In late September what Vanity Fair called the “Ultimate Exit Interview” was far from ultimate—rather it fell among the first of many. Timed to coincide with the first presidential debate, before Donald Trump’s lewd tape leaked or Comey’s blasted letter, President Barack Obama and his favorite historian Doris Kearns Goodwin dwelled on a legacy that was then just taking shape and widely believed to be destined for at least a four-year extension. Since then, everything’s changed.
These days, Obama looks back through a darker veil. In post-election exit interviews with a fawning Jann Wenner, NPR’s Steve Inskeep, The Daily Show‘s Trevor Noah, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the outgoing president has lately attempted self-awareness with mixed results.
These greatest hits from fallen-hero Obama stand out as signals of what shape his legacy will really take. Takeaways from the autopsy interviews and the Democrat’s advice for President-elect Trump altogether suggest that lame-duck Obama—more vulnerable than ever to historical criticism but with a public image still unpunctured by Democrats’ failure—is, at long last, peak Obama.
1. First, with Jann Wenner, he seemed to seek solace in his rockstar status.
Wenner offered to postpone his interview, scheduled for November 9, because, “This had to be one of the worst days of Obama’s political life, and he hadn’t had a moment to reflect on it, to be angry or to accept it.” But the intrepid commander in chief went along as planned, because, after all, as Wenner points out: “He viewed Rolling Stone readers as part of his base.”
Rolling Stone—its cover graced in turn by naked starlets, rockers flipping the bird, smiling Pope Francis, and grinning President Obama—is a direct line to the best of the Obama coalition.
Obama, we can assume, welcomed the opportunity to play to “his base” as a rockstar relishes performing for his most loyally-obsessed fans.
2. His coolness, after all, knows no bounds.
This one is not technically an exit interview, nor were the interviews within it technically recorded post-election. Ta-Nehisi Coates has penned a sprawling retrospective analysis of race and the Obama years. In “My President Was Black,” the cover story of the latest issue of the Atlantic, Coates strings together material compiled over multiple interviews, which he uses to support a thesis that yes, it is all about race.
Many of Obama’s intimate exchanges with Coates do, at face value, diverge from Coates’s central message. Obama considers but diminishes the decisive role of racism in Donald Trump’s ascent. But none can deny Coates is onto something timelessly true—the stuff of legacy—when it comes to the outgoing president’s unshakable coolness, his enduring status within pop culture:
3. Timeless advice: Do as I say, not as I’ve done.
Monday morning, in an exit interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep—more composed than Wenner’s morning-after one-on-one and more controlled than Coates’s compilation—Obama cautioned the incoming administration against following his well-worn precedents in federal overreach.
Asked whether incoming President Trump should take up the Obama playbook, Obama advised against it. Unironically.
“My suggestion to the president-elect is, you know, going through the legislative process is always better, in part because it’s harder to undo.” Come to think of it, that’s fairly generous advice from President Obama, who also noted he’s expecting to see so much of his work undone.
Take overbearing agency rules, for instance. “[I]f he wants to reverse some of those rules, that’s part of the democratic process. That’s, you know, why I tell people to vote because it turns out elections mean something.”
One lasting inheritance, however, will be the expansion of executive power, Inskeep said. “You used your power in certain ways, and even in ways that you’d suggested in the past might be beyond your authority.”
To which Obama countered, “Well, no, I don’t think I’ve done that.”
Inskeep, who got in a few toughies, still had to concede Obama’s always gonna be the coolest guy in the room.
4. A touch of hypocrisy: He told Wenner “Fox News in every bar” is to blame.
The next-day autopsy Obama gave Wenner was equal parts Democrats’ insufficient ground game and Tucker Carlson’s Falsehoods. “Part of it is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country,” he said. Folks actually familiar with the middle-American bar scene challenged this claim, and more rejected the unseemly insinuation that a single TV network brainwashing free-thinking citizens can explain away election results.
“We spend a lot of time focused on international policy and national policy and less time being on the ground. And when we’re on the ground, we do well. This is why I won Iowa,” Obama also said. But he went on to double down on media’s sealing Democrats’ failure to reach voters in middle America. Rather than economically-driven, Trump’s victory in Michigan comes down to “a cultural issue. And a communications issue,” he said.
“[W]hatever policy prescriptions that we’ve been proposing don’t reach, are not heard, by the folks in these communities,” he said. “And what they do hear is Obama or Hillary are trying to take away their guns or they disrespect you.” These same folks of course might also have heard certain policy prescriptions, with or without oppositional spin, and made the natural inference that, whether or not Obama or Hillary deplore you personally, their shared politics fall short of preserving constitutional self-government.
5. And yet, favorable “storytelling,” a future-focused President Obama believes, will help Dems defeat reality.
His what’s-next response to Wenner included a lofty to plan to “train …the next generation” with a finer-tuned narrative.
Democrats need to tell a new story, complete with fresh “facts,” that will reunite the nation. Some assembly required.
6. Confessional advice: No one should take this job for “the perks.”
“So aside from any particular issue, the president needs to recognize that this is not about you. This is not about your power, your position or the perks, the Marine band,” he said, reupping a somber reflection on the ultimately unfulfilling trappings of fame from an oddly confessional NPR interview last year.
7. More confessional advice: Stay good looking.
Obama also discussed the delicate subject of racial identity with Daily Show host Trevor Noah. He reiterated his belief that “there’s goodness in the majority of people” and an incumbent faith—reinforced by his two-time election to the highest office in the land—that he could “win them over.”
With Noah, we also won insight into Obama’s evolving self-image. Wistful and unabashed about his vanity, he told the 32-year-old talk show host: “I will say that I resent how young and good looking you are ’cause I used to think of myself in those terms, and it’s been downhill for quite some time.” (Sad.)
But when it comes to the legacy of Obama’s handsomeness, the devotion of elite creatives already staves off decay—as the poet said: And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, / When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.
