years, it was geared more towards the professional elite rather than the working class.

Seemingly we had entered a new political era where the Democrats, because of their demographic advantages, would dominate presidential politics, and the Republicans, because of gerrymandering and the disproportionate power of rural states in the Senate, would command congressional politics – a complete inversion of Washington’s balance of power from the late ’60s to the early ’90s.

Whereas once we had talked about the Republican lock on the Electoral College, now we spoke of an impregnable ‘Blue Wall’, the 18 states, including the big-three stronghold of New York, California and Illinois, and also the Rust Belt trio of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, that had voted Democratic in the last five presidential elections. Behind the Blue Wall were 242 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win, seemingly protected like the gold bullion at Fort Knox. Even the party’s worst result since the pre-Roosevelt era did not appear to shake the Democrats’ complacency and belief in demography as destiny.

His second shellacking in a congressional midterm election did, however, galvanise Obama. Determined to demonstrate he was not yet a lame duck, he embarked on one of the more productive phases of his presidency. In the international realm, where his actions were harder for Congress to circumscribe, he normalised relations with Cuba, took the lead in negotiating the 2015 Paris climate-change accord and pulled off his signature foreign-policy achievement, the Iranian nuclear deal.

His farewell year also delivered some of the most compelling imagery of his presidency. His trip to Cuba, where the enchanting streets of Old Havana served as backdrop, was the most filmic of his time in office. On the 50th anniversary of Black Sunday in Selma, he joined arms with Congressman John Lewis, the bravest of the brave civil rights activists, to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Then there was that summer of progressive triumphs, capped by his impromptu rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’.

However, his farewell year also provided some of the most haunting imagery of his years in office: the picture of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy, drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, whose lifeless body was washed up on a Turkish beach; the photograph of a Black Lives Matter protester, Ieshia Evans, goddess-like as she confronted a line of policemen decked out in RoboCop-style riot gear in Baton Rouge.

Smartphones made newsgatherers out of anyone who bore witness to a newsworthy event, and in that final summer there was a spate of police shootings caught on camera that in previous times would have passed without notice. In Falcon Heights, Minnesota, the girlfriend of Philando Castile, a school worker shot seven times by a police officer, even live-streamed the aftermath on Facebook, the couple’s four-year-old daughter watching from the back seat of the car.

Eight years on from the financial crash, the economic mood of the nation was still sour. In November 2016, when the country went to the polls to decide upon Obama’s successor, 55 per cent of voters still thought the country was mired in recession. It had ended in June 2009, less than six months into the Obama presidency, but the micro contradicted the macro: millions of Americans were still contending with personal downturns.³⁸ For those who had not seen their standard of living rise over the past eight years, despite taking on multiple jobs to make ends meet, America did not feel great.

So many hopes were vested in the Obama presidency, from reviving the US economy to fixing Washington’s broken politics, from ending the unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to shuttering Guantánamo Bay, that a sense of anti-climax was perhaps unavoidable. Just as he had seemed fated to win the White House, so he also seemed doomed to disappoint once he occupied the Oval Office. From the moment in Chicago’s Grant Park when he uttered the words ‘Yes we can’ for the first time as president-elect, he was hobbled by unrealistically high expectations and an unreasonably obstructionist opposition party. Being the first black man to occupy the White House was always going to provide the opening line of his obituary. His presidency, it was often noted, was less historic than the fact he became president.

What the ‘doomed to disappointment’ argument fails to account for is that Obama entered office as the head of a unity government with a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate. The gridlock that beset six of his eight years as president was not preordained. Nor were those two shellackings in the midterm elections. He was the author of many of his problems, partly – and unexpectedly – because there were times when he was a poor communicator, especially when speaking without a script. His answers at press conferences could be meandering and ridiculously long-winded, and tended to appeal to the head rather than the heart. Often aloof, he lacked Clinton’s empathy. Often overly cerebral, he lacked Reagan’s gift for neat encapsulation.

For all the shortcomings and disappointments, his two terms in office are amongst the more consequential of the post-war years, not least because he helped rescue the US economy and saved the country from freefalling into a second Great Depression. Cars are still manufactured in Detroit, partly because of Obama’s bailout of the auto industry. The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act re-regulated the financial sector. Still, his administration was noticeably more pro-Wall Street than Main Street. Rather than targeting the big banks, he shielded them. ‘My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,’ he told a meeting at the White House involving 13 big bank CEOs. ‘I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you.’³⁹ An ethos of too big to assail.

