Obama's considerable, if shaky, legacy: what Trump can and cannot unwind.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew
• Position: Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail - Book review

Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail

by Jonathan Chait

Custom House, 272 pp.

Who was Barack Obama? The question is practical as well as rhetorical. After all, his rise was so unlikely, his ascent so steep, that it seemed we barely knew him before he was gone. Only four years and a few days separated Obama's tenure as an Illinois state senator and his inauguration as the forty-fourth president of the United States. His time in the U.S. Senate constituted a pit stop in his race to the presidency. The other two senators elected president in the twentieth century, Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy, at least had full terms behind them. At fifty-five, Obama isn't yet eligible for Social Security, so now he gets to go build his presidential library to commemorate his tenure. The rest of us are left trying to make sense of his eight years, squished in between George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.

Jonathan Chait, a columnist for New York magazine, has been thinking about Obama a lot, and he's confident--even audacious--about his conclusions. "I am not always right," Chait says in the conclusion to Audacity, his slender volume on the Obama presidency. But when it comes to his optimism about the Obama presidency, he's defiant. "I was right, right from the beginning."

Chait proclaims Obama a consequential president, and he challenges the many conservative critiques, which range from dismissing Obama as a mere parenthetical president to claiming he's a socialist who came this close to snuffing out freedom. Likewise, Chait has no time for the whiny members of the left moping under their HOPE posters and pouting that Obama was disappointing and incrementalist. Chait saves his harshest ridicule for the pundits who underestimated Obama's achievements and have offered the president bromides like suggesting that he should go play golf with John Boehner.

The book is in some ways a bookend to journalist Michael Grunwald's 2011 book, The New New Deal, in which Grunwald defended Obama's stimulus bill as both CPR for an economy that was fiatlining and a cornucopia of policy innovation, from green energy to digitizing medical records, that the chattering classes barely understood, let alone appreciated. Chait explains how this essential act of Keynesianism, along with the auto bailout and financial reform, defied the pundits and saved us all from an Extinction-Level Event.

Chait's command of policy and politics, and...