Comment: Obama’s White House visit a reminder of past hopes

By Robin Givhan / The Washington Post

The 44th president returned to the White House wearing a suit and tie and joking that he rarely dresses so formally, now that he’s a private citizen, albeit one with “more than a passing interest in the course of our democracy.” In a crowded East Room, in a sea of soberly dressed men in stark white shirts — as well as women in their panoply of power attire — former president Barack Obama was the distinctly loose-limbed statesman in the charcoal suit and the indigo-blue shirt.

He stood on the small stage between Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden with his arms folded in front of him and with his chin tilted upward in a familiar posture, the one that projects a combination of confidence and optimism. The three of them, the past and the present, these mere humans that history has tasked with representing hope and progress and healing, entered the room together to a sustained ovation and jubilant applause from an audience filled with Cabinet members, friendly legislators and constituent admirers.

Obama returned to the White House on Tuesday for the first time since vacating it in January 2017, to speak to the enduring impact of his signature achievement: the Affordable Care Act. After it was signed into law in 2010, it allowed some 20 million people who had been without health care to get it. It put an end to insurance companies being able to deny people coverage because of preexisting conditions or to cut off their coverage because they’d outspent an arbitrary lifetime cap on financial support. The ACA was hardly perfect. Some people were still uninsured. There were plenty of glitches and shortcomings in the system. The public remains deeply divided, along partisan lines, yet a record 14.5 million Americans signed up for the insurance during the most recent open enrollment.

“Throughout history, what you see is that it’s important to get something started, to plant a flag, to lay a foundation for further progress. The analogy I’ve used about the ACA before is that, in the same way that was true for early forms of Social Security, Medicare, it was a starter home,” Obama said. “It secured the principle of universal health care, provided help immediately to families, but it required us to continually build on it and make it better.”

The current president aims to expand that starter home with an executive order to make the ACA that much more affordable to a larger group of people.

Obama’s presence served as a reminder of a beguiling past. He was a visual reference to a recent history when people believed that while the country might not have moved entirely past its racism, it had taken such an enormous step forward that surely momentum would keep society on course toward the light. He was a reminder of a time when the most daunting troubles and concerns now seem quite manageable in light of all the country faces today: a stubborn pandemic, a warring nuclear Russia and our own post-insurrection nation so divided that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, asked Biden’s Supreme Court nominee — the first Black woman formally considered for such a position — whether she believed babies were racist and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., called Republican senators who’ve expressed their support of the nominee “pro-pedophile.”

Obama came to cast a warm, nostalgic glow on the Biden White House. He came to deliver a bit of his familiar prose with its informal eloquence and uplift. But in the process, he also reminded us of how we got here, to this place of national turmoil. Change has its pushback. Hope isn’t always unifying. Light can be blinding rather than clarifying.

Obama began his remarks by referring to Biden as “vice president” and then reassured his audience that his mistake was just a joke. “It was all set up,” Obama said as he laughed. There were references to the political capital that Obama expended on the ACA, and he chuckled in hindsight as he thought about how it made his reelection prospects grimmer. And, of course, there were multiple references to Biden’s effusive and expletive-laced description of just how big a deal it was when Obama signed the ACA into law.

“Feels like the good old days,” Biden said of Obama’s return to the White House. And the president basked in the rose-colored recollections. “Look, it’s fitting that the first time you return to the White House is to celebrate a law; a law that’s transforming millions of lives because of you. And I say ‘because of you.’ We had a lot of help — the staff and I helped a little bit — but it was because of you. A law that shows hope leads to change.”

But in the midst of those soft-focus memories and the easy-listening humor, there are also stubborn and familiar realities. Republicans have been relentless in trying to weaken and ultimately repeal the law. And Biden warned that this remains a risk if the Republicans should win the congressional majority in the midterm elections.

The Republican National Committee’s response to Obama’s visit to the White House was to compare him to TikTok influencers and to sum him up as a mere Netflix producer, which recalled years-old characterizations of him as an inconsequential celebrity candidate during his first presidential campaign. For all the references to the ACA as a symbol of the large-scale change of which the country is capable, for the very change that Obama himself represented, the celebratory ceremony was a five-alarm warning about a determined opposition that keeps pushing rewind on politics and the culture.

As Biden sat at a small table to sign the executive order, his colleagues gathered around him for a photograph. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., stood alongside Obama. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., was behind Biden. Afterward, Biden handed the pen he’d used to the former president and the two bumped fists in victory. Then the two men did what politicians do. They worked the room, shaking hands and taking selfies. Smiling and laughing. It was a reminder of how things used to be. And of how they no longer are.

Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press. Follow her on Twitter @RobinGivhan.