Unemployment dropped over the course of his presidency from 10 per cent to 5 per cent, while the Dow Jones more than doubled. In the final year of his presidency, American household incomes actually enjoyed the largest gains on record. Yet that was not the widespread perception, especially in the old industrial heartland of the Rust Belt.

Obama became the first post-war president not to achieve an annual GDP growth rate of 3 per cent. Economic gains came to be unevenly spread. Income segregation became more pronounced. Between 2009 and 2013, 95 per cent of the income gains in America went to the top 1 per cent, an astonishing figure during a Democratic presidency.⁴⁰ An especial concern, as Obama himself acknowledged, was the decline in prime-age participation among male workers. In 1953, just 3 per cent of men between 25 and 54 were out of work. By 2016, it was 12 per cent.

Productivity had also slowed, which Obama blamed on a lack of public and private investment caused by the lingering effects of the financial crisis and the anti-tax ideology that had taken hold in Washington. Tellingly, however, he did not blame Ronald Reagan, or make a prolonged effort to change the anti-government zeitgeist.⁴¹

In enacting Obamacare, the president succeeded where Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton failed. More than 30 million uninsured Americans finally received coverage. But almost the same number remained uninsured, and the botched roll-out of the Obamacare website showed a disregard for the mechanics of government. Thereafter, his legislative accomplishments were fairly meagre. He failed to enact a comprehensive immigration reform or a cap-and-trade bill to combat climate change. Unable to breach the wall of Republican opposition, he was forced to rely on executive action to push his Clean Power Plan, the Paris climate-change accord and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which protected the children of illegal immigrants from deportation.

His reliance on reform through the stroke of a presidential pen meant much of his legacy was reversible, and could be wiped out by his successor’s signature. Nor did he build a Democratic Party that could advance his agenda or protect his legacy. His working assumption seemed to be that the Clinton machine would soon take over the Democratic National Committee, and a second President Clinton would safeguard Obamacare and his other reforms. Too often he relied on his political celebrity rather than emphasising the drudgery of party-building, a strange oversight for a one-time community organiser. The Obama Justice Department did little to challenge Republican gerrymandered districts – although, oddly, Eric Holder, his former attorney general, tried to do so after he left office.

On Capitol Hill, all of the Congresses of his presidency, from the 111th through to the 114th, were successively more divided and dysfunctional. Obama, who eschewed personal flattery and didn’t give much thought to the kind of small gestures that often could make such a big difference, was criticised for not doing enough to charm and cajole lawmakers.

Not a whisky-after-work sort of president – understandably, he preferred to have supper with his wife and daughters – even fellow Democrats complained about his standoffishness. Partly because of his cool temperament, his preternatural ‘No Drama Obama’ mode, often he was quiescent in the face of GOP obstructionism. Rather than rail, Truman-like, against a do-nothing Congress, he played it cool, mistakenly believing that rationality would be rewarded. Nor did he take on the Tea Party, and even avoided using the term. When Mitch McConnell blocked his doomed Merrick Garland for almost a year, Obama was far too supine.

‘I understand the posture they’re taking right now,’ he said. ‘I get the politics of it. I’m sure they’re under enormous pressure from their base ... and I’ve told them I’m sympathetic.’⁴² His response to the victory of Donald Trump, while magnanimous, was also typically phlegmatic. ‘The path that this country has taken has never been a straight line,’ he said dispassionately in the Rose Garden the day after the election, departing from the beloved liberal narrative of continual progress. ‘We zig and zag and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back. And that’s okay.’⁴³

Placing himself on the right side of history all too often became a substitute for battling to alter its course. Sometimes, on issues such as climate change, it was as if he was virtue-signalling to future generations. Winning arguments and claiming moral victories often seemed just as important to him as winning elections and enacting legislation.

Some critics, like the Yale professor David Bromwich, suggest his lack of fight stemmed from everything coming so easily to him – from the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, even though he hadn’t ever authored a signed paper for this academic journal, to the presidency of the United States, even though he had only been a senator for three years. The black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, noting how Obama’s formative years had been spent in Hawaii, America’s most racially integrated state, claimed he had not been exposed to the same level of discrimination as, say, a black kid growing up in Alabama, Mississippi or even Illinois. As a result, he underestimated the forces seeking to destroy his presidency.

