Both Sides Are Using Democratic Politicians As Whataboutism Punching Bags And It Needs To Stop
There is a particular kind of argument that has become so common in American political discourse that most people do not even notice it anymore. It hides in plain sight. It shows up in comment sections, in dinner table arguments, in cable news panels, in social media threads that spiral out of control at two in the morning. It is the “what if Obama did this” argument, and it is one of the most intellectually dishonest, politically useless, and frankly exhausting rhetorical habits in modern American life. And the most maddening part of it? Both sides do it. Not in the lazy, false-equivalence way that political pundits love to deploy that phrase to avoid taking a real stance on anything. No, genuinely, actually, both sides of the political aisle have developed a strange codependent relationship with the specter of Democratic politicians past, and it is making every single political conversation we try to have worse.
Let us start by being clear about what whataboutism actually is, because the word gets thrown around a lot without people really sitting with what it means. Whataboutism is a deflection tactic. It is what you do when someone raises a legitimate criticism or concern and instead of engaging with that concern honestly, you pivot to pointing at someone else and saying “well what about what they did?” The goal is not to actually address the issue at hand. The goal is to muddy the waters, to create a sense of moral equivalence where none may exist, to exhaust your opponent into dropping the subject entirely. It is a rhetorical escape hatch. And historically it was associated with Soviet propaganda, where officials responding to criticism of the USSR would deflect by pointing to American racism, American poverty, American foreign policy. The content of the deflection might sometimes have been factually accurate. That was never really the point. The point was to avoid accountability by changing the subject.
Now here is where it gets interesting. For years, the political left in America has correctly identified whataboutism as a bad-faith tactic used primarily by conservatives and right-wing media figures. And they were not wrong to call it out. When someone raises a serious concern about a current policy or a current leader and the immediate response is to drag up something Bill Clinton did in the nineties, or to invoke Hillary’s emails for the thousandth time, or to bring up some obscure thing Jimmy Carter said in 1978, that is absolutely whataboutism. It is deflection dressed up as debate. It is bad argumentation masquerading as political insight. Conservatives have used this tactic aggressively and relentlessly, and it deserves every bit of criticism it has received.
But here is the thing that a lot of people on the left do not want to hear. They do it too. They do it constantly. And the specific flavor of whataboutism that has become most popular among liberals and left-leaning political commentators is the “what if Obama did this” formulation. You know exactly what this looks like. A Republican politician or a conservative figure does something, makes a policy decision, takes an action, says something controversial, and rather than engaging with that specific thing on its own terms, the response becomes “can you imagine the outrage if Obama had done this?” Or “if Obama had done half of what this guy has done, they would have called for his impeachment.” Or some variation thereof. It is everywhere. It is relentless. And it is, without question, whataboutism. Liberal whataboutism. Left-coded whataboutism. But whataboutism nonetheless.
Now, someone reading this is already formulating their objection. They are thinking, “but it’s different when we do it, because we’re pointing out hypocrisy.” And yes, hypocrisy is a real thing worth calling out. Political hypocrisy absolutely exists, it is corrosive to democratic norms, and there is genuine value in holding people accountable for applying different standards based on who is in power. That is a legitimate point. But there is a critical difference between calling out hypocrisy as part of a larger substantive argument and using the specter of a past president as your primary mode of political engagement. When “what if Obama did this” becomes the entirety of your critique rather than a supporting observation within a broader argument, you have stopped doing political analysis and started doing deflection. You have stopped talking about the actual thing that is happening right now and started using a former president as a rhetorical prop. You have, in other words, done exactly what you accuse the other side of doing.
There is also something worth sitting with here about what this habit actually accomplishes. When you lead with “what if Obama did this,” you are not persuading anyone. The people who would be outraged if Obama had done this are not suddenly going to have an epiphany and change their minds because you pointed out the inconsistency. They already know. They either do not care, or they have constructed some internal justification for why the two situations are different. You are not breaking through to them. You are not shifting the conversation. You are not building a coalition or making a movement stronger. You are essentially performing outrage for an audience that already agrees with you. You are preaching to a choir that is already fully aware of the hymn. The “what if Obama” framing does not advance anything. It just feels good to say it, and feeling good is not the same thing as being effective.
But let us go further, because this problem is actually bigger than just the left doing it. What is truly bizarre and uniquely stupid about the current state of American political discourse is that both parties, conservative and liberal alike, have settled on Democratic politicians as their go-to whataboutism examples. Think about that for a second. Conservatives use Democratic politicians to deflect from criticism of Republicans. Liberals use Democratic politicians to highlight Republican hypocrisy. Everybody is talking about Democratic politicians. Obama, Clinton, Carter, Biden, Hillary who never even served as president but somehow became a permanent rhetorical fixture in American politics. These figures have become the universal political punching bag, the shared reference point that both sides reach for when they want to make a point, score a point, or avoid a point altogether.
Conservatives bring up Obama’s drone strikes when people criticize Republican military policy. They bring up Bill Clinton’s welfare reform when people criticize Republican economic policy. They bring up Democratic governors’ COVID restrictions when people criticize Republican pandemic responses. They bring up Hunter Biden when people talk about Donald Trump’s legal troubles. They bring up Hillary’s emails when literally anything involving questions of government misconduct comes up. In every single case, the rhetorical function is the same: here is a Democrat who did something bad or questionable, therefore the thing we are currently criticizing is either not that bad or is somehow equivalent. It is deflection. It is avoidance. It is changing the subject while appearing to engage with the subject.
And then liberals turn around and do almost the exact same thing with the exact same people, just flipped. They bring up how Obama was scrutinized for wearing a tan suit when they want to make a point about media bias. They bring up how Obama could not get a Supreme Court nominee confirmed in an election year when they want to talk about Senate procedural norms. They bring up what would have happened to Obama if he had behaved the way subsequent Republican presidents have behaved, as a way of demonstrating double standards. Again, the rhetorical function is essentially the same: here is a Democrat, here is how they were treated or how they would have been treated, therefore the current situation is evidence of hypocrisy or unfairness. It is not entirely without merit as an observation. But as a dominant mode of political communication? It is just as much a dead end as the conservative version.
What both of these habits share, underneath the surface, is an orientation toward the past rather than the present. They are both, at their core, arguments about what happened before or what might have hypothetically happened before, deployed as a substitute for genuine engagement with what is happening right now. And this is perhaps the most damaging thing about both varieties of this rhetorical tic. The past is fixed. We cannot change it. We can learn from it, we can reckon with it, we can allow it to inform our understanding of the present, but we cannot alter it. Every moment we spend relitigating what Obama did or did not do, what Clinton should or should not have done, what some hypothetical version of a past Democratic president would have faced in some imagined scenario, is a moment we are not spending on the actual world we live in right now. It is energy poured into a vessel that cannot hold anything useful.
