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A year ago, during the Democratic Presidential-primary debate in Flint, Michigan, Senator Bernie Sanders was railing against the crooks on Wall Street when he turned to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and said, One of us has a super PAC. One of us has raised fifteen million dollars from Wall Street for that super PAC. One of us has given speeches on Wall Street for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clinton had a ready response: If you were going to be in some way distrusted or dismissed about whether you can take on Wall Street if you ever took money, President Obama took more money from Wall Street in the 2008 campaign than anybody ever had! Obama had still stood up to Wall Street, she said, and so would she. But there was a problem with that argument: although Barack Obamas two campaigns had raised about twenty-five million dollars from Wall Street, he had not personally received large fees from the industry. Meanwhile, since 2001, Hillary and Bill Clintons paid speeches had earned them a hundred and fifty-three million dollars.

Obama may yet catch up. Last week, it was reported that, having returned from sailing around Tahiti with friends, he would embark on the working stage of his post-Presidency by giving a speech for which the financial-services firm Cantor Fitzgerald would pay him four hundred thousand dollars. During his time in the White House, Obama made his share of mistakes, but he worked hard. While enduring insults about his family and his citizenship, he won landmark progressive victoriesincluding the expansion of health-care access to millions of Americansall without a hint of sordidness or scandal, and then he campaigned tirelessly for Clinton. He deserves a comfortable retirement. But isnt that what the joint book deal that he and Michelle Obama recently signed, for a reported sixty-five million dollars, is supposed to provide? For that matter, what should a post-Presidency provide? A reason that Obama has been criticized for the Cantor Fitzgerald fee may be not that he would take the money but that he would do so before his identity outside the White House has been solidly defined. Now almost the first thing that the public is learning about this next stage in his life is the one thing they think they already know about politicians: they are financially beholden to corporate interests.

Obama will not run for office again. And, unless the Obamas have learned nothing from the Clintons experience, his decision to accept the speaking fee should finally put to rest any notions that Michelle might run. Still, one hopes, and Obama has said, that he is not done with public life. Last month, in Chicago, he talked about wanting to inspire young people to feel good about politics as a profession. He might consider how the financial decisions he makes in the next few years could compromise that goal, and others. He is committed to working with Eric Holder, the former Attorney General, in the battle over congressional redistricting, which will require fund-raising for state campaigns.

Obama has also begun accepting money from donors like John Doerr, the venture capitalist, and Reid Hoffman, of LinkedIn, for the Obama Presidential Center. The design for the twenty-one-acre library-and-museum complex, on the South Side of Chicago, was revealed last week, at an event near the site. Obama announced that he and Michelle would donate two million dollars to a youth-jobs program, and emphasized that, while other Presidential libraries had involved retrospective ego-tripping, his would look forward. According to the Times, the fund-raising target is eight hundred million dollars, to cover construction costs and the initial endowment. The modern imperative for a former President to collect cash for a monument to himself as soon as he leaves office allows little respite from the culture of political financing. The minute you stop being pharaoh, you have to start building a pyramid.

Until quite recently, it was considered perfectly proper for a former President to trade his conversation and his companionship for a check. Jimmy Carter, who eschewed personal enrichment in favor of quietly effecting humanitarian advances around the world, was viewed as an outlier. Yet, if the tradition was ever a healthy one for our democracy, voters no longer seem to see it that way. Russian hackers may have been a factor in Hillary Clintons defeat, but so were a number of Americans who believed that the Clintons had sold their independence. The Democratic super PAC Priorities USA recently commissioned a study of voters in Wisconsin and Michigan who had chosen Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016, and found that thirty per cent had voted not for Trump but against Clinton. Many also distrusted the Democrats economic allegiances. The G.O.P., meanwhile, was short on elder statesmen who had enough credibility with its populist wing to halt the lurch toward a demagogue who said that all politicians were crooks, and that he knew it because he had bribed them himself.

Obama may feel that hes had enough of this kind of headache, but the fact is that his party still needs him. If he could just hand over the reins to successors with national reputations and, crucially, the ability to articulate what the Democratic Party stands for, it would be fine for him to focus on his own projects until the next time hes called on to give a Convention speech. The Democratic field, however, is in a state of unproductive entropy, in part because the Party has not resolved the divisions and the contradictions that drew younger voters, in particular, to Sanders. The list of potential standard-bearers includes everyone from Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, who will be in their seventies in 2020, to traditional machine politicians, like Andrew Cuomo and Terry McAuliffe, and younger senators, such as Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, and Chris Murphy, who as yet lack the constituencies and the institutional support that they will need in order to succeed on the national level. But, if any of them are standing on a primary-debate stage in 2020, they are going to have to offer better answers than the ones Clinton gave in Flint.

Her campaign was full of confidence after that debate, but Sanders, in an upset, won the Michigan primary, and Clinton went on to lose the state, narrowly, to Trump. Many observers wondered why the candidate hadnt done more polling, or deployed a better field operation, or, at least, made better use of a surrogate who would have been a great asset there: President Barack Obama. Maybe next time.

Read more here:
Obama's Life Post-Presidency - The New Yorker