Obama was never credulous enough to think he could usher in a post-racial America, a term he deliberately avoided. ‘I never bought into the notion that by electing me, somehow we were entering into a post-racial period,’ he told Rolling Stone.

The racial stalemate he spoke of in his Philadelphia race speech in 2008, which saved his imperilled candidacy when the sermons of his controversial fire-and-brimstone pastor, Jeremiah Wright, sounded like they may condemn him, was evident still when he exited the White House. Yet a recurring problem of his eight years in office was that he shied away from delivering a presidential version of the extraordinary speech that helped make him president. Obama was the poet laureate of his own presidency, but his rhetorical gifts were seldom brought to bear on race.

As for the birtherism of Donald Trump, Obama publicly laughed it off, and gave the impression of not taking it seriously. ‘This all dates back to when we were growing up together in Kenya,’ he joked on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. ‘When we finally moved to America, I thought it’d be over.’ Dealing with racism through humour, however, trivialised extreme views. For Obama, irony was a means both of deflection and avoidance.

Even if he was never going to be truly transformational on the vexed question of race, the hope was he might be transitional: the leader who oversaw the peaceable demographic shift from a still strongly Caucasian America where 62.6 per cent of US citizens were white to a more ethnically diffuse nation. Four years into his presidency, for the first time in American history, a majority of newborn babies were from racial or ethnic minorities. Likewise, a record number of Americans – 12 per cent – married partners from a different race.⁴⁴ Instead, he handed over power to a white nationalist birther who played the race card from the bottom of the pack. Rather than bringing about the deracialisation of America, Obama’s presidency actually contributed to its re-racialisation.

Obama’s attempts to close the partisan rift also failed. Over the course of his presidency, the partisan divide became starker on every major issue. About three-quarters of Democrats approved of Obamacare, while 85 per cent of Republicans disapproved. In 2008, there was a 27 percentage-point gap between Obama and McCain supporters on whether it was more important to protect gun rights than limit gun ownership. By 2016, the gap between Clinton and Trump supporters on guns had surged to 70 per cent.

Climate change was another topic where the Democrats and Republicans grew further apart. Immigration too. Twice as many Democrats thought immigrants strengthened the country as Republicans, whereas at the turn of the century attitudes had been much the same.⁴⁵ Here again, the president’s race was an important factor. If Obama was strongly associated with an issue, research by Michael Tesler of Brown University revealed, it became significantly more ‘racialised’ in the eyes of voters. This was especially true of the Affordable Care Act, the reform that bore his name. Voters even reacted differently to pictures of the Obamas’ pet dog, Bo, after they learned the identity of its master.⁴⁶ The president’s skin colour went a long way to explaining why he was such a polarising figure, with an 81 per cent average approval rating from Democrats, but just a 14 per cent average approval rating from Republicans.⁴⁷ Never before had there been such a partisan gap.

In foreign affairs, he closed the CIA’s enhanced interrogation programme on his first full day in office, hunted down Osama bin Laden, revived US support for international cooperation and multilateralism and, after the Bush years, rehabilitated the rules-based international order. His landmark Cairo speech was a long overdue attempt to reassure the Muslim world that America was not engaged in a crusade against Islam.⁴⁸ His ‘Asia Pivot’, officially announced in a speech before the Australian parliament in November 2011, was an attempt to disentangle America from wars in the Middle East.

Those around the world who disparaged George W. Bush embraced the new president. The post-Iraq mood of anti-Americanism dissipated. In the United Kingdom, America’s closest ally, confidence in the US president leapt from 16 per cent under Bush in 2008 to 86 per cent for Obama in 2009.⁴⁹

However, he was by no means as saintly as the ridiculously early award of a Nobel Peace Prize implied. Of the estimated 3,797 people killed during his drone campaign, the cornerstone of his counter-terrorism strategy, more than 300 were civilians. ‘Turns out I’m really good at killing people,’ he reportedly told aides, sounding uncharacteristically trigger-happy and gung-ho. ‘Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.’⁵⁰ Obama ordered more than 500 drone strikes, compared with Bush’s 52. These extrajudicial killings obviated the need for waterboarding or enhanced interrogation.

