After Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, the historian Perry Anderson wrote an essay in the New Left Review arguing for a certain continuity between Obama and Trump, in that, though only one of them courted it as an end in itself, both were celebrities. And in Anderson’s terms, “celebrity is not leadership, and is not transferrable. The personality it projects allows no diffusion. Of its nature, it requires a certain isolation.”³⁸

The problem for Obama, by Anderson’s account, was that his personality was so overwhelming. He was convinced of his fate, driven by a sense that this was his “defining moment.”³⁹ And when he left office, it became clear that others thought so too; according to Gallup polling, he had the joint-fourth highest final approval ratings of any departing president. But the glow of his charisma no longer extended to the rest of the Democratic Party.

In December of 2009, the House of Representatives was made up of 257 Democrats and 178 Republicans (the largest majority since Jimmy Carter); by November 2016, the Republicans had 247 seats to the Democrats’ 188. For Anderson, this was all too predictable. Obama had relished “his aura” and, rather than dilute it, “reserved the largesse showered on him by big money for further acclamation at the polls.” As a result, his “celebrity dazzled, but didn’t convert.”⁴⁰ It clung to him like a shiny frock coat.

In defense of his record—and dazzled in turn—celebrities like Jay-Z said of Obama, “He’s not a superhero.” ⁴¹ The fact that his defense would even be couched in these terms shows the extent of Obama’s problem. From the beginning, he seemed to know it. Eighteen days before the 2008 election, at a fundraising dinner in New York, he joked that “contrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-El, to save the planet Earth.” ⁴²

In March 2011, this joke was taken at face value when Trump started calling on him to present his birth certificate to the American public and prove that he wasn’t actually an alien. Those among the right-wing media who already hated Obama harped relentlessly on his identity, fixating on his “demonic” appearance and supposed links to the Black Panthers, as well as the authorship of his memoir, which some claimed was ghostwritten by a white man.⁴³

Any statement that tried to shift the debate back to policy was soon framed around him as a person, an isolated personality. To some, he was a superhero; to others, a villain. Perhaps he knew that, as a black man in America called Barack, the only way he could succeed was to recast himself in the glowing mold of the hero. And in making that choice, he must have known that he would be destined like all heroes—even Achilles, in the end—to fall short.

Living an ocean away, I felt complicit in this failure. Back then, I saw him as someone in whom one places faith rather than support. I couldn’t see that, though his globe-spanning, mixed-race story was exceptional, he was still a politician: well-intentioned, but flawed and constrained.

Thinking I had found a hero, I experienced something new at Obama’s success: relief, the sensation of a burden being lifted that I hadn’t realized was there. I think this is one of the functions of superheroes. They come to represent—to manifest—what is by definition beyond our ability. They take away the weight of our own expectations.