A Clear-Eyed Look at the Early Obama Years

Like so many others, I first watched him speak on the night of the 2004 Democratic convention, the year John Kerry became the nominee. He was still a state senator then, his face unlined, his head full of dark-brown hair. He humbly told the audience that his presence there was “pretty unlikely.” His Kenyan father had grown up herding goats; his paternal grandfather cooked for a British soldier. In a Baptist cadence, he quoted from the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s words are stirring on their own, but when a certain kind of orator gets hold of them, the effect can feel like thunder, or the Spirit. The country had tumbled into a new century after a contested election and the start of a war in Iraq. Barack Obama spun a convincing vision of the nation as “one people,” in which our ethnic, religious, and ideological differences mattered little.

When I think about what Obama meant to me at the time, my eyes pool with water. I was fresh out of college, taken by the force of his intellect and the way his ideas seemed to cohere and hum. His ear for language was evident in his oratory and in his prose. Dreams From My Father, his first memoir, drew from a humanist tradition of American autobiography laid down by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Toni Morrison’s eulogy of Baldwin in 1987 seemed to foreshadow what many would feel about Obama in 2008: “You made American English honest … You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane.”

And yet, it wasn’t enough; the reverie wouldn’t, couldn’t last. In Great Expectations, Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel, the New Yorker writer and critic assesses the hope and disillusionment of the Obama years in a thinly veiled political satire cum bildungsroman featuring an Obama-like junior senator as “the candidate,” as well as a multifarious cast of supporting characters who employ their savvy, money, and connections to get him elected as president. Cunningham takes the reader back to a time when many thought Obama had an answer for every American ailment: He would usher the country into a post-race era, offering white people grace and absolution while assuring Black people that they would hereafter get a fair shake.

The novel is a keen look back at the failed promise of those early years, during which the country’s lofty expectations left little room for the candidate’s human fallibility—and obscured the reality of American politics. In this country, progress has usually happened in complicated, nonlinear ways: Hard-won advances are generally followed by forceful backlash and heartbreaking setbacks. Advances in civil rights, economic equality, health-care access, or environmental policy have often triggered reactionary codas; since at least the end of Reconstruction, momentum toward multiracial democracy has inflamed particularly vitriolic responses. Ultimately, Cunningham’s novel reminds the reader that simple solutions—the passage of one just law, the election of a single great leader—are seldom a match for American problems.

[Read: The political novel gets very, very specific]

The narrator—based on the author himself, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign and in his White House—is David Hammond, a 22-year-old single father from uptown Manhattan. Floundering after dropping out of college, he joins the campaign as a fundraising assistant on the recommendation of the well-heeled mother of a teen boy he tutors. As the novel roves from Manhattan to Manchester, New Hampshire; from Los Angeles to Chicago, David, whose true ambition is to be a writer, uses his new role to sharpen his ear and eye. He’s middling at the minutiae of the job but great at interacting with people. He makes friends with his co-workers and stumbles into a tender love affair with another staffer named Regina. Along the way, he loses slivers of his innocence as he sees what lies beneath the campaign’s shimmering exterior: the candidate’s aloofness when he is offstage, the financial improprieties of a few wealthy patrons. Eventually, the blind allegiance of the candidate’s supporters—their belief that the campaign is a “move of God”—begins to feel foreboding.

David often invokes the ecstatic mysticism of religious devotion as a metaphor for the candidate’s hold on his supporters. The senator “reminded me of my pastor,” David says early on, his regal posture bringing to mind a “talismanic maneuver meant to send forth subliminal messages about confidence and power.” One night, on the trail in New Hampshire, David tells Regina about a magic trick he witnessed as a teenager: While waiting outside of church with his friends, he watched as a magician performed a standard sleight of hand, then levitated a few inches off the city pavement. “Everybody screamed. It was mayhem,” David remembers. “Black people love magic,” Regina rejoins, through laughter. It is a detour in a novel of detours and roundabouts, and also a parable that smartly explains how the candidate’s fervent admirers could be so awed by his charisma that they missed the signs of trouble to come.

Sometimes David allows himself to get carried away like everyone else. He thinks about how the candidate and his family had begun to embody some kind of national fantasy of a Black Camelot. “Maybe there was the hope that black, that portentous designation, could finally be subsumed into the mainstream in the way that Kennedy had helped Irish to be. That some long passage of travel was almost done,” he thinks at one point. In that same stream of thought, David suggests that the public’s belief in the candidate’s ability to dismantle the racial hierarchy is largely thanks to his symbolic appeal: It was, he observes, “mostly the look” of the candidate and his glamorous family—an elegant wife and two small daughters—that made supporters believe he could overcome racism. Who wouldn’t want to accept them?

[Read: Our new postracial myth]

Privy to the campaign’s disappointments and its weaknesses, David is clear-eyed where others are credulous. With the benefit of hindsight, the reader knows that his skepticism would eventually be validated. In the years since Obama’s election, America has seen the birtherism movement, the rise of the Tea Party, Donald Trump’s presidency, and the dismantling of cornerstone civil-rights victories, including key portions of the Voting Rights Act. Then, of course, there were Obama’s own shortcomings during his presidency, namely his capitulation to forces opposed to his most idealistic visions. He would pass a new health-care bill, but fall short of the goal of universal coverage he campaigned on. He would withdraw troops from Afghanistan but begin a series of what the political scientist Michael J. Boyle called “shadow wars,” which were “fought by Special Forces, proxy armies, drones, and other covert means.” According to the Council on Foreign Relations, drone strikes authorized by President Obama led to the deaths of nearly 4,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; more than 300 of them were civilians.

When Cunningham’s novel closes on that fateful night in November, the night of the candidate’s victory, it’s an ending for David, a graduation, even. The book implies that he will go on to work for the new president, but unlike everyone else in that ecstatic moment, he looks to the coming years soberly, acknowledging that the campaign had spoken “a language of signs,” wherein the symbolism of the moment overwhelmed all else. Already, he seems to know that the country will see no grand, lasting transformation. For many Americans, who felt on a similar, actual night that the world seemed on the precipice of change, the lessons would take much longer to learn.