A lot has changed since Barack Obama’s presidency. On today’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show, the podcast host and the former president discussed the ways in which American politics have evolved since Obama’s first presidential campaign.
Klein seemed particularly interested in the work Obama did to persuade white Americans to vote for him in 2008 and 2012. Ta-Nehisi Coates has written extensively about the very specific type of candidate, the very specific type of Black man Obama had to be to win the White House. Implicit in his message of “Hope and Change” was, at times, an avoidance of a lot of the hard truths with which we are currently struggling in our politics. Obama admits to Klein that what he said didn’t always align with what he felt — shouting out Key and Peele’s anger translator sketch — and described weighing the political benefits of calling out racism when he saw it in Tea Party figures: “Is it more important for me to tell a basic historical truth, let’s say about racism in America right now, or is it more important for me to get a bill passed?”
“There’s a psychic cost to not always just telling the truth,” he admits.
Still, Obama believes this is the way to persuade voters. He pointed to the uprisings last summer after the murder of George Floyd by a white former Minneapolis police officer. “What we saw after George Floyd’s murder was a useful bit of truth telling that young people led,” he said. “But even after I think a shift in perspective around George Floyd, we’re still back into the trenches of how do we get different district attorneys elected? How do we actually reform police departments? Now we’re back in the world of politics. And as soon as we get back into the world of politics, now it’s a numbers game. You have to persuade and you have to create coalitions.”
Coalition building is vital, given the structural advantages Republicans have over Democrats. On that subject, Obama agreed that “the game is tilted.” Democrats, Klein points out, need to win over right-of-center voters to be elected, while Republicans don’t need to persuade left-of-center voters. The good news, according to Obama is that having to appeal to more diverse voters makes the Democratic Party more empathetic and wiser. “We have to think about a broader array of interests and people. And that’s my vision for how America ultimately works best and perfects its union.”
But could that union account for extraterrestrials? After Obama addressed the recent videos of U.F.O.s that have been in the news lately on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Klein had to ask the former president how the existence of aliens might change his politics. “It wouldn’t change my politics at all,” Obama insisted. “Because my entire politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating in the middle of space.”