Obama went a long way towards fulfilling his promise of withdrawing US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan – the number of troops dropped from 180,000 at the start of his presidency to around 15,000 at the end. But it was a drawdown rather than a complete disentanglement, which opened him up to criticism from both hawks and doves. His failure to leave behind a residual force in Iraq directly contributed to the rise of ISIS and its capture of Mosul, then the country’s third-largest city. But he failed to extricate US forces from the conflict in Afghanistan, America’s longest war. This meant Donald Trump could simultaneously claim Obama was both feeble and feckless for leaving Iraq vulnerable to the threat from ISIS but not delivering complete disengagement.

Though Obama made much of the world admire America again, he had less success in making other countries bend to his will. Under his leadership, the United States lost much of its fear factor, partly because he was so reasonable, and partly because he was so reluctant to pursue a militarised foreign policy. In Syria and Ukraine, Putin ran rings around him. Bashar al-Assad, after not being punished for crossing Obama’s red line, again poisoned his own people with nerve gas. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a constant and bolshie irritant, regularly flouted Obama’s demands to stop settlement construction in occupied territory.

Even close allies were unafraid to defy him, as Britain, Australia, South Korea and Germany did when they joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a Chinese initiative intended to rival the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, two of the post-war Bretton Woods institutions upon which Pax Americana had been built. Obama’s first Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, was alarmed by the stampede to join the new Chinese institution. ‘This past month,’ he wrote in April 2015, ‘may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system.’⁵¹

Towards the end of his presidency, Obama told a group of historians, ‘I didn’t make any big mistakes.’⁵² His ‘Don’t do stupid shit’ approach had, in his mind at least, been a success. Yet the Syria conflict, where by the end of his presidency 400,000 people had been killed, was a terrible blight on his record. In Libya, ‘leading from behind’, as an administration official described America’s role in the coalition, was an unusually weak posture for the world’s most powerful nation. Then, after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, the United States remained a bystander to the chaos that followed, which created another safe haven for ISIS and led tens of thousands of refugees to take to the treacherous waters of the Mediterranean in the hope of reaching Europe. Both instances showed how Obama had overlearned the mistakes of Iraq, which led him to commit unforced errors of his own. Too much of his foreign policy was informed by an exaggerated sense of the limits of American power. To the extent there was an ‘Obama doctrine’, it was essentially a series of correctives for the Bush years, rather than a positive vision of global leadership. Much like Bill Clinton, Obama did not solve America’s post-Cold War strategic dilemma, of how and where to project its power.

A searing rebuke of his approach came from his first Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. ‘Great nations need organising principles,’ she said, when asked about the Obama doctrine. ‘“Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organising principle.’⁵³ Even more damning was Vali Nasr, an academic who had served during the first term of the Obama administration and watched US influence wane in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and even Africa. ‘We have gone from leading everywhere, to leading nowhere.’⁵⁴

His main corrective, of ending America’s long and costly wars, was entirely understandable given the disaster of Iraq, but after eight years of disengagement Americans became wary of any kind of interventionism. This made it easier for Donald Trump to prosecute his case for America First neo-isolationism.

Obama’s trade policy, centred upon the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a move intended to hem in China, also inadvertently played into Trump’s hands. Working-class Americans rejected the argument that trade deals fuelled the US economy by opening up new markets. Instead, roughly half of voters associated globalisation with lower wages and fewer jobs. The slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, which Trump tried to trademark just weeks after Obama’s re-election in 2012, had more resonance when about half of the country thought its global power had declined over the past decade.⁵⁵

How did Obama change the office itself? After an eight-year pause during the Bush years, Obama revived the performative presidency. By the time he entered the White House he was not merely a global celebrity but an international cultural icon immortalised in that ‘HOPE’ portrait. From early on, he understood the power of his fame, and how it accrued political capital. His celebrity, and the fear it could be fleeting, played a significant part in his decision to run for the presidency in 2008, despite having served for just three years as a senator. In the Democratic primaries, his stardom also helped him dispatch Hillary Clinton, a politician with the name recognition but not the charisma of her husband.

Obama also understood media spectacle. Oprah Winfrey became his most prominent surrogate. When he delivered his acceptance speech before 80,000 people at the Mile High Stadium in Denver, the backdrop was a columned mock-up of the White House colonnade. The McCain campaign, trying to turn his global megastardom against him, put out an attack ad simply called ‘Celeb’, which intercut footage of Obama being fêted by a million-strong crowd in Berlin with images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. ‘He’s the biggest celebrity in the world,’ the ad noted. ‘But is he ready to lead?’ Even in post-9/11 America, however, the question of whether voters wanted a commander-in-chief rather than a celebrity-in-chief was by no means clear-cut. The McCain ad inadvertently showcased one of Obama’s strengths.

