Few are more flattering of the Obama presidency than liberal writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Almost everything that comes out of his pen and out of his mouth has been complimentary if not idolatrous. When that former president and first lady left the White House, Coates wrote breathlessly that the pair were “rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity.”
The Coates compliments then, make the subsequent Coates criticism especially notable. Talking with Jamie Weinstein of National Review, Coates slammed Obama for making Wall Street speech money. “It’s bad to take however [large an] amount of money, $200,000, whatever it was, you know what I mean, to talk on Wall Street,” Coates said, “I just don’t think you have to do that.”
Coates is right: Obama has cashed out on his presidential legacy, monetizing hope and change. A single speech costs about $400,000 and, so far, he has given at least three to big Wall Street banks. An initial post-presidency public offering of sorts, that racket has made Obama a millionaire in less than a year.
No president should go penniless of course, and Obama has obligations as a father and a husband. But he isn’t destitute. Post presidency perks include an annual $200,000 pension, free medical care, and lifelong security services. If that won’t cover the bills, Obama could write a book (or live from the royalties of his earlier books) or become a professor or apply his liberal genius a million other ways. Obama could do anything, and conservatives couldn’t complain, so long as he didn’t take money from a corporate special interest.
It’s pretty simple. Presidents must make decisions for the benefit of the country, not their nest eggs. Cashing an industry check after the fact raises questions about whether Obama was governing impartially.
No one should be surprised. Obama packed the White House with bankers, lobbyists, and executives from Wall Street. At one point, the Oval Office looked like the break room of Goldman Sachs, with White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel calling the shots. Now the old colleagues of his former employees are paying him to talk.
It’s not like Obama didn’t bend over backwards to help them. While the government meddled more in Wall Street after Obama signed the Dodd-Frank regulation into law, that didn’t hurt the big banks. They even said as much.
After the 2016 election, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon rushed to the regulations’ defense, saying at a banking conference that “we’re not for wholesale throwing out Dodd-Frank.” How could a banker be okay with increased banking regulations? Because his bank is big, allowing his corporation to survive while the law strangles the competition.
No one knows what is in Obama’s heart, just what’s in his bank account. The more speeches he gives, the more he makes all that hope and change rhetoric—that modern gospel of equality—sound like another sales pitch.
