Barack Obama has always been good at bringing Americans together, making us feel like we’re on the right track. So his involvement in a new Netflix nature documentary series feels decidedly on-brand: not only does the series celebrate something we can all agree on (the splendour of the natural world), but casts the former president in the familiar role of Reassurer-in-Chief.
The magic of Our Great National Parks isn’t in Obama’s voiceover — he’s still a better orator than a narrator, as it turns out — but in his mere presence onscreen. “Join me in this celebration of our planet’s greatest national parks and wilderness,” he drones pleasantly in the trailer, over magnificent footage of scurrying ants, cascading sea ice, a monkey leaping through an otherworldly landscape of jagged rocks. An extended riff on the micro-ecosystem that lives inside the fur of a sloth ends with the money line: “This sleepy sloth might just save us all.”
The vibe, to use a very Obama-era buzzword, is decidedly hopeful.
But it’s also a little bit odd. How did the 44th President go from leading the free world to hosting nature programs?
The path from the White House to the screen is not completely unprecedented; former Vice President Al Gore, who lost his bid at the presidency in 2000, went on to win an Oscar for his climate documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. But where Gore’s foray into filmmaking was blatantly scaremongering, designed to terrify a complacent public into taking action on climate change, Obama greets us like he’s taking us on a date: standing barefoot on the shores of a Hawaiian beach, welcoming viewers to a visual pleasure cruise through the world’s most gorgeous places. It’s just delightful — and, it must be said, a good look for him.
But by Obama’s own admission, this isn’t what he wanted. His departure from office in 2017 was also supposed to mark a big step back from public life, as he cited the “wise American tradition of ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage and making room for new voices.” That idea is an American original, first expressed by George Washington in his farewell address. Then, the slow fade of the elder statesman was an almost parental fantasy: of leaving the nation you raised from infancy to its own devices. By the time Obama left office, it was a more standard expression of confidence: this was simply how it worked, and the wheels of democracy would keep on turning without him.
The trouble is, they didn’t — and certainly not in the direction liberals wanted them to. For those on the Left, the president’s vow to step back from public life at this moment was practically a form of criminal negligence, leaving the country in the highly incapable hands of a heinous orange madman. And while nobody said so at the time, the impending Trump administration was sort of Barack Obama’s fault. The outgoing POTUS had been instrumental in pressuring Biden, his own Vice President, not to run in 2016, even though he would have been traditionally next in line for the nomination.
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