Whereas many of his predecessors looked like daggy dads dancing at a disco when they ventured into the world of entertainment, Obama made the transition effortlessly, whether mimicking Al Green, boogieing with Ellen DeGeneres, appearing on The View or driving around the White House grounds cracking jokes with Jerry Seinfeld on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

To some long-time Washington watchers, it resembled a high-end version of Keeping up with the Kardashians. ‘The Obama White House was the biggest, splashiest reality show ever,’ wrote Obama biographer Jonathan Alter, ‘lacking in tacky or embarrassing drama, perhaps, but still entertaining.’⁵⁶ Obama became another president who understood that politics had become pop culture, but who underperformed in the back-office aspects of the job.

By putting himself at the head of the social-media revolution, Obama took the celebrity presidency into the digital age, which was transformative. Whereas Bill Clinton had sent just two emails during his time in office, the Obama White House was downright promiscuous, joining Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, iTunes, Snapchat, YouTube, Periscope, Instagram, Pinterest, Friendster and Myspace. It gave the presidency online omnipresence. Racking up millions of followers, friends and likes, he became the country’s most influential influencer. He used social media to persuade more young people to sign up to Obamacare and to think more seriously about climate change. It made sense to use the tools at his disposal. Yet in the absence of legislative action, it could often look like presidential clicktivism.

This online presence vested the presidency with new powers. His reliance on digital engagement allowed him to bypass the traditional media, and established the White House as a media outlet in its own right. This further weakened traditional news organisations at a time when they were already reeling. It also meant more of the national conservation played out online, although in ways that often accentuated political separatism. The use of micro-targeting – the tailoring of special messages for specific audiences – aggravated polarisation, not least because its primary intention was to mobilise existing voters rather than reach out to new ones.

There was a hipness about the Obama years that challenged the old adage ‘Washington is Hollywood for ugly people’, a descendant of the line ‘Politics is showbusiness for ugly people’. The most photogenic First Family since the Kennedys, the Obama White House became a Black Camelot. Even the nation’s sleepy capital felt fashionable, with ‘permanent Washington’, the commentators and journalists who make up its chattering class, starting to eye itself as more of a cultural player. The annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which became more glamorous and self-congratulatory, was a case in point. ‘Nerd Prom’, as it was dubbed, transformed itself into a night of a thousand stars, with a red-carpet celebrity parade beforehand, covered live on CNN, and swanky parties afterwards, one of which was hosted, Oscars-style, by Vanity Fair. When Stephen Colbert’s roast of George W. Bush became a viral hit, it turned the dinner into a pop-culture calendar event, complete with hashtag hieroglyphics (#nerdprom). Comedians invited to speak no longer minded bombing in the ballroom, so long as they lit up Twitter.

By 2011 the dinner had become sufficiently glitzy to attract Donald Trump, who came as a guest of The Washington Post, a paper he came to hate. His primary role that night, however, was to be a comic prop for the president. Just days after releasing his birth certificate to the press, Obama mercilessly roasted the untitled head of the Birther Movement, and even flashed on the big screen a picture of how a Trump White House might look, with its ridiculous golden Greek columns, three extra floors and Vegas-style hoarding inscribed with the billionaire’s name.

Obama’s speech could also be interpreted as an attempt to re-erect a barrier between celebrity and politics, to remind people of the gulf in responsibility between a real-life president and a reality TV tycoon. He teased Trump about his ‘credentials and breadth of experience’, citing an irksome decision on an edition of Celebrity Apprentice – whether or not to fire the B-list actor Gary Busey. Twenty-four hours later, Obama’s mocking words were brought into even sharper relief when he stepped solemnly before the cameras in the Grand Foyer of the White House to announce the death of Osama bin Laden.

His attempt at character assassination, however, blew up in his face. Even though Trump has since denied the Correspondents’ Dinner was the moment he decided to run for the presidency, it surely aroused a desire for revenge. Moreover, it elevated his status as America’s foremost anti-Obama, a useful position to occupy in a Republican Party increasingly defined by its hatred of the president.