This matters enormously because the present moment is not short on things that require genuine attention and engagement. There are real policy debates happening right now that will have real consequences for real people in the near future. There are real institutional questions about the health of American democracy that deserve serious, substantive engagement. There are real arguments to be made, real coalitions to be built, real persuasion to be done. None of that gets accomplished by invoking the ghost of Barack Obama’s presidency, in either direction, for any purpose. The “what if Obama did this” argument and the “but what about what Obama actually did” argument are both, in their own ways, forms of political escapism. They are ways of feeling like you are engaging with politics while actually retreating from the hard work of engaging with the present.
There is also something worth naming about what the constant invocation of past Democratic presidents does to political culture more broadly. It flattens everything. It reduces the complexity of the current moment to a comparison with something that already happened, as though the only meaningful way to understand what is occurring right now is to hold it up against some prior administration and ask whether it measures up or whether it would have been treated the same way. This is a deeply impoverished way of understanding politics. The world is not static. Circumstances change. Contexts shift. The political environment of ten or twenty years ago is not the same as the political environment of today, and arguments that depend on hypothetical comparisons between different eras often collapse under the weight of all the things they have to ignore to make the comparison work. “What if Obama did this” always requires you to pretend that the political climate, the media environment, the cultural context, the specific cast of characters, and a thousand other variables are all exactly the same as they were during the Obama years. They are not. They never are. The argument is built on a foundation of unreality.
And while we are being honest about unreality, let us talk about the role that imagination plays in all of this. A significant portion of the whataboutism that uses Democratic politicians as its raw material is not even based on things that actually happened. Some of it is based on things that have been distorted beyond recognition. Some of it is based on things that have been taken wildly out of context. Some of it is based on things that simply did not happen the way they are being described. The Hillary’s emails saga, for example, was a legitimate news story that got inflated into something almost entirely disconnected from its actual substance through years of repetition and exaggeration. The various scandals attributed to Obama that were never actually scandals got laundered through enough retellings that they became accepted as obvious fact in certain circles. Political memory, especially in the social media age, is extremely short and extremely malleable. When people build arguments on “remember when Obama did this,” they are often not actually arguing about what Obama did. They are arguing about a version of events that has been filtered through years of partisan storytelling. That is not a foundation for serious political discourse. That is a hall of mirrors.
Here is what actually needs to happen, and it is not complicated even if it is difficult. We need to get better at staying present. We need to develop the discipline, individually and collectively, to engage with what is actually happening right now rather than reflexively reaching for historical comparisons as our first move. This does not mean the past is irrelevant. History matters enormously. Context matters. Pattern recognition matters. Understanding how current events relate to historical precedents is genuinely important. But there is a difference between drawing on history to illuminate the present and using history as a substitute for engaging with the present. One is intellectual rigor. The other is avoidance.
When something happens that deserves criticism, criticize it. Criticize it on its own terms. Explain what it is, why it is wrong, what its consequences are likely to be, and what you think should be done about it. If historical context genuinely helps make that case, use it sparingly and specifically. But resist the urge to make the Obama comparison the centerpiece of the argument. Resist the urge to frame your entire critique around what a different president in a different era would have faced, because that framing immediately drags the conversation into hypothetical territory where nothing can be definitively established and everyone can argue forever without resolution. Hypotheticals are not accountability. Hypotheticals are a way of feeling like you are making a point without actually making a point.
And for the love of everything, let us stop using the same small handful of Democratic politicians as the permanent reference class for every political argument from every direction. These figures have become so overloaded with rhetorical meaning, have been invoked so many times in so many contradictory contexts, that they have almost ceased to function as actual historical figures and have become something more like political Rorschach tests. What someone thinks when they hear “Obama” or “Clinton” or “Hillary” tells you more about their existing political commitments than it tells you anything useful about the actual policy questions at hand. That is not how you have a productive political conversation. That is how you have two people talking past each other using the same names to mean entirely different things.
The standard we should be holding ourselves and each other to is this: can you make your argument without invoking a past president as either your hero or your villain? Can you explain what is wrong with a current policy without comparing it to what a hypothetical Obama administration would have done? Can you criticize a current political figure on the merits of their actual actions rather than by contrasting them with someone who left office years ago? If you can do that, you are doing politics in a way that has a chance of actually mattering. If you cannot do that, if the Obama comparison is load-bearing in your argument, then your argument probably needs more work.
The past happened. It is real. Some of it was good and some of it was bad and most of it was complicated in the way that real things are always complicated. But we live here, in the present, where things are still happening and still being decided and still being shaped by what people do and say and choose. That is where the action is. That is where the accountability needs to happen. That is where the arguments that actually matter need to be made. Not in some imaginary parallel universe where Obama is still president and we are asking ourselves how things might have gone differently. Not in some revisionist history where past Democratic administrations are either the gold standard against which all others should be measured or the ultimate proof that both sides are equally corrupt. Here. Now. With what is actually in front of us.
Stop reaching for the whataboutism. Stop letting both sides of the political spectrum use the same deceased or retired politicians as rhetorical shields or rhetorical weapons. Do the harder work of engaging with the present on its own terms. The future is not going to be shaped by who makes the cleverest “what if Obama” argument. It is going to be shaped by who shows up, pays attention, and does the actual work of holding power accountable right now, in the moment, for the things that are actually happening. That is the only political conversation worth having.
Obama Won In 2008. That Was Almost Twenty Years Ago. Let That Sink In.
There is a number that I think people need to sit with for a moment, because once you actually sit with it, a lot of our current political habits start to look genuinely absurd. Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. He was inaugurated in January of 2009. As of this writing, that is somewhere in the neighborhood of seventeen years ago, and we are rapidly closing in on the twenty year mark. Twenty years. Think about what that number means in any other context. Think about how far away 2008 feels when you measure it against literally anything else in your life. Twenty years ago from 2008 was 1988. Nobody in 2008 was building their political arguments around what Ronald Reagan did in his final year in office, or treating George H.W. Bush’s policy positions as a live, urgent reference point for understanding the issues of the day. Yet here we are, in a political culture that still cannot stop talking about Obama as though he is one news cycle removed from the Oval Office.
And it gets even more stark when you look at the back end of his presidency rather than the front end. Obama left office in January of 2017. His final full year as president was 2016, the year of that election. We are now closer to 2036 than we are to that moment. Ten years from now, we will be marking the twentieth anniversary of Obama leaving the White House entirely. Twenty years since the last time he held political power of any kind. Twenty years since he last signed a piece of legislation, twenty years since he last set a single policy that actually had the force of federal authority behind it. That is not recent history. That is not “the other day.” That is the kind of timeframe we usually reserve for talking about a different political era altogether, a different generation of voters, a fundamentally different country in a lot of measurable ways.
Think about everything that has happened in the years since Obama left office. We have had a complete presidential administration that ran its course, an election that unseated it, a pandemic that reshaped the entire world, an attack on the Capitol, multiple subsequent elections, entire new generations of young people who have aged into voting eligibility having no living memory of Obama as a sitting president at all. There are eighteen and nineteen year olds voting in elections right now who were in elementary school, or not even born yet, when Obama left office. For them, “Obama was president” is not a memory. It is a historical fact they learned about the same way they learned about other presidents, something read about rather than lived through. And yet the rest of the political conversation continues to act as though his administration is some kind of ongoing, immediate reference point that everyone shares equal living memory of.
