Yes, he brought honour to the White House. But Obama leaves America more divided than ever, writes MAX HASTINGS

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Eight years ago, I stood among thousands of cheering Americans in a Kansas City park and witnessed history being made with the creation of President Barack Obama.

Waving placards proclaiming ‘Ready for Change’, they chanted ‘Yes-we-can! Yes-we-can!’

A preacher addressed the crowd, embracing the prospect of ‘a new day for America, for the world’. He continued: ‘Let us welcome the sheer beauty of believing in a candidate who inspires us.’

Tomorrow, America’s first black chief executive will start packing up

That is how most U.S. presidencies are born — in a passing cloud-bank of faith that this time, it will all be different. Such naivete is part of the American genius for reinvention.

That October day, for all his marvellous rhetoric, Obama, then 47 years old, seemed to me oddly vulnerable, perhaps lacking steel.

‘Let us hope,’ I wrote, ‘that this cool, remarkable, clever but curiously remote man possesses some notion about how to translate his vision into reality.’

Today, the speculations are long past, because we have lived through two terms of Obama presidency. Tomorrow, America’s first black chief executive will start packing up, becoming a mere caretaker until he leaves the White House in January.

Frightening

He admits he will miss Air Force One, his flying presidential palace. Though he will never again walk free of his very necessary security detail, he says: ‘I’m looking to negotiate to see maybe if I can take a drive somewhere on some open road.’

Think of all that has happened to America, and to the world, since he attained office. There has been an uneasy recovery from the banking collapse. Most U.S. states decriminalised cannabis. Same-sex marriage has become commonplace.

Osama Bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs, but the U.S. ambassador in Libya and three of his staff were killed by jihadis in Benghazi.

He admits he will miss Air Force One, his flying presidential palace

In social terms, though unemployment has almost halved since 2009, and the Dow Jones share index has nearly doubled, the Obama years have seen income inequality at its highest level since 1928.

Perhaps this is linked to the fact that race relations have deteriorated in a frightening fashion, exacerbated and exemplified by a succession of apparently unjustified shootings of blacks by police officers and vigilantes.

Across the whole population, there have been 296 mass murders of Americans, by Americans.

Brutal

Not only that, Islamist terrorist atrocities are becoming tragically familiar in the U.S., too, in California and Florida, for example — just as they are across Europe and the Middle East. Russia has annexed Crimea, started a war in eastern Ukraine and devastated Syria.

Those are a few of the things that have happened in the world. Now let us turn to the man who has governed through those events.

President Obama has been an ornament to his office, a personality of intelligence, dignity, wit and grace.

He was fiercely criticised by conservatives for shaking the hands of Cuba’s Raul Castro

He was fiercely criticised by conservatives for shaking the hands of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s former dictator, and of Cuba’s Raul Castro (brother of Fidel), but he showed his nature, unapologetically saying: ‘I think normal human responses, basic courtesy, is not checked at the door when you become president.’

Obama has shown himself the most effective public speaker to hold his office certainly since Ronald Reagan, perhaps since Jack Kennedy — articulating high ideals in higher language.

As a British king, or maybe Archbishop of Canterbury, he would have been terrific. But his task has, instead, been to govern the United States, and to provide leadership for the Western world.

It is in these roles that his performance has been controversial and sometimes outright disappointing.

Former New York governor Mario Cuomo said: ‘You campaign in poetry, govern in prose.’ He meant, of course, that the soaring phrases of the hustings must be replaced by the brutal realities of office.

The question is whether Obama has failed to deliver because he simply lacks the skills of a politician, or whether he assumed the presidency in such radically new circumstances that the obstacles have been insuperable.

The answer is probably something of both.

From the first day that Obama the Democrat took office, Republicans in Congress were determined to make him a one-term president.

They have blindly, stubbornly, brutally opposed almost every executive action he has undertaken, including the 2009 fiscal stimulus which economists declared indispensable, to avert global recession in the wake of the banking crisis.

Raw rancour, almost all of it from the Right, has supplanted rational argument in U.S. politics, exemplified by Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina. As Obama addressed a 2009 joint session of Congress, Wilson shouted from the floor: ‘You lie!’ Wilson was formally rebuked by his peers, but has thrice since been overwhelmingly re-elected by his redneck constituents.

From the first day that Obama the Democrat took office, Republicans in Congress were determined to make him a one-term president

Republicans fought to the death against Obama’s flagship health policy, the Affordable Care Act, which became law in March 2010, and have since mounted 60 further congressional attempts to overturn it.

Nobody, including Obama himself, disputes that the measure had severe teething troubles, but today it provides health insurance for 20 million Americans who were previously denied this.

There is no rational basis for the fanaticism of conservative opposition to so-called ‘Obamacare’. It has merely become a symbol of everything many Republicans loathe from this black president. (Absurdly, a quarter of Americans still profess to believe that Obama was not really born in the U.S. — and thus was not entitled to be president.)

