Vinson Cunningham’s Novel of the Obama Campaign

THE NOSTALGIA AMONG LIBERALS for the Obama presidency has lately crested such that it’s a surprise that proposals to overturn the 22nd Amendment haven’t gained traction, even in the fantasy realm of non-feasibility where a lot of American political thinking occurs. Given the centrist fetish for norms and process, a restoration of Barack Obama would be beyond the pale. Let him podcast, produce content for Netflix, and issue biannual lists of his middlebrow fiction faves. Still, there are believers in the restoration of another Obama, both on the paranoid fringe and in the dismayed middle. Lately my primary source of oral political commentary has been the Stephen A. Smith Show, a YouTube broadcast by the ESPN host and longtime sports journalist. In February Smith and guest Charles Barkley speculated on potential Democratic replacements for Joe Biden, who is very old. (Or as Smith put it: “It’s not that you’re old, it’s that you look it. You clearly have lost a step, and we can see it.”) Barkley, surprisingly bullish on flailing Republican challenger Nikki Haley despite her recent comments that the United States “has never been a racist country,” favored California Governor Gavin Newsom “for the simple fact that he’s been in politics and ran a big state before,” but Smith cast his wish for Michelle Obama. “I think Michelle Obama could beat Trump,” he said. “I don’t think Gavin Newsom could beat Trump.” Indeed, the odd thing about the Democratic Party since Obama is that it hasn’t furnished any politicians born after 1950 and not named Obama who even seem capable of winning national elections at the top of the ticket. Sportscasters, who make their reputations on betting advice, are realists on this subject—cynics, you might say. Yet any regular observer of athletes, no matter how cynical, knows that miracles do happen and sometimes the underdog wins.