This is the part where I think we need to be honest about what is actually happening when adults who absolutely do remember the Obama presidency keep dragging him back into every single conversation. It is not really about Obama anymore. It stopped being about Obama as an actual policy-maker a long time ago. At this point, invoking Obama has become a kind of political shorthand, a flag that people wave to signal which tribe they belong to, completely detached from any specific, current relevance his actual record might have. Conservatives invoke him as shorthand for a kind of liberal overreach they want to warn people about. Liberals invoke him as shorthand for a kind of competence and decency they want to contrast with whatever is happening now. In both cases, the actual substance of his presidency, the actual policies, the actual outcomes, have become almost beside the point. He has become a symbol. And arguing with a symbol is not the same thing as engaging with reality.
Here is the thing about treating a person as a symbol instead of a historical figure with a finished record: it freezes them in a kind of permanent present tense that does not actually exist anymore. We do this with very few other political figures, and it should tell us something that we keep doing it with this one. Nobody is out here constructing daily arguments around what Jimmy Carter did during the Iran hostage crisis as though it is a live, breaking news item. Nobody is treating George H.W. Bush’s handling of the end of the Cold War as the central reference point for understanding foreign policy disagreements in 2026. Those presidencies have been allowed to recede into the actual past, to become history in the way that history is supposed to work, informing our understanding without dominating our present-day arguments. Obama, for whatever reason, has not been granted that same treatment. He remains stuck in this strange purgatory where he is simultaneously acknowledged as a former president from a bygone era and treated as though his presidency ended six months ago.
Part of this, I think, comes down to the fact that the years since Obama left office have been so chaotic, so relentlessly newsworthy, so thoroughly dominated by a handful of subsequent political figures, that his presidency has taken on a kind of retrospective glow simply by virtue of contrast. When you spend a decade in a state of near-constant political turbulence, it is natural for people to look back at an earlier period and remember it as calmer, more stable, more normal, even if that memory is not entirely accurate to how things actually felt at the time. Obama’s presidency, in retrospect, gets cast by a lot of people on the left as a kind of last gasp of political normalcy before everything went sideways. That is an understandable emotional impulse. But emotional impulses are not the same thing as sound political analysis, and “things felt more normal back then” is not actually an argument about anything happening today.
On the right, the persistence of Obama as a reference point serves a different but equally hollow function. He has become a stand-in for an entire constellation of grievances, some legitimate policy disagreements and plenty of outright conspiracy theories and bad-faith distortions, that get reactivated any time someone wants to rally opposition to a current Democratic figure or policy. It is rhetorically efficient in a deeply cynical way. You do not have to make a fresh argument about why a current policy is bad if you can just invoke Obama and trust that an entire audience will fill in years of accumulated resentment on your behalf. That is not persuasion. That is muscle memory. It works because it has worked before, not because it actually illuminates anything about the present.
And look, I want to be fair here, because there is a version of this that is not unreasonable. If a current policy genuinely echoes a previous Obama-era policy in a specific, substantive way, and that comparison actually helps explain something about how the new policy is likely to function or fail, that is a legitimate use of historical reference. That is what history is for. The problem is not that anyone is forbidden from ever mentioning Obama again under any circumstances. The problem is the reflexive, context-free, almost ritualistic invocation of his name as the default move whenever certain political buttons need pushing, regardless of whether his actual record has anything specific or substantive to do with the current situation. There is a difference between citing relevant precedent and treating a man as a permanent rhetorical mascot for an entire political era that has, by any reasonable measure, ended.
We also have to grapple with what it does to our collective sense of time when we refuse to let any political era actually become the past. Time moves forward whether our rhetoric acknowledges it or not. The country in 2026 is not the country of 2008 or 2016. The economic conditions are different. The technological landscape is different. The demographic makeup of the electorate is different. The specific challenges facing the country, from how we think about work and the economy to how we think about global conflict to how we think about the basic functioning of our information ecosystem, are different in ways that an Obama-era framework simply was not built to address, because those particular problems either did not exist yet or existed in a much earlier and less developed form. Continuing to filter every current debate through the lens of a presidency that ended a near-generation ago is not just intellectually lazy. It actively prevents us from developing the kind of fresh thinking that an actually new set of problems requires.
There is also something worth saying about respect here, and I do not mean respect for Obama specifically, I mean respect for the idea of historical accuracy itself. When we treat something that happened seventeen, eighteen, almost twenty years ago as though it is current events, we are doing a disservice to our own understanding of how much time has actually passed and how much has actually changed. We are essentially telling ourselves a story in which the last two decades did not really happen, in which the appropriate comparison point for any current political development is still this one administration from the late two-thousands and twenty-tens, as though nothing of comparable significance has occurred since. That is simply not true. An enormous amount has occurred since. Pretending otherwise, even unconsciously, even just through force of rhetorical habit, distorts our ability to actually reason clearly about the world we are living in right now.
So here is the actual ask, and it is a simple one even if it runs against years of accumulated rhetorical habit on basically every part of the political spectrum. Let Obama’s presidency be what it actually is at this point: history. Real, meaningful, worth-studying history, but history nonetheless. Not a live political battlefield. Not a permanent reservoir of grievance or nostalgia to be tapped on demand. Not the default frame through which every current event must be processed. If you are making an argument about something happening in politics today, try making that argument using only things that have actually happened in the last few years. See if it still holds up. If it does, great, you have made a real argument about the present. If it falls apart the moment you remove the seventeen-year-old reference point, that should tell you something important about how substantive the argument actually was in the first place.
Twenty years is a long time. Long enough for an infant born the year Obama was elected to be old enough to vote in their first presidential election and have a kid of their own on the way. Long enough for entire technologies that did not exist to come into existence, dominate the culture, and start to feel old themselves. Long enough for an entire political party to go through multiple complete identity shifts. Long enough, frankly, for an entire presidency to stop being news and start being history, the way every presidency before it eventually did. Obama’s presidency deserves that same treatment. Not erasure. Not disrespect. Just an honest acknowledgment that it ended a long time ago, that the country has moved a long way past it, and that continuing to treat it as a live political reference point says a lot more about our own rhetorical habits than it does about anything actually happening in the world today.
The Obama Obsession: What Are We Actually Doing Here
I want to ask a genuine question, not a rhetorical one, an actual question that I think deserves a real answer. Why can neither side let this man go? Why, of all the political figures available to either praise or criticize, has Barack Obama become the permanent shared fixation of both liberals and conservatives, almost two decades after he was elected and nearly a decade after he left office? Because when you actually lay out the timeline of what has happened since Obama was president, the continued obsession starts to look less like reasonable political engagement and more like something closer to a national tic, a habit nobody quite knows how to break even though everybody can probably sense it has stopped making sense.
