Obama: maybe I was "10 or 20 years too early"

[pbrower2a]

One historical theory that has nothing to do with ideology suggests that Barack Obama is ahead of his time due to a temperament related to the time in which he was born. It has little to do with his ideology and far more to do with his personality.

If anything, Barack Obama is a liberal analogue of Dwight Eisenhower, a stickler for precedent and protocol, someone unlikely to jump onto any demagogic bandwagon. Both are known for one huge spending project (the Interstate Highway System, Obamacare) and similar responses to a civil-rights issue of the time (school desegregation, same-sex marriage) -- on those, it was simply "It's the law, folks!" Both were scrupulously honest and had no tolerance for corruption or cronyism. Neither had any flair for drama in politics, Eisenhower ignoring it and Obama thinking it troublesome. zzhBoth were incredibly inept at building support for any sort of machine to outlast their Presidencies.   Ignoring differences of curriculum vitae between the two (it seems to be less important) with Eisenhower as the war hero and Obama being simply 'good officer material'. Both came from generations heavily derided for amorality, money-lust, and lack of intellectual seriousness.  

The difference between them? (No, not ethnicity) is the times in which they were President.  Eisenhower became President after the great Crisis of the Twentieth Century (Great Depression and the Second World War) was over. Obama became President during such a Crisis, as the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 looked after a year and a half that it could be as severe as the economic meltdown beginning in September 1929. America dealt differently with the economic meltdown of 2007-2009, backing the banks about a year after the meltdown began.

Obama seemed like the sort of person to get us out of a Crisis -- until Trump came along. I remember JFK, successor of Eisenhower -- and all that Donald Trump has in common with JFK among the Presidents is a sordid record with women.  We are now in a huge Crisis involving the foundations of political process and social norms about eighty years after the Crisis of 1940 (Great Depression and Second World War) and 160 years after the Crisis of 1860 (potential dissolution of the USA over slavery and potential abolition of slavery).  A prior dangerous time was the American Revolution.

The timing of these cycles reflects the physical reality of the mass-extinction of childhood memories of adults in their eighties, with the last of their age dying, going senile, or going grossly feeble.