Ceaser on Obama in March 2015, considered in light of Trump in June 2016

Anyone seeking an education in ways of understanding politics should take some time to listen to, watch, or read transcripts of Conversations with Bill Kristol. Earlier today I happened to be listening to the podcast of Kristol's first conversation with James Ceaser, which took place last March, and I thought there was much wisdom to be found in it. Much of the conversation is about constitutionalism in the United States. But near the end the conversation turned to President Obama.

Consider how Professor Ceaser's observations about President Obama might help us to understand the Trump phenomenon. An excerpt: 

KRISTOL: You’ve written a fair amount about our current president, President Obama, and I’m just curious from the point of view of a student of American history and of the American constitutionalism broadly, anything striking about him. I mean, what will historians note about the Obama presidency?

CEASER: Well, I think they’ll begin by noting the extraordinary election of 2008, which is partly about Obama but partly about Obama-ism, which was much more than a political phenomenon. It was a cultural phenomena and in way a worldwide phenomenon, something like almost a religious devotion to an individual who was seen as being able to deliver not only to the United States but the whole world from the morass in which it found itself.

And it’s more telling, I think, about the masses, even than Obama, because, after all, he was just the vehicle for this mass movement that emerged. The yearning for someone who could transform the world. That doesn’t speak well for the modern state of the world or democracy. It’s in a way a terrifying – a terrifying event to see so much hope put into one person with the obvious understanding that no person, even if Obama were more than he is, could ever have achieved that. So I think that 2008 is a quasi-religious phenomenon portending something about the character of our world. Maybe it’s just a one-off. Maybe the experience of disappointment will sober people up and make them feel a little embarrassed at how they acted in 2008. But that’s the event that stands out.

Even in the 2012 election, you look at that the campaign in 2012 was so radically different from 2008. It was effectively run in 2012 but there was no high inspiration, no hope and change, it was tough politics. So we’d already passed this curious stage. And I wonder in some ways, not to try and make excuses for Obama, whether he wasn’t the victim of this movement, which probably must have affected his soul in some ways.

When you move from venue to venue and you’re treated with such a degree of adulation, maybe if you’re not a strong personality, you begin to believe it yourself. And I think there are personal reasons, deficiencies in his own character, which I think helped that process along. But I think he was affected by this, began to think that these speeches that he gave, which had these responses could actually change reality. In particular in international affairs, his first speech in Cairo, maybe it was a prudential move, but he seemed to think that he could run foreign policy by his own voice. And that the same thing which brought him success in the election could bring him success in the running of the country and the world. We’ve seen, I think, that that’s not the case. A good solid and simple education, but an education nonetheless.

Since the rise of Trump, others have observed that the Trump movement of 2016 is a kind of funhouse-distorted-mirror version of the Obama movement of 2008. But keep in mind that Ceaser was making these observations about Obama a few months before Trump announced his candidacy and even longer before people began to recognize its potency.