Let us just lay out the chronology plainly, because I think the plain chronology does more work than any amount of commentary could. Since Obama left office in January of 2017, we have had an entire first Trump term, a complete four years, start to finish, with its own wars and scandals and Supreme Court appointments and a global pandemic that reshaped the planet. Then we had a full Biden term, another complete four years, with its own set of policies, its own economic conditions, its own foreign policy crises, its own political controversies that had absolutely nothing to do with anything Obama did or did not do. And now we are sitting in the middle of a second Trump term, an entirely separate presidency with its own distinct character, its own administration, its own specific set of current events that are unfolding in real time right now, today, this year. That is three full presidencies, two different men, occupying the White House across nearly a decade, each with thousands of pages of their own actual record to discuss, debate, praise, or criticize. And still, somehow, conversations get dragged back to Obama. Constantly. Reflexively. As though none of those three presidencies actually happened or mattered enough to replace him as the reference point.
This is where I think the obsession reveals itself as something a little bit irrational, because it is not as though there has been a shortage of more recent material to argue about. We are not running out of things to say about Trump’s first term or Biden’s entire presidency or what is happening under Trump right now in his second term. There is an overwhelming abundance of current, relevant, actually-happening-right-now material for both sides to dig into. And yet Obama remains the gravitational center that conversations keep getting pulled back toward, almost as though the three presidencies that have occurred since his are somehow less real, less substantial, less worth talking about than a presidency that ended the better part of a decade ago. That does not track. That does not make sense as a matter of simple relevance. It only makes sense as a matter of habit, emotional attachment, and tribal signaling that has very little to do with actual political analysis.
So why does it persist. I think for liberals, there is a real emotional component that is worth naming honestly rather than dancing around. Obama represented, for a lot of people on the left, a particular feeling, a particular sense of optimism and competence and generational change that has simply not been replicated by anything that has happened since. Whether or not that feeling was ever fully justified by the actual substance of his policy record is a separate conversation. But the emotional residue of that feeling is real, and I think a lot of the continued invocation of Obama by liberals is less about his actual presidency and more about an attempt to recapture or reference that feeling, especially during periods that feel chaotic or demoralizing by comparison. It functions almost like comfort food. A return to a memory that feels safer than engaging with the genuinely difficult and unresolved present.
For conservatives, I think the persistence works differently but ends up in a similarly irrational place. Obama became, during his actual presidency, a kind of foundational villain figure for a particular strain of conservative politics, the object around which an entire apparatus of grievance, suspicion, and opposition organized itself. That apparatus did not really get rebuilt around new figures so much as it got partially transferred and partially just kept running on the same fuel. Even now, with three subsequent presidencies worth of material to be angry about or organize against, the rhetorical reflexes built during the Obama years still fire automatically, the same way a habit keeps running long after the original reason for it has stopped applying. It is muscle memory dressed up as political conviction.
But here is where the chronology gets even more absurd, and where I think the deeper point really lives. Because the same exact problem applies even further back, to George W. Bush, and almost nobody notices the parallel even though it is sitting right there. Bush was elected in 2000. He was inaugurated in January of 2001. That election, that inauguration, sits twenty-six years in the rearview mirror as of right now. Twenty-six years. Bush’s final year in office was 2008, the same year Obama was elected to succeed him, which means Bush’s actual presidency ended nearly eighteen years ago. And notice something important here: nobody is doing this with Bush. Nobody is building daily political arguments around what Bush did in his final year in office. Nobody treats the 2000 election as a live, ongoing reference point for understanding political disagreements in 2026. Bush has been allowed to actually become history, the way historical figures are supposed to become history, studied and referenced when genuinely relevant but not treated as an active battlefield in present-day political combat.
Why the difference. Why does Bush get to recede into the past in a way that Obama, despite an almost identical amount of time having passed, simply has not. I think part of the answer is that Bush’s presidency does not serve the same ongoing tribal function for either side anymore. Liberals are not nostalgic for Bush in the way they are nostalgic for Obama, so there is no emotional pull keeping him present. And conservatives largely moved past treating Bush as a hero figure once the Tea Party and then Trump-era politics redefined what conservative identity was supposed to look like, often in explicit contrast to Bush-style Republicanism. Bush, in a strange way, got abandoned by both sides simultaneously, which paradoxically allowed him to actually become history rather than remaining a live symbol. Obama never got that same release, because he remains useful, emotionally and rhetorically, to both sides in ways that Bush simply does not.
That word, useful, is really the crux of the whole thing. Obama persists as a reference point not because his presidency contains some uniquely permanent insight that more recent presidencies lack, but because he remains rhetorically useful to both tribes in ways that serve present-day tribal purposes rather than present-day analytical purposes. For liberals, he is useful as a symbol of a kind of dignity and competence to hold up against whatever feels chaotic or demoralizing right now. For conservatives, he is useful as a permanently available villain whose name still reliably activates a familiar set of grievances without requiring any fresh argumentative work. In both cases, the usefulness has almost nothing to do with the actual content of his presidency and everything to do with the emotional and tribal function he continues to serve in the present.
And once you see it that way, the entire habit looks less like political analysis and more like a kind of shared addiction, something both sides keep returning to not because it is good for the political conversation but because it is familiar, comfortable, and easy. It requires no new thinking. It requires no engagement with the genuinely complicated and unresolved problems of the actual present. It is a well-worn groove that both sides can fall into without effort, which is precisely why it is so hard to break, even though, on some level, I suspect most people on both sides sense that it has become a little ridiculous.
I think the honest answer to my own question, why can neither side let him go, is that letting him go would require both sides to do something genuinely harder, which is engage fully and seriously with the actual political present on its own terms, without the comfort of an old, familiar reference point to fall back on. It would mean liberals having to articulate what they actually stand for right now, in 2026, rather than gesturing back at a presidency that ended nine years ago as a stand-in for present-day values. It would mean conservatives having to build their critiques of current Democratic politics on the actual record of actual current Democratic politicians, rather than recycling a decade-old villain because the new material requires more work to build a case against. Both of those are harder tasks than just saying his name and trusting an audience to fill in the rest.
So let us just be honest about what twenty-six years and almost twenty years actually mean in this context. Twenty-six years ago is far enough back that Bush’s election now sits in the same rough historical distance as the Gulf War and the early days of the internet, events that get studied, not relitigated daily. Almost twenty years ago is far enough back that an entire generation of newly eligible voters has no living memory of Obama as a sitting president whatsoever, the same way most of us have no living memory of Bush’s predecessor’s presidency. There is no good reason, by any honest measure of time or relevance, that Obama should occupy more present-tense political space than Bush does. The fact that he still does says everything about our current rhetorical habits and basically nothing about anything actually happening in American politics today. Three presidencies have happened since the man left office. It is long past time we started talking about those instead.
The Unspoken Lie Underneath The Obama Obsession: That He Was The Gold Standard
There is something happening underneath all of this constant Obama talk that almost nobody says directly, but that I think is actually driving a huge amount of it, especially on the Democratic side and even among some Republicans when they begrudgingly admit it. By continuing to hold Obama up as the permanent reference point, the thing everyone measures everything else against, both parties are quietly reinforcing an idea that never gets stated out loud but absolutely shapes how people think: that Obama was the gold standard. That he was the best Democrats have ever produced. That his presidency represents some kind of ceiling, the high-water mark against which all subsequent Democratic politics should be measured and which nothing since has come close to matching. And I think that idea is not just overstated. I think it is flatly wrong, and I think it has done real damage to how the left thinks about what is actually possible.