It is a long-standing criticism that Obama has disdained the sordid wheeler-dealing with Congressional foes that is inseparable from the American process of government. Lyndon Johnson excelled at this, and so did Franklin Roosevelt, who wrote good-natured notes to bitter enemies, saying: ‘Why don’t you come by and talk to me, sometime?’

Among Obama’s undoubted failures, reflecting his inability to carry Congress with him, was the attempted policy tilt in favour of the Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation.

He said in his famous speech in Cairo in 2009: ‘I’ve come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect.’

Tensions

He was right, that Israel’s rejection of the two-state solution (its existence alongside an independent Palestinian state) and continuing repression of the Palestinians, feeds chronic tensions with the Muslim world. Nonetheless, Israel’s unlovely prime minister Bibi Netanyahu has decisively outmanoeuvred Obama.

On a wider front, the President took office with a sensible consciousness of America’s shrunken global dominance. Last year, his administration made a diplomatic deal with Iran to curb its atomic programme, because the only credible alternative was that the U.S. should use nuclear bunker-busting bombs against Iranian facilities . . . a terrifying prospect.

Yet such prudent caution caused Obama to go an ill-judged step further, and almost wholly reject U.S. interventions abroad. Inevitably, this has emboldened America’s enemies, especially Russia’s President Putin, and dismayed its allies.

George Washington or Abraham Lincoln would struggle to lead a nation in which at least 45 per cent of voters think well of Donald Trump

He made one of the most grievous errors of his presidency by proclaiming in August 2012 that any deployment of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime would constitute crossing of a ‘red line’, triggering a U.S. response.

Yet then he did nothing when Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad did use chemical weapons.

Obama still defends that decision, saying there was never a good intervention option in Syria, because there was no credible rebel faction to support.

Maybe so. But failure to mean what he says has earned the president a reputation for listless passivity which America’s enemies interpret as weakness. And nowhere more so than in the Middle East, where the continuing tragedy of Aleppo should stand as a mighty mark against the Obama administration.

For his part, the outgoing president says of his record in office: ‘Here in the U.S. hopefully we’re building a culture and a way of living together that we can look back on and say: “[This] was good, inclusive, kind, innovative, able to fill the dreams of as many people as possible.” ’

This is assuredly the sort of America this President has been seeking to build, yet utterly at odds with what the country has become on his watch. He himself describes the relationship between conservatives and liberals as a ‘cold civil war’.

On a huge range of issues, from gun control through race relations, abortion, religion, same-sex marriage, taxation, health care and conspiracy theories about their wicked rulers in Washington, there is an unbridgeable gulf between an East or West Coast Democrat and a Montana or Arizona Republican.

Any Republican in Congress who offers even basic civility to Obama’s White House becomes dead meat in the eyes of their constituents. After the 2004 presidential election which returned to power George W. Bush, disgusted Democrats produced a spoof political map of the country which labelled as ‘America’ the blue coastal and north-eastern regions that voted for their presidential candidate John Kerry, while painting the vast red Republican swathe of states ‘the crazy bits in between’.

Over the past 12 years, the world has watched in dismay and disbelief as the ‘crazy bits’ have got crazier. Obama’s view is that, sadly, ‘slash-and-burn politics have come to be the norm’.

Ronald Reagan’s achievement as president was to make Americans feel good about themselves. Obama has been unable to do this. He leads what is still a marvellous country, endowed with a host of good things. Yet few of its own citizens currently believe this.

It is a small miracle that he has not been shot — as Lincoln, JFK and Reagan were before him — and in these days of hate and violence I say that in earnest. He bears no responsibility for the mood, which is fed by the appalling untruths perpetrated through social media, Right-wing talk radio and Fox News hosts. He is trying to govern in a 21st century in which a substantial portion of its white citizens want to revert to the 19th.

Obama says that if he failed to fulfil all the early hopes he inspired, it was because he was trying to do the toughest job in the world. ‘One of the things you realise is that there are problems that just end up being really hard, and by definition the only problems that come to my desk are those that nobody else can solve.’

Barack Obama has not been a great President, and has failed to provide sorely needed global leadership. But as the world, as well as the United States, becomes ever more diffuse and fragmented, maybe unity in pursuit of common purposes is no longer achievable.

George Washington or Abraham Lincoln would struggle to lead a nation in which at least 45 per cent of voters think well of Donald Trump.

America’s first black president has brought honour upon his race as well as his country, showing himself a man of the highest intelligence and integrity. And unlike some who preceeded him — such as the priapic Kennedy and Bill Clinton — he has shown himself to be a devoted husband and father.

History is likely to judge him more generously than have some of his contemporaries. Especially after we have lived through a season with his successor.