We shouldn’t doubt that President Obama will read the new book by the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait. The title alone will be enough to grab him: Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail. He will read it slowly and carefully, Montblanc at the ready to underline notable passages and jot down marginalia (How true! and Excellent point! and Tell it to Michelle!).
And when he puts it aside he will feel just a little bit uneasy. Maybe he’ll even ink a note on the final page: This is the best they can do?
Chait writes about politics for New York magazine, and in the crowded imperial court of Obama’s journalists he stands apart—the courtier’s courtier, the boot-licker against whom all boot-licking must be measured. “I am not always right,” he writes at the close of his book, with unusual understatement. “But Barack Obama is a subject I believe I got right, right from the beginning.”
From the start, he says, he saw that Obama had “a keen mind, oratorical gifts, and just the right combination of idealism and skeptical, analytic thinking.” (Obama nods, reaches for the Montblanc.) That Jonathan Chait, he likes him some Barack Obama.
So his book is worth a lingering look, if not much more. It will stand for now as the most comprehensive, full-dress brief for the achievements of Barack Obama—such as they are. Of course, what they are, and how many they are, is the subject of hot dispute, and Chait is impatient with anyone who thinks they were less than dazzling, or “transformative,” to use the tired language of Obama and his acolytes. Chait’s original subtitle was about how Obama “transformed America.”
Audacity, Chait writes, “is a book that makes an argument.” It’s a hard argument to follow, even when we know the conclusion in advance. Partly this is owing to his promiscuous use of the anecdotes, statistics, and social-science findings that he insists are evidence for his proposition. His first chapter, for instance, makes the case that “Obama’s appearance on the national scene made conservatism obsessed with race.” In support of this assertion he immediately produces several revolting anecdotes in which various people made racist statements in public. Only one of these people is identified as a Republican, but a reader will feel that he is to take their stories as representative of the conservative obsession.
Or maybe not. For the next paragraph begins: “These episodes should not be taken as specimens of the authentic Republican base.” Then why include them? Apparently, the stories demonstrated “white racial panic” because the racists involved publicly denied they were racist. This jolting passage concludes with Chait going psychological: “In their mind, [conservatives] find themselves victimized once by the hoodlums and welfare moochers closing in all around them, and again by a society accusing them of bigotry.”
Anecdotes are only one means by which Chait is able to rummage through the mind of Republicans. Like 99.999 percent of published writers, he swallows stack after stack of dubious social science without a hint of skepticism, so long as he thinks it suits his argument. In the first half of his chapter on race he suggests that race relations in the United States have seldom been so fraught: We live in a “hyperracialized era,” thanks to the white racism inadvertently touched off by Obama. To support this contention, he cites “data” produced by a pair of left-wing political scientists. The findings have been debunked by other social scientists, also on the left. (Pretty much everyone in social science is on the left.) They point out that the design of the studies conflates ordinary conservative political beliefs with racism, making the conclusion simply a function of the premise.
Indeed, by the end of the chapter, Chait is arguing against the argument he made at the start. “Conditions [between the races, presumably] were not really getting worse. They were actually getting better.” His explanation: Over eight years, Obama has led us between “the despair of the left and the obliviousness of the right.” As evidence he cites the debunking social science that is often used to refute the data he cited earlier. Whatevs! All political writers have a weakness for the sweeping generalization. (How’s that for a sweeping generalization?) Fewer have the gift of making a sweeping generalization and then, within living memory of the first sweeping generalization, make a sweeping generalization that contradicts the earlier one. He keeps a reader on his toes.
It’s possible that Chait’s argument is hard to follow because of its subtlety and fine distinctions, but I don’t think so. Other chapters sink into pure propaganda and give the game away. His chapter on Obamacare—titled, so help me God, “Obama Cares”—is a mishmash of false assertion and excuse-making. Like other Obamacare champions, Chait wants to persuade readers that the Affordable Care Act is a pragmatic, incremental, even conservative adjustment that gently redirects the health care system down a fairer and more sustainable path. At the same time, it is utterly revolutionary—”one of the most ambitious and successful social reforms in the history of the United States.” Transformative, you could say.
Well, we shall soon see. Chait glides over the public’s widespread unhappiness with the law and waves off the recent surge in health care costs and the deadly rise in insurance premiums. The creepy, authoritarian manner in which the legislation was passed and is now being enforced is evidence of Obama’s “moral resolve.” Chait litters his chapter with nakedly false statements like this: “as insurance goes, the exchange plans have turned out to be reliable and affordable.” And this: “Even the most conservative elements within the Republican party deemed [Mitt] Romney’s health care [plan] a sound basis for a national plan.” And this: “In the interim [Obama-care] is likely to begin wreaking havoc with the health care sector—raising insurance premiums, health care costs, and public anxieties.”
Wait! That last statement is actually true. But it comes from the writer (and Obamacare critic) Yuval Levin, who said it in 2010. Chait quotes Levin mockingly, as though events have proved him wrong rather than right. Later he quotes Levin “gasping” the following prediction, also in 2010: “The apparent decision to push Obamacare through reconciliation gives new meaning to the term political suicide.” Levin was right about that too.
Obama, of course, was reelected after Obamacare passed, and I suppose this is why Chait thinks it hasn’t proved politically suicidal. To the contrary, he ends the book on a triumphalist, even Caesarean, note.
“The Obama presidency completed the tectonic shifts that had begun in the 1960s,” he writes. Under Obama the Republican coalition had been rendered a weak and shrinking anachronism. “The Obama presidency was able not only to advance the interests of its new and growing coalition but also to represent its values: humane, pragmatic, open to evidence and science, and welcoming to outsiders and diverse perspectives.”
Early reviewers’ copies of Audacity arrived before the election, and reading these passages after November 8 I grimaced a little, and not simply because of their vanity and self-congratulation. As a fellow hack I sympathized with the amount of rewriting Chait would have to do; the book is shot through with the assumption that Obama’s designated heir would also be his successor in the White House, fortifying his achievements.
As it happens, the horror of the Trump ascendancy has forced him to rewrite a little, but not enough. In fact, Trump’s victory and the repudiation of Obama’s heir only reinforce Chait’s argument, because . . . because it just does.
“Trump’s surprise victory gave [Republicans] a last-gasp chance to stave off defeat,” he writes. “Conservative Republicans won power but they lost the future.” That’s a hard statement to disprove. We won’t know whether he’s correct until the future gets here. We’ll have a long wait.
Chait’s argument for the durability and ultimate triumph of Obama’s coalition rests on the familiar belief that demography is destiny, though it often isn’t. He also has to ignore the electoral devastation suffered by the party Obama has led since 2008. Not since the 1920s, when the country was aswoon over the manly Coolidge, have Democrats been so weak at the state, local, and national levels. We don’t need to wait for the future to predict that a coalition built around the peculiar qualities of a single politician isn’t likely to last.
Not transformative, in other words. But it’s the best they can do.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