I want to be upfront about where I am coming from here, because I think it matters for how the rest of this lands. I am a progressive. I do not say that to score points or signal anything. I say it because I think the perspective genuinely matters for this particular argument, because the “Obama was the gold standard” narrative is largely a product of a more moderate, establishment Democratic framing, one that treats incremental change, careful compromise, and political caution as the highest available virtues. From a progressive standpoint, looking honestly at what Obama actually did while in office rather than what he represented symbolically, the record is a lot messier and a lot less impressive than the mythology suggests. He was not great. He was, in a lot of specific and consequential ways, deeply disappointing, and pretending otherwise just because he is being compared favorably to whoever happens to be the current villain of the moment is not honest political analysis. It is nostalgia doing the work that actual scrutiny should be doing.
Let us start with immigration, because this is one of the areas where the gap between Obama’s image and Obama’s actual record is widest. Obama oversaw a deportation apparatus that earned him the nickname “deporter in chief” from immigrant rights advocates, and that nickname was not some right-wing smear, it came from people on the left who were watching the actual numbers and the actual policy in real time. His administration deported people at a scale that exceeded prior administrations, built and expanded enforcement infrastructure, and pursued an approach that, while sometimes wrapped in more measured rhetoric than what came after him, produced real consequences for real families and real communities. If you are someone who cares about humane immigration policy, you cannot look at that record and call it a gold standard. You have to call it what it was: a continuation and in some ways an intensification of an enforcement-heavy approach that did serious harm.
Then there is foreign policy, where the contrast between Obama’s reputation as a calm, measured, intellectual president and the actual conduct of his administration’s military operations is genuinely stark. Drone strikes expanded dramatically under his presidency, with a level of expanded scope and frequency that represented a significant escalation from what came before. These were not abstract policy decisions happening somewhere far away with no real consequence. Drone warfare carried out under his administration resulted in civilian casualties, including children, in countries the United States was not even formally at war with. This is the same man who is remembered, especially by his supporters, as a thoughtful, restrained, almost professorial figure. That image and the actual military record sit in real tension with each other, and the obsession with Obama as a symbol tends to let the image win out over the substance every single time.
The NSA situation deserves its own real reckoning too, because we are still living with the consequences of decisions made or continued under his administration. The scale of domestic surveillance that got revealed during his presidency, the bulk data collection, the scope of what the government was monitoring about ordinary people’s communications, represented a genuinely alarming expansion of state surveillance power. And the response to the people who exposed it was not exactly a profile in civil libertarian courage. We are still dealing with the legal and institutional aftermath of that era, still arguing about the proper boundaries of government surveillance in a world that has only become more digitally saturated since. That is not a small footnote. That is a structural legacy that continues to shape the relationship between citizens and their government right now, today, and it does not get nearly the attention in the popular Obama narrative that it actually deserves.
And then there is healthcare, which I think might be the single clearest example of how the “gold standard” framing falls apart under any real scrutiny. The Affordable Care Act gets treated, especially by more moderate and establishment-aligned Democrats, as the crown jewel of the Obama presidency, the signature achievement, proof of what competent, can-do Democratic governance looks like. And look, expanding access to insurance for people who previously could not get it at all was a real and meaningful thing. I am not going to pretend that improvement did not matter to the people it actually helped. But let us be honest about what the Affordable Care Act actually was and was not. It was not universal healthcare. It was not a public system that guaranteed care as a right rather than a product. It was a deeply compromised piece of legislation that preserved the existing private, for-profit insurance industry at its core, added a layer of regulation and subsidy on top of that same fundamentally broken structure, and left an enormous number of people still facing crushing costs, impossible deductibles, and coverage that often turned out to be far less comprehensive than advertised once they actually needed it.
That compromise was not incidental. It was characteristic. Obama’s entire governing style, across nearly every major piece of legislation and policy fight during his presidency, involved starting from a position that was already moderate, often already a concession to what he assumed Republicans might accept, and then negotiating further away from anything resembling a bold, structural fix. Single-payer healthcare was barely allowed into the conversation in any serious way. The public option, even as a modest middle-ground compromise, got negotiated away. Over and over, across issue after issue, the pattern repeated itself: start cautious, compromise further, end up with something that addressed the crisis just enough to take the pressure off without actually solving the underlying problem. That pattern is the actual substance of the “gold standard” presidency that gets invoked so reverently. It is a pattern of half-measures, dressed up in genuinely impressive rhetoric and genuinely impressive personal political talent, but half-measures nonetheless.
And here we are, in 2026, still fighting over a healthcare system that has been fundamentally broken for decades, still watching people skip medication, delay treatment, go bankrupt over medical debt, die from preventable conditions because they could not afford to seek care early enough. The Affordable Care Act did not fix that. It was never actually designed to fix that, not in any structural sense. It was designed to expand access within the existing for-profit framework, and the existing for-profit framework remains exactly as predatory and exactly as broken as it was before, just with more people now formally inside a system that still fails an enormous number of them. That system needed to go a long time ago. It needs to go now, today, immediately, replaced with something that treats healthcare as a right rather than a market product. And the fact that we are still having this same fight, the same fundamental fight, all these years later, with no structural resolution in sight, should tell you everything you need to know about how much the “gold standard” framing actually holds up.
This is why the constant invocation of Obama by both parties does real damage beyond just being annoying or repetitive. It is not a neutral habit. Every time he gets held up as the best version of Democratic governance available, the implicit message is that incrementalism, compromise, and caution represent the ceiling of what is achievable, rather than a particular choice made by a particular administration that could have gone differently and that, in a lot of important respects, fell short. It quietly forecloses the conversation about what bolder, more structural change might actually look like, because the reference point being used to define success was never actually that bold to begin with. If the bar for Democratic achievement gets permanently set at “expanded access within a still-broken system” or “increased but somewhat more careful military intervention” or “surveillance expansion with marginally more oversight than what followed,” then we have set the bar in a place that should be unacceptable to anyone who actually wants transformative change rather than managed decline.
I want to be clear that this is not an argument that Obama was uniquely terrible or that there was nothing of value in his presidency. That would be its own kind of dishonesty, just pointed in the opposite direction. There were real accomplishments, real moments of genuine progress, real policy wins that mattered to real people. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the mythology that has grown up around the presidency, the unspoken assumption baked into so much current political rhetoric that this was as good as it gets, that this is the standard against which everything else should be measured and that nothing has come close since. That mythology serves a purpose for moderate Democrats who want to justify continued caution and continued compromise as the only realistic path forward. It serves a purpose for Republicans who want a permanently available boogeyman whose actual record they rarely examine closely enough to notice how much of it, from a genuinely left perspective, should be criticized rather than feared.