The president’s mockery of Trump continued all the way up until Election Day in 2016. Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, he took part in a regular segment where celebrities read out insults posted on Twitter. ‘President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States,’ he read, before adding the name of its author, ‘@realDonaldTrump’. Then Obama delivered his response, ending, rapper-like, by dropping his phone to the floor. ‘Well, @realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as president.’⁵⁷

In the final months of the Obama presidency, as the battle to succeed him reached its unseemly climax, two weaknesses from his time in office intersected over Russia’s covert operation to help Donald Trump reach the White House. The first was the president’s lack of menace on the international stage, especially when it came to confronting Vladimir Putin. The second was the president’s failure to extract concessions from his Republican tormentors on Capitol Hill.

In early September, when he came face-to-face with Putin at the G20 summit in China, Obama glared at the Russian president as he warned him to ‘cut it out’ and warned of ‘serious consequences’ if he didn’t. Yet Putin, who had already outmanoeuvred the US president in Syria and Crimea, was undeterred. The Kremlin’s meddling continued unabated. Then, when the White House sought bipartisan support to send a letter to state governors warning them to protect election infrastructure from Russian dirty tricks, the Republican congressional leadership refused, claiming it was a naked partisan play.

Not wanting to intervene so dramatically at the late stage of an election he thought his friend was going to win, Obama left it to his intelligence chiefs to sound the warning. Rather than hold a news conference, however, they did so with a written statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. It landed in our inboxes at around 3.30 on a Friday afternoon, often the time in Washington when unwelcome news get buried.

In any case, 30 minutes later came a far more extraordinary October surprise: the release by The Washington Post of the Access Hollywood tape. On that same, news-packed Friday afternoon, WikiLeaks started tweeting links to emails hacked by Russian operatives from the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta. But even though they contained revelations embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, the tape of Trump gleefully using the words ‘Grab ‘em by the pussy’ would surely kill off his candidacy. In what Barack Obama described that month as the ‘relay race’ of the presidency, it now looked certain he would hand over the baton to America’s first female president. The election, most of us thought, was as good as over.

To Chicago we headed for the valedictory speech of his presidency, which he delivered in a cavernous convention centre close to the South Side streets where Obama had worked as a community organiser. For those who worked on his presidential campaign, this Windy City homecoming was also a reunion. Onto the windows of the neighbouring hotel, many of his former staffers taped posters with the words ‘Fired Up, Ready to Go’, the chant the then Illinois senator first heard on the campaign trail in Greenwood, South Carolina, from Edith S. Childs, an elderly African-American woman with a gold tooth and a giant Sunday-best purple hat, who had come to hear him speak on a day when his morale had been sagging.

Reflecting on his eight years in office, he ticked off his legacy items and spoke for one last time about striving for a more perfect union. Then he delivered perhaps his most honest assessment of the polarised state of the nation: of the ‘great sorting’ which had led people to seek refuge in their own ‘bubbles’; of ‘the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste’; of the rise of ‘naked partisanship’; of the problems posed by ‘economic and regional stratification’. There was a plea for politicians to recognise ‘a common baseline of facts’, and a warning against climate-change denialism.

His chief concern, though, was for the health of American democracy. Invoking George Washington, who had warned in his farewell address about the threat from political factionalism, he spoke of voting rates among the lowest in advanced economies, the corrupting impact of money, the dysfunction of Congress and the need for democratic renewal. Then, for one final time, he reprised his greatest rhetorical hit, with a retrospective change of tense:

‘Yes we can. Yes we did. Yes we can.’

It was the sort of contemplative speech that demanded lengthy debate and consideration. In that cerebral way of his, carefully weighing competing arguments, Obama tried to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump, albeit without ever mentioning his name. It was hard, though, to concentrate that night, still less absorb the full import of his earnest message.

For just as Obama was about to speak, BuzzFeed released the secret dossier that many news organisations, including the BBC, had gained access to before the election but had never managed to corroborate. Compiled by a former British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, it sketched out a possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to seize the US presidency. Some of its X-rated details made the Starr Report sound pedestrian, not least the allegation, vehemently and plausibly denied by Donald Trump, that prostitutes had urinated in front of him at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow to defile a bed used by the Obamas during a presidential visit. Nothing spoke of the jolting transition we were about to witness more than Obama talking about his perfect union while journalists on the press riser at the back were trading lavatorial jokes about golden showers. A presidency that for Barack Obama had started out atop a mighty mountain ended in the trash-strewn valley.