Barack to the Future

They are keening in the Bay Area. “Oh, America, what have we done?" wrote a San Bruno reader to the San FranciscoChronicle the week after November's election. "Many of us feel for President Obama, especially as we watch him gracefully support Donald Trump's transition, knowing Trump's priorities include destroying Obama's legacy."

About half the country did not wish to see Donald Trump elected president. To judge from the papers, though, their chief regret is not that Barack Obama governed in such a way as to help deliver the White House to Trump. No! What eats at them is that Americans voted in such a way as to unsettle President Obama's peace of mind, or his self-esteem, or whatever it is we mean when we talk, as we increasingly do, of the president's "legacy."

That is how President Obama sees it, too. "If you want to give Michelle and me a good send-off, .  .  . if you care about our legacy, realize that everything we stand for is at stake," he told the guests at a Congressional Black Caucus dinner in mid-September. "I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard." Journalists have picked up this way of thinking. The week before Christmas, Coral Davenport of the New York Times wrote:

President Obama announced on Tuesday what he called a permanent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along wide areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic Seaboard as he tried to nail down an environmental legacy that cannot quickly be reversed by Donald J. Trump.

In the United States at least, this is a new way of looking at politics. Do Americans need to be told it is a dangerous one? Policy outcomes in a democratic republic are not supposed to be things you can "nail down" so firmly that democracy cannot dislodge them.