LIFE Barack Obama

By Meredith Corporation

LIFE Barack Obama chronicles the former President's life, from his early years in Chicago to meeting Michelle and his rise in politics to the White House and beyond, as he continues to be prolific today at the age of 60. Complete with stunning, intimate photography, this special edition is a must-have for history buffs and fans of American politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meredith Corporation
• Release date: Jul 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781547859481

Book preview

A MOST COMPLICATED MAN

Barack Obama’s accomplishments as president were many, as were his deep frustrations. His legacy lies in what we as a nation learned from him.

BY KRISTAL BRENT ZOOK

From that first stunning address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, the speech that launched him into national consciousness, Barack Obama made clear his yearning for a new kind of politics that would galvanize a fresh generation of voters. His white American mother and Black African father had shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation, he told the crowd to rousing response. They passed that faith on to him, and it stuck.

Between that speech and now, as America’s 44th president turns 60 and cultivates a post–White House life, Obama changed the United States, and the world. His legacy evolves, along with the evolving vantage point of history.

Obama’s election to the presidency would mean . . . that the America I believed in was possible, that the democracy I believed in was within reach, he wrote in his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, . . . that I wasn’t alone in believing that the world didn’t have to be a cold, unforgiving place, where the strong preyed on the weak and we inevitably fell back into clans and tribes.

In terms of his character and temperament, there are points on which nearly everyone can agree. Obama was intelligent, restrained, dignified. An idealist, to be sure. A loving husband and father. Certainly, someone deeply dedicated to the mission he had been called to serve.

As he was the first African American president this country has seen, his presence and power in the White House were symbolic as well as actual, his identity embodying a part of our national identity that was messy and not easily defined. Because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, Obama wrote, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast.

That so many Americans embraced this man with a Muslim-sounding name, with all of his unknowns and aspirations, said something profound. His complicated background and experiences reminded us that America is full of contradiction and disappointment, but also hope. He was nothing if not the collective mirror we held up to remind ourselves not to succumb to cynicism.

Barack Obama never believed that his presidency would lead to a postracial America. After all, this was a man who was placed under round-the-clock security by the Secret Service earlier in the campaign than any presidential candidate before him. Obama was not naive about racism. He simply refused to give in to it.

His tenure in the White House mattered not only in figurative terms but in concrete policy measures. He appointed the country’s first two Black attorneys general and instituted criminal justice reforms to address racial disparities impacting Black and brown people. He added more than 100 federal judges of color to the bench and nominated Sonia Sotomayor as Supreme Court justice, the first Latina to serve in that capacity.

Still, he refused to cast himself as only a Black president and was intent on being a bridge that could unite us all. In many ways, he did just that. Obama consistently won white voters, claiming nine states in 2008 that had voted Republican in 2004. His presidential campaigns registered thousands of young people and people of color—new voters who previously had been disengaged. Many white citizens of traditionally red rural districts cast their ballots for him. His open-arms approach to the electorate was a stance for which he received some criticism from African Americans, but not enough to dent his Gallup poll approval rating among Black voters, which remained in the 80-90 percent range throughout his eight years in office.

Politically, Obama’s accomplishments were numerous and varied, the most significant of them arguably being the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It provided health coverage to 20 million people, including 4 million Hispanic people and 3 million African Americans. As Thomas Holt, a University of Chicago professor emeritus of American and African American history, has described it, passage of the ACA placed Obama in the same historical ranks as Franklin D. Roosevelt for instituting Social Security and Lyndon B. Johnson for Medicare.

With that one victory, Obama achieved what generations of Democratic presidents had tried and failed to do. That such a feat was grounded in mostly moderate measures—such as allowing adult children to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26 and not denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions—often gets lost in translation.

Obama will also be remembered for rescuing the country from the brink of financial disaster, as the economic meltdown he inherited upon taking office was the worst America had faced since the Great Depression—with an unemployment rate that had reached 10 percent and thousands of foreclosures forced by the collapse of the housing market. Almost immediately as president, Obama put in place the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a stimulus package containing $787 billion in tax cuts and spending. The legislation, ultimately credited with saving some 2.5 million American jobs, was passed without a single Republican vote in the House.

Among Obama’s environmental actions, the Paris Agreement often gets top billing, but there is more to his record on climate change, according to political journalist Jonathan Darman, who in a New York magazine Q&A cited tough EPA constraints on coal, a meaningful accord with China to cut emissions, serious stimulus spending on clean energy, new emissions standards for cars and trucks. Darman added, History may well reveal that Obama showed more personal courage on this issue than any other.

In his final speech in office, Obama included other accomplishments in his tally, reminding us that his administration saw the dawn of a new era with Cuba after 55 years of discord, that under his leadership military forces took out Osama bin Laden, that he succeeded in bringing marriage equality to LGBTQ couples, and that he was responsible for shutting down Iran’s nuclear weapons program without firing a shot.

Despite these many successes, a cloud loomed over his presidency. Obama watched a rising tide of right-wing extremism take hold across the country, a trend with roots in economic insecurity, fear of demographic shifts, and resentment over immigration—and in the election of Obama. The President seemed helpless to stem the tide. Hate crimes rose, and between 2010 and 2016 right-wing domestic terrorism skyrocketed from 6 percent to 35 percent of domestic terror attacks, according to the Center for American Progress. The most notorious racial incident