The cult of Obama is over

Everyone wanted to get close to the president. For three hours outside the O2 Arena in London, a queue of admirers pawed at and posed with a fifteen-foot-tall billboard of his face. All of the marketing for yesterday’s event, titled ‘An Evening with President Barack Obama’, had used his official presidential portrait from 2012 in the Oval Office. It was a reminder of the good old days – before Trump ever happened. ‘I’m just looking forward to being in the same room as him,’ said a woman called Fran who had taken a photo with the billboard, leaning on it for support. She started crying. ‘I’m looking for a little bit of hope.’

All Obama’s life people have staked their hopes on him. His white mother was the first. When he was a child she played him recordings of Mahalia Jackson and the speeches of Martin Luther King, and told him that his destiny was to carry their glorious burdens. Then his grandparents. In 1971 when Obama moved to Hawaii to live with them, he realised that they had given up on their own ambitions and put their dreams onto him. ‘So long as you kids do well, Bar’, his grandmother told him, ‘that’s all that really matters.’ In time, the whole liberal world would lean on Obama. Ten months into his first term, he was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize. In his memoir A Promised Land, he records his reaction: ‘For what?’

Now in London he came on stage as a reluctant messiah. The crowd had been made hyper by a montage of powerful snippets of his speeches, set to cinematic music, but when he arrived in the flesh he was diminutive and physically far away. He said ‘Hello, London!’ and sat in a too-big chair opposite the British historian David Olusoga, who was hosting the evening. Obama kept talking over the applause until it stopped. He drank from a takeaway coffee cup.

Olusoga began by asking Obama what he now spends his time doing, squinting and quietly straining his voice when he spoke, feigning poignancy as he tried to meet the promised specialness of the evening. Obama replied that he has been trying to ‘dig myself out of a hole with Michelle’, using almost identical wording to the answer he gave when he was asked the same question at the Jefferson Educational Society in Pennsylvania a fortnight ago. Even the garbled punchline – ‘I’m almost level’ – was copied. (Michelle never wanted Barack to run for president, but he did so anyway, he’s said before, not for his own reasons, but because he wanted black kids and Hispanic kids and ‘kids who don’t fit in’ to ‘see themselves differently.’)

Obama can turn it on when he wants, but at the O2 he did not. Olusoga asked for his analysis of current affairs and his response was boring and wrong. After World War Two, he said, it was clear that ‘blood and soil nationalism’ and ‘castes and hierarchies’ did not work, and so new ways of politics emerged. ‘Things kept getting better’, he said, aside from a war in Vietnam, a genocide in Rwanda, millions of deaths from conflicts in the Middle East, and ‘terrorism’. Then ‘we got complacent, we got smug’, he said, and liberalism failed to create ‘a language that made everybody feel like they had a stake’. In Obama’s telling of the 21st century, America pre-Trump was consistently going the right way. The country’s good course was not altered by 9/11 or the financial crisis of 2008. No, things only went bad after 2016.

For people like Fran who wanted answers, Obama gave none. He just seemed depressed. He said that Britain, like America, is at a ‘fork in the road’. He said that we’re too materialistic, and have lost two historic defences against consumerism: religion and counterculture. (Hip-hop used to have a purpose, now rappers just talk about money.) He said there was a ‘significant risk’ that AI becomes a tool of oppression and censorship, and said that Donald Trump has committed ‘violence against the truth’. ‘Old men hanging on who are afraid of death’ cause 80 per cent of the world’s problems, he told the audience, with exasperated frankness. His world view had lost.

After an hour-and-a-bit he was done. Olusoga said ‘Mr President, thank you for your leadership’, and Obama smiled, waved and left. People ran for the doors. To get the train home, to rush to their friends and loved ones, to proclaim that their king was dead.