What gets lost in all of this is the actual progressive critique, the argument that says we do not need to return to some imagined high point from nearly two decades ago, we need to go further than that high point ever went. We need healthcare that is not contingent on preserving insurance company profit margins. We need an immigration system that does not treat enforcement scale as a measure of success. We need a foreign policy that does not normalize expanded drone warfare as an acceptable middle path between full-scale war and genuine restraint. We need a relationship between citizens and their government that does not include the kind of bulk surveillance infrastructure that got built and expanded with insufficient pushback. None of that requires returning to 2009. All of it requires moving past 2009, past the entire framework that produced these compromises in the first place, and building something that was never actually achieved in the era we keep getting told was the best we ever had.
So the next time someone, on either side, invokes Obama as the implicit standard for what good Democratic governance looks like, it is worth asking what that standard actually contained. Not the speeches. Not the symbolism. Not the contrast with whoever is currently making headlines. The actual policy record, examined honestly, on its own terms. Because once you do that, the gold standard starts to look a lot more like a particularly well-marketed bronze, and the conversation we should actually be having is not about how to get back to that level, but about how to finally go further than we ever did.
The Affordable Care Act Was Never Actually Affordable
There is an irony sitting right in the name of the Affordable Care Act that I think gets glossed over way too easily, and it is worth slowing down and actually sitting with it. It is called the Affordable Care Act. Affordability is right there in the title, the supposed core promise of the entire piece of legislation. And yet here we are, well over a decade after it was signed into law, with millions of people who are technically covered by it still unable to actually afford the healthcare they are supposedly covered for. That is not a minor footnote. That is a fundamental failure at the exact thing the law claimed to be about. You can call something affordable in the title as many times as you want. That does not make it true for the people actually trying to use it.
Let us start with the most basic layer of this problem, which is the people who still cannot afford coverage in the first place. The entire architecture of the law depends on a mix of subsidies, tax credits, and expanded Medicaid eligibility to bring coverage within reach of people who could not previously afford it. And for some people, in some income brackets, in some states, that mix actually worked reasonably well. But the law was never universal in its actual reach, and the gaps in that reach were not small. The subsidy structure was always tied to income thresholds that left plenty of people stuck in an uncomfortable middle zone, making just enough to lose access to substantial subsidies but nowhere near enough to actually absorb the real cost of a marketplace plan on their own. For those people, the math simply does not work. Premiums alone can eat a significant chunk of a monthly budget before a single dollar of actual care gets paid for.
And then there is the entire separate disaster of the Medicaid expansion gap, which I think does not get nearly enough attention in mainstream conversations about the ACA’s legacy. The law was designed with the assumption that every state would expand Medicaid to cover more low-income people, with the federal government picking up the overwhelming majority of the cost. But a Supreme Court decision made that expansion optional rather than mandatory, and a number of states simply refused to expand it. The result is a genuinely absurd situation where there are people who make too little money to qualify for marketplace subsidies, because those subsidies were designed assuming Medicaid would catch people below a certain income level, but who also do not qualify for Medicaid in their state because their state opted out of the expansion that was supposed to cover them. These people fall into what is actually and officially referred to as the coverage gap, a hole in the system that exists purely because of how the law was structured and how certain states responded to it. People in that gap are not lazy, are not gaming the system, are not failing to take advantage of available help. There is simply no help available to them under the law as it actually functions in their state. That is not a small oversight. That is a structural failure built into the foundation of the thing.
But here is where I think the conversation needs to go even further, because the people who are not covered at all are only half of the actual story. The other half, maybe the more important half because it gets discussed so much less, is what happens to the people who are covered, who did sign up, who do have a marketplace plan or employer coverage that technically satisfies the law’s requirements, and who still cannot actually afford to use the healthcare they are paying for. This is the part of the affordability crisis that gets almost entirely buried under the political talking point that some number of million people gained coverage under the ACA. Gaining coverage and gaining actual access to affordable care are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the most persistent and damaging pieces of spin around this entire law.
Think about what a typical marketplace plan actually looks like for a lot of people in practice. High deductibles that can run into the thousands of dollars before insurance starts covering much of anything beyond preventive care. Coinsurance percentages that mean even after the deductible is met, the patient is still on the hook for a real chunk of every subsequent bill. Out-of-pocket maximums that sound reassuring on paper but are still set high enough that hitting them can mean a genuinely devastating financial year for an average household. Premiums that increase year over year, sometimes significantly, leaving people having to scramble to find a comparable plan or simply absorb the increased cost because switching plans mid-relationship with a particular doctor or specialist is its own nightmare. This is what coverage looks like for an enormous number of people who would show up in the statistics as successfully insured under the Affordable Care Act, statistics that get cited as proof of the law’s success without any acknowledgment of what that insurance actually amounts to in practice.
The result is a phenomenon that has become depressingly familiar and has its own name in healthcare policy circles: underinsurance. People who have a plan, who are not counted among the uninsured, who would show up as a success story in any simple tally of coverage numbers, but who still delay or skip necessary care because they cannot afford the deductible, still ration medication because the copay is too high, still avoid going to the doctor for something that is bothering them because they know what a visit plus any potential follow-up testing is going to cost even with insurance technically covering part of it. Underinsurance is, in a very real sense, its own kind of healthcare denial. It just happens to be denial that occurs after the insurance card has already been issued rather than before. And it is happening to people who, on paper, are exactly the success stories the law’s defenders point to.
Medical debt is the place where all of this becomes impossible to spin away. Medical debt remains one of the most significant drivers of personal financial distress, including for people who have insurance through the marketplace or through their employer. People do not generally rack up medical debt because they are uninsured and recklessly seeking care anyway. They rack up medical debt because they are insured, sought care that their insurance was supposed to help cover, and discovered that the actual financial exposure of deductibles, coinsurance, out-of-network surprises, and uncovered services left them owing thousands of dollars they did not have. This happens to people with ACA marketplace plans constantly. It happens to people with what would be considered decent employer coverage too. The entire for-profit insurance model, which the Affordable Care Act preserved and built its entire structure around rather than replacing, is fundamentally designed to shift a meaningful share of financial risk back onto the patient no matter how comprehensive the policy looks on its sales brochure. That shifted risk is where affordability quietly dies, even for people who technically have a plan.
There is also the issue of network restrictions, which compounds all of this in ways that rarely make it into the political conversation about coverage numbers. A lot of marketplace plans, especially in the lower-cost tiers that are the only thing actually affordable to lower-income enrollees even with subsidies, come with narrow networks of providers. That can mean limited choice of doctors, long waits to get in with specialists who are actually in-network, and situations where the nearest emergency care available in an actual emergency turns out to be out-of-network, generating a surprise bill on top of an already stressful medical situation. Even when surprise billing protections have closed some of these gaps in certain circumstances, the underlying network narrowness remains a real barrier to people actually getting timely care, separate from and in addition to the cost barrier. Coverage that technically exists but that does not connect you to an actual, reasonably accessible doctor when you need one is not the same thing as functional access to healthcare.
