Unpopular opinion: Barack Obama was—in ways somewhat analogous to Lyndon Johnson—ultimately a failure as president.

Remember, Obama explicitly said that he wanted to be Ronald Reagan. He wanted to solidify a center-left (just how left it actually was is... questionable) consensus that would dominate American politics for the next generation.

He failed.

Nostalgia for the unifying rhetoric of the Obama era—the “there is no red America, or blue America, but the United States of America”—is understandable and incredibly political powerful.

It’s why Joe Biden is president now.

But it was—and I cannot overemphasis enough—wrong.

“No red America, no blue America, but the United States of America” didn’t stop the Tea Party in 2010 or Donald Trump in 2016.

And “let’s stop fighting and work together” hasn’t exactly been the fountainhead of political stability in 2020.

To put it a little bit more concretely... Obama wrote in his memoirs he was made on behalf of GWB during the inauguration in 2009 because of anti-Bush protestors.

Obama was supposed to be the great unifier who would transcend the bitter partisan divides of the 2000s and, as America's first black president, finally overcome America's racist history and fulfill its promise and potential to all Americans.

These were messianic goals that were almost certainly structurally impossible to accomplish, but they were nevertheless the broad political goals of the Obama administration!

It is a tragedy -- repeat, a *tragedy* -- that this proved to be impossible.

I'd also suggest that the messianism blinded Obama and his staffers -- and Democrats more broadly -- to just how bad things were going to get.

I'm not happy that Obama was unable to bind our fractured polity back together.

And while I'm critical of Obama from the left, I don't blame him for failing in his goals. Because realistically, they were simply not structurally possible to achieve.