…If the Obamas aren’t living the American Dream, then who is?

By William Boardman

Now they are offering the man $400,000 for making just one 60-minute speech (and another $400,000 for a 90-minute speech). That $400,000 is more than twice the average net worth of most Americans at their wealthiest ($194,226 in 2011, mostly in the worth of a home). A Credit Suisse survey in 2014 put Americans’ average net worth at “a whopping $301,000,” still well below what rich people will pay for a one hour speech by a former president.

Even Obama’s annual pension is more than what most Americans own (his pension is $205,700 plus roughly $150,000 in perks). Speaking at a rate of $400,000 per hour translates to $16 million for a forty-hour work week; even if the speech takes a day to prepare, that’s still $2 million a week. An annual household income of $450,000 puts you in the top one percent. It takes an income of almost $150,000 to be in the top ten percent. Most Americans don’t even dream of a payday in the millions.

Why shouldn’t he go for it? That $400,000 speech is almost as much as his taxable income in 2015 ($436,035, from publicly released tax returns). In 2015, the Obamas paid $81,472 in federal income tax, more than Americans’ average annual household income of $55,775). Citizen Obama is already way richer than 90% of his fellow citizens (and almost all Kenyans probably), so why shouldn’t he try to increase that gap between himself and the hoi-polloi? At the same time why shouldn’t he be trying to narrow the much more gigantic gap between himself and his mega-rich play-pals, like Richard Branson (net worth over $5 Billion) or David Geffen (net worth over $7 Billion). Barack and Michelle Obama together have a net worth of only $24 million or so, up from a mere $8 million when he became president. Or to put it in perspective, when he became president, Obama was already in the top one percent of wealthiest Americans.

None of this is meant to suggest that the Obamas are doing anything wrong in the way they are living their post-White House lives, insofar as we know. At least he’s not crying poor the way Hillary “dead broke” Clinton did when departing Pennsylvania Avenue. Nor has he been smarmily coy like then-Presidential multi-millionaire Bush telling The New York Times that, in retirement, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.”

In fairness, it should go without saying that, in the White House, President Obama was probably, on balance, preferable to his most recent predecessors, and is still a notch above the current incumbent. That said, Obama’s presidency was mostly an ineffectual limp rag of minimal horror that looks good mainly in contrast to the glaringly worse high crimes and misdemeanors of others. There’s no good reason he shouldn’t cash in in the same ways his less worthy predecessors have. Obama fits quite comfortably into the cliché of useless, self-regarding ex-presidential lifestyle to which the only recent arguable exception is Jimmy Carter.

Responding to Obama’s acceptance of the traditional emoluments of out-of-office, the flusterings of the twitterati have often portrayed themselves as shocked, shocked to find that there’s post-presidential enrichment going on (but they express that shock with none of the patent irony of Captain Renault in Casablanca). The moral fatuity of these nattering nabobs of nonsense is nothing new, it has long been the ruling class’s farcical manner of flattering itself that it has actual principles beyond just having more. The last few minutes of a Bill Maher clip illustrate the dominant mind bubble, where only billionaire Nick Hanauer reveals any sense of the greater good, wishing Obama had spent time building houses for Habitat for Humanity and identifying wealth disparity as tearing the country apart. The three show biz millionaires at the table don’t even acknowledge either point.

But then there’s Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, both of whom seem to be running for president in 2020.

Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts and former Harvard Law School professor, said on SiriusXM, referring to news of Obama’s $400,000 speaking fee:

I was troubled by that … One of the things I talk about in the book [This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class] is the influence of money. I describe it as a snake that slithers through Washington and that it shows up in so many different ways here in Washington…. There’s more of us than there is of them. And we’ve got to use our voices and our votes and fight back.

Warren’s use of “us” is rather elastic, since she and her husband have a net worth of roughly $8.75 million, enough to be at the bottom of the top one per cent by wealth. The couple’s annual income of roughly $950,000 is well within the top one percent. She received an advance of $525,000 for her book, This Fight Is Our Fight.

Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont and former congressman, told CNN:

Look, Barack Obama is a friend of mine, and I think he and his family represented us for eight years with dignity and intelligence. But I think at a time when we have so much income and wealth inequality … I think it just does not look good…. It’s not a good idea, and I’m sorry President Obama made that choice.

Sanders is not among the top one per cent in wealth or income. He and his wife have a net worth of roughly $1.6 million, putting them comfortably within the top ten percent. The couple’s joint income of $205,271 in 2014 is also well within the top ten percent. For all of that, Sanders does in fact “remain one of the poorer members of the United States Senate.”

The point of all this has nothing to do with hypocrisy, which may or may not exist in any of these examples. What’s truly “troubling,” what really “does not look good,” is that, in retrospect, Obama now appears the consummate huckster, a man whose gulls remain full of admiration for the man they fail to realize has fleeced them from beginning to end with empty eloquence. And now the dark joke is that those who benefitted most from all that empty eloquence are willing to pay handsomely to hear more of it.

THAT should be troubling, yet few seem troubled by it.

And that’s all you really need to know to understand why we’re where we are now, no longer with a charm shark but with an unabashed con man as leader of the free world: the richest president in our history, a user and abuser who is richer than all prior presidents combined, a man whose wealth was not built on actual slavery like Washington’s, but close enough by treating people like slaves without even the obligation to feed or house them.

The idealized Obama would have – might have – led the resistance to President Trump. But then the idealized Obama might have led the resistance to Obamacare in favor of single payer, might have led the resistance to the Honduran military coup in favor of democracy, might have led the resistance to Saudi genocide in Yemen in favor of human rights. In 2009, President Obama said, “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,” although he managed to do as much. Obama’s campaign included the notion that Wall Street fat cats should pay their fair share in taxes. That hasn’t happened, but at least some of those cats are paying a fair share to him.

And that’s all fine and good and ironic and amusing and unimportant.

What matters is what he does – and what Warren does, and what Sanders does, and what the rest of our real and would-be leaders do, where they stake their futures. Recently Obama spoke reflectively about his own future: “What is the most important thing I can do for my next job, and what I’m convinced of, is that although there are all kinds of issues that I care about, and all kinds of issues that I intend to work on, the single most important thing I can do is to help in any way I can prepare the next generation of leadership to take up the baton and take their own crack at changing the world.”

Really? The single most important thing is to kick the can down the road? When the house is on fire, the single most important thing is to call an architect?

Just as the Bush presidency set the conditions for Obama to become president, so did the Obama presidency set the conditions that have produced President Trump. Obama entered the White House with the wind at his back, with Democrats in the majority in Congress, with the country ready for hope and change and serious leadership. The result, eight years later, is not pretty. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. Or maybe it’s worse.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

(From Reader Supported News)