All of this adds up to a pretty damning picture once you actually look at it honestly instead of through the lens of the simple coverage statistics that get repeated as shorthand for the law’s success. Yes, more people have insurance cards than they did before the law passed. That is true and it is not nothing. But having an insurance card and having functional, affordable access to the healthcare you need when you need it are two very different things, and the gap between those two things is exactly where an enormous number of people are still suffering, still going into debt, still delaying care, still rationing medication, still avoiding the doctor, all while being counted as one of the law’s success stories in the official numbers. The name of the law promised affordability. The actual lived experience of a huge number of the people it covers tells a very different story.
This is exactly the kind of thing that gets lost when the Affordable Care Act gets treated as some kind of finished, settled achievement, the high point we are supposed to compare everything else to rather than a deeply flawed compromise that still requires fundamental, structural fixing. The law did some real good, expanding access for some people in some circumstances, closing some of the worst pre-existing condition exclusions that used to leave people completely locked out of coverage entirely. None of that is in dispute. But “did some real good while leaving a massive affordability crisis fully intact” is not the same thing as solving the problem, and treating it as though the core issue has been handled, treating it as the ceiling of what ambitious healthcare reform is supposed to look like, actively gets in the way of the conversation we actually need to be having about what comes next.
What comes next has to actually solve the affordability problem rather than papering over it with subsidies that only reach some people and coverage that does not protect the people who do get it from crushing financial exposure the moment they actually need to use it. That almost certainly means moving away from a model that is fundamentally built around for-profit insurance companies whose basic business model depends on collecting more in premiums than they pay out in care, an incentive structure that is never going to align cleanly with the goal of people actually getting the care they need without facing financial ruin. It means looking honestly at systems, used successfully in plenty of other wealthy countries, that treat healthcare access as a guaranteed public good rather than a product people have to shop for in a marketplace with deductibles and coinsurance and network restrictions standing between them and an actual doctor’s visit.
The Affordable Care Act, whatever its name promised, did not get us there. It got us partway, for some people, some of the time, with real and ongoing financial exposure built into the design for almost everyone it touches. That is not a stable, finished accomplishment we should be defending as the high-water mark of healthcare policy. That is an unfinished, deeply compromised starting point that needed serious follow-up reform years and years ago and still has not gotten it. The people who are uninsured because of the coverage gap know this. The people who are insured but drowning in medical debt anyway know this. The people skipping medication because the copay is too steep this month know this. It is long past time the rest of the political conversation caught up to what the people actually living inside this broken system have known for a very long time: affordable, in the name of this law, was always more aspiration than reality, and the gap between those two things has had a real, ongoing human cost that we cannot keep pretending does not exist.
The Part Of This Nobody Wants To Say Out Loud: Race
There is one more piece of this puzzle that I think has to be named directly, even though it is the part of the conversation that makes people on both sides the most uncomfortable. We have talked about nostalgia. We have talked about tribal usefulness. We have talked about the gold standard mythology and the gap between symbol and substance. But underneath all of that, shaping how all of it plays out, is something neither side particularly wants to sit with: Obama was the first Black president this country ever elected, and he remains, as of right now, the only one. That fact is not a footnote to everything else we have discussed. It is woven into why his presidency generated this much heat in the first place, and why that heat never really cooled the way it does for every other past president.
I want to be careful and precise about what I am actually claiming here, because this is exactly the kind of point that gets flattened into something cruder than it is supposed to be. I am not saying that every single person who criticizes Obama is doing so because of his race, full stop, end of analysis. That would be an unfair and frankly lazy reduction of a lot of people who have entirely substantive, race-neutral objections to specific policies he pursued. And I am not saying that everyone who still feels nostalgic affection for him is doing so purely because of racial pride, either, as though the actual content of his presidency is irrelevant to why people felt connected to it. What I am saying is something a little more structural than that: his being the first Black president changed the entire emotional and political atmosphere around his presidency in ways that are still rippling outward, and those ripples are part of why he has remained such a uniquely persistent reference point compared to every president who came before him.
Think about what his election actually represented in the moment it happened. For an enormous number of Black Americans and plenty of people well beyond that community too, his election carried a weight that went far past ordinary partisan politics. It landed as confirmation that something many people had been told their entire lives was not possible had actually happened. That is not a small thing to attach to a single presidency. It created a level of emotional investment, of personal and communal stake in his success, that simply does not exist in the same way for a white president whose election does not carry that same historic, generational significance. When people on the left still feel a pull back toward him, when his name still produces something closer to genuine affection than ordinary political assessment, a real part of that is rooted in what his election meant symbolically and historically, separate from and on top of whatever his actual policy record turned out to be.
But the flip side of that same coin is just as real, and it is the part that gets discussed far less honestly. His being the first Black president also generated a level of opposition, scrutiny, and outright hostility that went well beyond what gets directed at a typical new president from the opposing party. The birther conspiracy theory, the relentless and explicitly race-coded questioning of his legitimacy, his citizenship, his background, his place of birth, did not happen to any white president before or after him, and it did not happen by accident. That entire conspiracy theory, which consumed years of national attention and launched at least one subsequent political career in a very direct way, was fundamentally a story about a Black man occupying the highest office in the country and a segment of the population that simply could not accept that as legitimate without manufacturing a reason to delegitimize it. That hostility did not stay contained to the birther stuff either. It bled into the tone and intensity of opposition to nearly everything his administration tried to do, in ways that observers across the political spectrum, including plenty of conservative commentators willing to be honest about it, have acknowledged carried a different character than ordinary partisan disagreement.
So when conservatives keep his name in constant rotation as the reflexive villain, the permanently available reference point whose mere mention is supposed to activate a whole accumulated reservoir of grievance, it is worth asking honestly how much of that reservoir was built on substantive policy disagreement and how much of it was built on something else entirely, something that never had to do with drone strikes or deportation numbers or the Affordable Care Act at all, but with a much older and uglier discomfort about who gets to hold power in this country and what it meant to a lot of people that he held it. I am not saying every individual conservative who brings him up is consciously thinking about race when they do it. I am saying that the sheer intensity and staying power of the opposition to him, an intensity that has not really faded the way opposition to past presidents typically does once they leave office, did not come out of nowhere, and pretending race had nothing to do with generating that intensity requires ignoring a huge amount of very visible, very documented history from his actual time in office.
And on the other side, when liberals keep reaching back for him as the symbol of competence and dignity they want to hold up against the present, it is worth asking honestly how much of that is actually about specific policy outcomes, the ones we have spent real time picking apart and finding wanting, and how much of it is about the symbolic and historic weight of what his presidency represented, a weight that is real and valid to feel but that is not actually the same thing as a substantive policy argument about what is happening in politics today. Both of these dynamics, the disproportionate hostility and the disproportionate reverence, draw from the same well, which is the simple, heavy fact that this was the first time it happened, and the country as a whole, across every part of the political spectrum, has clearly not finished processing what that meant.
This is, I think, a meaningful piece of why he never got allowed to recede into ordinary history the way Bush did, the way Clinton mostly has, the way every other past president eventually does once their administration stops being current events and starts being something people study rather than relive. Bush leaving office did not carry this same charge. There was no equivalent reservoir of identity-based reaction, in either direction, attached to his presidency in the way there was and still is attached to Obama’s. The racial significance of Obama’s election added a layer of stakes that simply has no parallel with any other modern president, and that layer of stakes is part of why both the affection and the hostility around him have proven so resistant to fading on the normal historical timeline.
