Barack Obama, We Miss the Leadership You Brought to the Presidency.

Barack Obama, We Miss the Leadership You Brought to the Presidency.

(ThyBlackMan.com) There’s a way of measuring a leader that never shows up in the ledgers. Not in the bills passed or the votes counted. I’m talking about bearing. The thing that comes out of a person when the floor drops out from under a whole country and everybody turns at once to see how the one in charge is going to hold up. I’ve watched a fair number of presidents meet that moment. Some rose to it. Some didn’t come anywhere close. And when I sit here and take the full measure of Barack Obama, what stays with me isn’t a policy or a signing ceremony. It’s how he wore the office. How he stood in front of us on the hardest days and spoke like we were grown, like we could take the truth without falling to pieces.

I came up in a sterner time. Back then your word was your bond, and how you carried yourself when the heat was on told folks more about you than any speech ever could. My father, God rest him, used to say you find out who somebody really is when the trouble shows up, not when the cameras are being kind. That old line has been sitting on me lately. Keeps walking me back to the same door.

My mind goes to the days right after Sandy Hook. All those babies, gone. A whole country sucker punched and not even sure how to breathe. He came to that podium and you could just see it sitting on him. Jaw tight. Eyes wet. That long pause before he could get a single word out. He didn’t dress his grief up for us. He let it be what it was, and in doing that he gave everybody else a little room to hurt too. Plenty of leaders will tell you they feel your pain. Not many will stand up there and let you watch them carry it. That’s a whole different animal. I caught it every single time.

Now hold on, don’t get me wrong. Nobody around here thinks he walked on water, me least of all. Had my fights with him. There were days I wanted him to hit back twice as hard, dig his heels in, quit reaching across an aisle that kept smacking his hand away. We said as much down at the barbershop most Saturday mornings, coffee going cold, everybody talking over everybody. But not once in eight years did he make me ashamed of how he talked to the world. And brother, that’s a low bar we didn’t know we’d end up missing this bad.

Obama had a way with words that I think we all took for granted while we still had it. Spoke in whole thoughts. Trusted you enough to actually build the argument out, let a sentence breathe, figure you were sharp enough to walk with him clear to the end of it. He wasn’t trying to shout you down. He was trying to reason with you, which is a lost art if there ever was one. When he got on television to talk to the nation, it felt like sitting across from somebody serious who understood exactly how serious the job was. Didn’t matter if you liked his politics. You knew he’d read the briefing and lost sleep over it.

Think about the ugliness they threw at him, and Lord, there was a mountain of it. The birth certificate mess. All that whispering about where he was really from, what he really believed down in his chest, whether he even belonged in that house. A whole cottage industry got built just to tell this Black man he was a stranger in his own country. And through the worst of it, he mostly kept his cool. Used humor when he could. Swallowed insults that would’ve cracked a lesser spirit clean in two. My generation knows that particular discipline in our bones. Twice as good, half as loud. Eat the disrespect so nobody can turn around and say you lost your composure. Watching him do it up on the highest stage there is, I felt two things at the same time. Proud he could. Sick that he had to.

Whoever came after showed us the other road a president can walk, and the contrast couldn’t have been starker. Donald Trump didn’t swallow a thing. Said the quiet part out loud, was widely condemned for appearing to mock a disabled reporter, attacked John McCain’s status as a war hero, and turned the office into something closer to a cage match than a solemn trust. Some folks ate it up. Called it authentic. Called it fighting back. They can have that opinion, it’s a free country. All I know is I watched the temperature of the whole place change right in front of me. The meanness that at least used to hide itself came out and pulled up a chair at the head of the table. Once that dam broke, it’s been awful hard to build back.

That’s really the center of what’s been eating at me. It isn’t just that I miss one particular man. It’s that his absence threw a hard light on how coarse everything’s gotten. Politics now is loud in a way that leaves you wrung out. Everybody hollering. Everybody performing their outrage for a phone. Half the people we ship off to Washington seem more interested in going viral than in doing the actual work, and Trump didn’t invent that fever so much as he gave everybody permission to run it hot. In all that racket, the memory of a leader who’d drop his voice to make a point stands out like a porch light on a black country road.

