Quiet strength prevails in Obama legacy

By Georgie Anne Geyer

No, of course, I would never say "I told you so." Reminding people that you were right, particularly about a controversial president of the United States, is just not cool.

Over the last eight years, there have been many times when I showed virtually aristocratic control of my emotions, held my wayward tongue and only vaguely argued why I thought Barack Hussein Obama would go down as a great, or at least very good, American president.

The Kenyanist chapter of the Republican Party, of course, saw him not only as a black usurper to the White House address but as a foreigner, very possibly an agent of al-Shabab or the Congolese militias.

Then there were the "birthers," who seemed to think Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate lacked legitimacy. That was part of the perfervid "identity" politics we are now seeing acted out day after day in the Republican primary wars.

Do I even now dare to suggest that our 44th president has been profoundly, and often deliberately, misunderstood?

Well, I am no longer alone. I now realize that, very suddenly, and in "sotto voce" rather than a Donald Trump screech, public and journalistic discussion about our president is quietly changing.

In a long and insightful article on Obama in The Washington Post, one of our most brilliant writers, David Maraniss, wrote: "Obama did not just want to be president. His mission was to leave a legacy as a president of consequence, the liberal counter to Reagan. ... It is now becoming increasingly possible to argue that he has neared his goal."

Another of our most sagacious journalists, Fareed Zakaria of CNN and almost everywhere, also wrote an astonishingly good analysis of the president.

Far from all the negative things so many have said about Obama, Zakaria views his accomplishments as evidence that he has indeed been a "transformational" president. He cites "Obamacare," the transformation of America's energy policy, and a new foreign policy that limits trying to establish political order in the Middle East to fighting counterterrorism, among many other accomplishments.

Then Zakaria might drive us into hysterical guffaws by going into fascinating detail, as he did on CNN early in April, adding that "the biggest impact of Obama's presidency" lay in driving the Republican Party into "an ideological breakdown."

I see Obama's gifts to America as more those of changing the mood: It's no longer fashionable to invade ancient civilizations and pretend we have the knowledge to transform them, but it's very intelligent to save the Earth. President Obama personifies Hawaiian "lokahi," seeking for ways to create unity, and "ahonui," or patience expressed with perseverance.

In fact, Barack Obama has shown over and over that he was not one to lash out or shout down his enemies, his caution and care always driving them to wilder margins of raging despair. Instead, there sat "Barry," cool, disciplined, rational and approaching the world from the center. While his enemies thought they were humiliating him, Obama was quietly watching them self-destruct.

He particularly revealed himself at a town-hall meeting with young people in London on his recent trip overseas. Challenged by a question suggesting that he had not done enough to address racial profiling at airports, he first praised young activists for their work, then soberly and "Obamaly" argued that they should work with political leaders instead of always criticizing them.

You "can't just keep on yelling at them," the president said. "And you can't refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position. The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then to start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved."

Often, he summed up, you have to accept "what is achievable at this moment." (Great words for any young person - or old one, for that matter.)

And so it seems to me that the present thinking about Barack Obama is in many ways quite different from the old ones, which tended to see him as either a distant and ineffective tinkerer or a socialist dreamer, and that it is bringing us closer to the real man.

The wise Zakaria sees the president's success as passive because he "let his opponents self-destruct and never overplayed his hand."

Let me introduce a new term. It seems contradictory, but it isn't really: Barack Obama - "passive victor."

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2016, Universal