None of this is an argument that we should stop discussing race in American politics, obviously. Race remains a real and serious factor in how policy gets made, how power gets distributed, and how people experience this country, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. But there is a difference between honestly grappling with the racial significance of his presidency as a piece of history worth understanding, and continuing to let that unprocessed racial weight quietly fuel an ongoing, present-tense political obsession with one man, nearly twenty years after he was elected, in a way we do not do with anyone else. The first part is healthy. It is the kind of historical reckoning a country is supposed to do. The second part is just another version of the same problem we have been describing this whole time, dressed up in a more uncomfortable set of clothes. Acknowledging that race is tangled up in why he still gets brought up this much does not excuse the habit. If anything, it should make clear how deep the habit actually runs, and how much more deliberate the effort to finally move past it is going to have to be.
Obama Is Old News. It Is Time We Actually Acted Like It.
We have spent a lot of time now picking apart exactly why this obsession does not make sense, and I think it is worth pulling all of it together into one clear, simple point before we close this out. Barack Obama is old news. Not unimportant news, not irrelevant history, but old. Settled. Finished. A chapter that ended a long time ago and that we have somehow refused to let close, even as the rest of the country and the rest of the world kept moving forward without him at the helm. We have spent more collective political energy circling back to this one man, this one presidency, than we have spent on almost any other historical figure in modern American politics, and at some point we have to ask ourselves honestly why that is, and more importantly, what it is costing us.
Let us just remind ourselves of the actual scale of time we are talking about, because I think repetition is useful here. The 2008 election, the one that put him in office, happened almost twenty years ago. His final year in the White House was 2016, which puts us within striking distance of the twenty year mark on that end too, closer to 2036 than to the moment he actually left. Three full presidencies have happened since then. Two different men, three completely distinct administrations, each with their own wars, their own economic conditions, their own scandals, their own legislative fights, their own foreign policy crises, all of it generated independently of anything Obama did or did not do while he held the office. And still, somehow, his name keeps getting dragged back into the center of arguments about things that have nothing to do with him anymore. That is not how we treat any other past president, and we walked through exactly why that double standard exists. It is not because his presidency was uniquely more relevant. It is because he remains uniquely useful, emotionally and rhetorically, to both sides, in ways that have far more to do with present-day tribal comfort than with present-day political substance.
We also spent real time taking apart the mythology that has built up around him, the unspoken assumption, especially among more moderate Democrats but echoed plenty by Republicans who need a permanently available target, that his presidency represents some kind of gold standard, the best version of Democratic governance that has ever existed or maybe ever could exist. And we looked at why that does not actually hold up once you look past the image and into the record. A deportation apparatus that earned him the nickname deporter in chief. A dramatic expansion of drone warfare that cost civilian lives in countries we were not even formally at war with. A surveillance infrastructure whose consequences we are still living with today. A healthcare law that, whatever good it did, preserved the for-profit insurance system at its core and left an enormous number of people either completely uncovered through the Medicaid expansion gap or technically covered but still drowning in deductibles, copays, and medical debt they cannot actually afford. None of that is the record of some untouchable high point we should all be measuring the present against. It is the record of a deeply compromised presidency, genuinely talented in some respects and genuinely disappointing in others, the way basically every presidency in history eventually turns out to be once you stop looking at the symbol and start looking at the substance.
And that, I think, is really the heart of everything we have been working through across all of this. Obama has been allowed to remain a symbol instead of being allowed to become history, and that distinction matters enormously. History is something we study, learn from, and use to inform how we think about the present without letting it dominate the present. A symbol is something that gets weaponized, on both sides, completely detached from its actual content, deployed reflexively whenever certain political buttons need pushing. We do not do this with George H.W. Bush. We do not do this with Jimmy Carter. We barely even do it with George W. Bush anymore, despite his presidency sitting at almost the exact same historical distance, twenty-six years since his election, eighteen years since he left office, comparable in every meaningful way to how far removed Obama now is. Bush got to actually become history. Obama has not been granted that same release, and the only honest explanation for the difference is that both political tribes still find him too useful as a present-day rhetorical tool to let him go.
But usefulness to a rhetorical habit is not the same thing as usefulness to actual political progress, and that is the cost we have been circling around this entire time. Every moment spent invoking Obama, whether nostalgically by people on the left trying to recapture some feeling that has not been replicated since, or accusatorially by people on the right recycling a decade-old villain because building a fresh case against current Democratic politicians requires more work, is a moment not spent engaging honestly with what is actually happening right now. And what is actually happening right now genuinely deserves our full attention. We are living through a second Trump term with its own specific policies and consequences unfolding in real time. We are living with the unresolved aftermath of a healthcare system that remains fundamentally broken regardless of what name got slapped on the last major attempt to fix it. We are living with the consequences of surveillance infrastructure, immigration enforcement patterns, and foreign policy postures that have continued to evolve, for better and for worse, well past anything Obama set in motion. None of that gets adequately addressed by reaching backward for a comparison point that is rapidly approaching its twentieth anniversary.
There is also something almost disrespectful, in a strange way, to the actual present moment when we keep doing this. It suggests that nothing happening right now is significant enough on its own terms to be discussed without constant reference back to an administration that ended years ago. It suggests that we do not trust ourselves to build fresh arguments, fresh critiques, fresh visions for what comes next, without leaning on old, familiar reference points that require no new thinking to deploy. That is an insult to the seriousness of what we are actually facing today, and it is an insult to the people living through the actual consequences of today’s policies, today’s failures, today’s unresolved crises, none of which are going to be solved by relitigating a presidency that the country has, in every measurable sense, already moved past.
So here is the actual ask, plain and simple, the thing all of this has been building toward. Let him go. Not in the sense of forgetting that the presidency happened, not in the sense of refusing to ever learn from it or reference it when genuinely relevant, but in the sense of finally allowing it to occupy the same kind of settled, historical space that every other past presidency eventually gets to occupy. Stop using him as the default symbol of liberal competence to long for. Stop using him as the default villain to rally opposition against. Stop treating his record as the ceiling of what is achievable rather than a deeply flawed starting point that needed to be built on and surpassed years ago. And start putting that same energy, that same rhetorical effort, into actually engaging with what is happening now, building the case for what should happen next, and holding the people who are actually in power right now, today, accountable for what they are actually doing, rather than what someone in office almost a decade ago once did or did not do.
We have never focused this much, for this long, on any other single past president, and the fact that we are still doing it with this one, nearly twenty years after his election and closing in on a decade since he left office, three full presidencies later, should be a signal to all of us that something about our political culture has gotten stuck. The way out of being stuck is not complicated, even if it requires some discipline. It is simply choosing, deliberately and consistently, to talk about now instead of then. The past cannot be changed, and reliving it over and over does not get us any closer to fixing what is actually broken today. Only the present can be acted on. Only the present can be improved. It is time we actually started treating it that way.