Let me be careful here, though. Nostalgia is a slick trickster. It’ll sand off every rough edge and hand you back a fairy tale. Obama years had their failures, real ones, and history’s going to weigh them the way it should. The drone strikes bothered my sleep. Wall Street walked off too clean for my liking. That hope he was selling back in ’08 was always bigger than any one fellow could deliver, and some of it soured into flat disappointment for people who needed a good deal more than a beautiful speech. I’m not asking you to forget one bit of that. A grown assessment holds the good and the bad in the same two hands and doesn’t drop either one.

But temperament is its own kind of substance. How the person at the top behaves ends up shaping how the whole nation behaves. Children were watching. My own grandbabies were watching. For eight years one of the most powerful people on earth showed them patience, curiosity, and self-control. He read to kids on the floor. And down in a church in Charleston, packed wall to wall with grieving people, after a young man had walked into their Bible study, sat among them for nearly an hour, and then murdered nine souls who had welcomed him into their prayer circle, the president stood up and sang Amazing Grace. That one lives in me. A sitting president, up there singing, because plain words just couldn’t hold the weight anymore. Wasn’t a poll tested thing. That was a human being reaching for the only thing left that might do any good at all. I’ve spent enough Sundays in enough sanctuaries to tell a performance from a prayer. What I saw that day was a prayer.

What I’m really grieving, if I’m being honest, is a whole idea. The notion that decency and strength can live under the same roof. Somewhere along the line we got sold this lie that kindness is weakness, that you’ve got to be cruel to be tough, that a leader who stays calm must be soft as pudding. It’s the whole gospel Trump preaches, and a lot of good people bought it. He put that lie in the ground just by being who he was. Firm as they come. Made the hard calls, sent people into harm’s way, carried the weight of every one of them, and never once turned into a bully to do it. He showed you can be steady and strong at the same time. That composure isn’t cowardice. That you can hold your ground without spitting on the fella standing across from you.

The young ones coming up didn’t really get to see any of that in real time, and it eats at me. A whole generation’s being raised to believe political life is nothing but combat, that the loudest, nastiest voice takes the whole pot, that contempt and conviction are the same thing. They flip on the television and watch grown adults act worse than middle schoolers, and they figure that’s just how the game is played. It is not how it’s played. It wasn’t always like this. There was a stretch, and not that long back either, when the person in the highest office carried himself with a dignity you could point a child toward and say, there now, be like that.

I’m not saying any of this to make a saint out of him. He’d hate that, and he’d be first in line to rattle off his own shortcomings. I’m saying it because we’re living through a mean, bruising stretch of American life, ugly enough that we’ve halfway forgotten the other thing ever existed. And remembering matters. Remembering is what keeps a people from just settling for the mud. Let cruelty become the water we all swim in, let shouting become the only tongue that power speaks, and we’ll have handed away something we might never get back.

Old preacher I knew a long time ago said grace isn’t weakness dressed up in Sunday clothes. It’s strength that has finally learned how to hold itself. That always rang true to me. Takes a whole lot more backbone to stay measured when the world’s poking at you to snap than it does to just blow sky high. He had that backbone. Showed a country a president could disagree without demonizing, could lose without whining, could win without gloating. Reminded us the office was always bigger than any one ego, that whoever sits in it is meant to be a servant and not some kind of king.

I’m an old man now. Seen enough presidents come and go to know not one of them is perfect, and every last one will let you down somewhere down the line. But every so often one of them shows you the very best of what the job can be, and he did. Not through the laws alone. Through the plain, almost radical act of behaving like a decent human being while half the world sat there openly hoping he’d fall flat on his face.

We shouldn’t need a former president to teach us how to treat one another. But if that’s the one lesson we’re willing to carry out of those eight years, then let’s carry it and let’s carry it seriously. And let’s not wait too long before we start expecting it again from the people we pick to lead us.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.