Can Barack Obama be credited for the blue wave? Perhaps – but others fathered this success

The former US president’s centrism lacks substance but his enduring political capital has given rank outsiders the chance to spark radical political change

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A blue wave has surged in the United States. It has been a week since the Democrats hammered the Republicans and regained majorities in the House and the Senate, and the credit for that is, shall we say, a matter of debate.

Success has many fathers. One of them is Barack Obama, the first to break the kind of barriers a new generation of Democrats has overcome. This week, I follow what can and cannot be traced to the man who still holds a unique position in the liberal political imaginary, almost a decade after leaving the White House.

Barack Obama’s presidency and specifically his first election win, remains a formative politicising moment for many millennials. Few imagined that a Black man with an Arab Muslim middle name, and an electrifying agenda of hope, could become president of the United States. Then there were his own personal attributes: an orator for the ages, cool as ice, confident and unflappable. These qualities were sharpened by what followed – a Donald Trump presidency that wrecked political institutions and norms, fomented racial divides, led by a peevish, insecure narcissist that made the Obama years feel like a hallucination. The Trump era, and how the country swung so sharply in another direction, suggested that Obama was in fact, not the start of something, but an anomaly. But there may be more of an enduring legacy to Obama than the Trump era suggests.

The question is: How much does a Dr Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s new senator and the US’s first ever Muslim senator, owe to Obama? El-Sayed answered that question himself by saying he is picking up the baton from the former president.

Obama also riffed on that note of continuity when he threw himself behind El-Sayed during the last days of the latter’s campaign, by comparing the Islamophobic attacks on El-Sayed’s name to those he faced. “I remind them his name was Barack,” El-Sayed said, of his detractors. He likened his disagreements with Obama to a son who loves his dad and “really appreciates all they’ve done, but … here are some things I would have done differently”.

But rewind a little, and this begins to look like clever campaigning. El-Sayed previously said that the Obama presidency had left the country “no better off”. He criticised Obama’s “war on terror” campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, use of drones and for presiding over record deportations. Obama’s historic win, El-Sayed wrote, is a memory that “will serve not as a reminder of the history we made that night – but of the silly emotions of a naive young man who didn’t understand that hope and change required more than flowery prose and a winning smile”. Oof.

When questioned on these strong critiques, El-Sayed’s softer tone credited Obama with one specific and revealing achievement: being of a certain background and still believing that he could make it into high office.

This suggests that Obama’s impact lies less in any radical anti-status quo politics that he pioneered – the sort that Bernie Sanders championed – but simply in breaking that psychological racial barrier for the American electorate. It is impossible to say whether successful candidates like Zohran Mamdani or El-Sayed would have prevailed in an environment steeped in Islamophobia, if Obama had not prevailed in an environment steeped with racism and Islamophobia. There is an argument that a president who was presented as radical, an “Arab”, even as a terrorist, who then spent eight years in the White House without passing sharia law, retained enough political muscle memory.

But is that all that new left-wing candidates of colour have to thank Obama for? It can be argued that Obama’s hawkish wars and conventional immigration policy, for example, preserved the sort of mainstream political capital that he could confer on people like El-Sayed. Since leaving office, Obama has remained a broadly milquetoast figure, occupying a cultural and political territory in which he has been refashioned as a curator of pop culture. From recommending literature and music, to his latest podcast, in which he hosts guests to discuss “great books”, Obama has frustratingly recused himself from the big political battles playing out since he left office, choosing to become some sort of jazz-playing uncle.

When he did make interventions, Obama’s once-moving rhetoric sounded remote and inappropriate for the moment. On Gaza, where a genocide is grinding down an entire population, Obama posted a weak statement which spoke of securing “lasting peace”, lacking the moral clarity to name the crimes that have been committed.

This cop out reveals that Obama, even out of office and free to be a political engine of change without risk to his career in Washington DC, is not a cautious canny tactician. He is just that regular establishment centrist critiqued for being little more than flowery prose and winning smiles.

But when he showed up for El-Sayed, bringing his trademark humour and presence to the Michigan campaign, one could see how valuable that centrism was and that Obama does not flinch from defending and endorsing politicians with more progressive views than him. In choosing to show up, lending his imprimatur of authority to a candidate who has sharply criticised him while sitting firmly outside the Democratic party mainstream on everything from corporate power to Israel, Obama enabled El-Sayed to advance a revolutionary agenda.

But that agenda is no orphan either. It owes much to Bernie Sanders who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination twice on a left-wing platform, and since his loss, continued advancing positions such as reducing military spending, curbing corporate powers, blocking military sales to Israel and wealth taxes for billionaires. Much of the exciting politics in the blue wave is downstream from him.

Working in tandem with Obama’s backing, these legacies have paved the way for the success of the racial outsider and those who want to break the grip of ‘moderate’ establishment politics. Not many fathers, but two.

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