#1,092: The Audacity of Taupe

14 years ago, this past Friday, Barack Obama became involved in the biggest scandal of his eight years as president: he had the cheek to attend a White House press briefing clad in a (gasp!) tan suit! To watch or listen to conservative newscasters and pundits, one would have thought he had just declared war on the Islamic Republic of Iran without notifying Congress, that he had threatened to make Canada the 51st state; or had just announced that he had pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Disgraced former CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

Oh, how times have changed! Back in 2014, the biggest, most widely publicized presidential “scandal” even got a laugh from the president himself. It just goes to show how absolutely starved for shame the Obama administration was, when compared to the current regime. Hell’s bells: the most up-to-date litany of ignominy and obloquy makes Teapot Dome and Watergate look like middle school tomfoolery by comparison. And yet, against all reason, there are still those who, when questioned by a social-media "person-on-the-street," will proclaim - without so much as a mini grin - that #47 is the greatest POTUS of all time, while #44 is the worst and most corrupt of all the nation’s leaders.

Calling Code Blue!

Barack Obama, of course, was by no means the first POTUS or political leader to appear in public wearing a non-grey, non-blue, non-black suit. Looking through various presidential archives, one finds photos of Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, Regan, Carter, both Bushes, and Biden, plus recently, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Majority Leader Mitch (MIA) McConnell, clad in tan. The two big differences were/are that Barack Obama is (1) black and (2) that he has the build of a male model. Having been raised by a father who was a bespoke tailor’s dream, I can tell you that Barack Obama wears clothes better than any president of the past half-century.

That bespoke tan suit of his - which he gave away years ago - likely set him back more than $3,000.00. It was handmade for him by the late (1928-2024) master tailor Martin Greenfield, a Holocaust survivor who, unbelievably, learned his art while imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp. In 2014, Mr. Greenfield (born Maxmillian Grünfeld) was described as “the best men’s tailor in the United States.” His client list included six U.S. presidents . . . the best being Barack Obama. (BTW: I have had my suits made by Brooks Brothers for nearly 50 years; one of their long-term designers is Martin Greenfield Clothiers.)

Above, I mentioned what I saw as the two primary reasons why Tangate became such an instantaneous "infamy-to-end-all infamies”: first, that #43 was our first Black POTUS (which brought a ton of inchoate racism to the fore, and second, that the man wore his clothes with grace, panache, and style. Upon a bit of reflection, I find two additional reasons...both viewed against the backdrop of what has occurred during at least six of the past fourteen years. First (or is that third?), there were far too few political scandals to pin on the Obama Administration during its eight years in office, and fourth, that the man and those he hand-picked to serve under him were - dare we use the term? - thoroughgoing professionals who carried themselves with dignity and consummate humanity.

This is not to say that neither the opposition nor members of Obama’s own party were incapable of finding faults and shortcomings with his politics or programs - for indeed, they did. As Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer noted in his edited 2018 book The Presidency of Barack Obama, “Obama turned out to be a very effective policymaker but not a tremendously successful party builder. . . . During his presidency, even as he enjoyed reelection and strong approval ratings toward the end of this term, the Democratic Party suffered greatly. . . . Democrats lost more than one thousand seats in state legislatures, governors’ mansions, and Congress during his time in office.”

Conversely, conservatives scored Obama for his Affordable Care Act, which they never forgot to label “Socialist,” or his approach to economic recovery. Indeed, Republicans ran on the slow recovery in the 2010 midterm elections. They made the perception that the stimulus package favored Wall Street, not Main Street, and repeatedly charged the Democrats with having a tone-deaf obsession with the health care bill. They easily took control of the House, picking up sixty-three seats—the biggest midterm election gains for the out party since 1938. And from then on, the Obama presidency struggled under a radicalized Republican Party.

But nowhere did one find a glimmer - let alone a whiff or illusion - of there being anything censurable or scandalous in the man or his team. Regardless of whatever shortcomings or lack of political perfection one might find in Barack Obama, the President, there was never an attack on Obama the son, son-in-law, husband, father, scholar, or citizen . . . except from the mouths of DJT and his faschistische Landsleute. In the 14 years since Barack Obama showed up wearing that impeccably tailored summer-weight suit, far too many Americans have chosen to forget that once upon a time, they expected far more grace, dignity, and class than we used to be accustomed to in our leaders. There once was a time when looking up to the POTUS and his associates was the rule; the POTUS looking down on us was the exception to that rule. Not that long ago, the president was our chief diplomat on the world stage; one who was both capable of - and more than willing to - embodying what was best and most humane in the American people. With the exception of a brief 4-year respite (2020-2024) from the politics of narcissism and nastiness, we are back to blaming and despising Presidents Obama and Biden for everything from keeping the Straits of Hormuz freely available and seeing a majority of presidential promises kept, to whittling down so many of our historic freedoms, all the while renaming, refurbishing, and gilding virtually everything in sight.

At the end of most workdays and weekends, I try to take a 90-minute walk, encompassing nearly 5 miles. On most days, I proudly wear one of my vintage 2008 “Yes We Can” Obama T-shirts. Some days I get a handful of cheers and thumbs-up gestures from my fellow walkers, while on others, I get sneers and thumbs-down signals from neighbors who don’t like my politics and don’t even know my name. I’m thinking of having a new tan suit made to order by Brooks Brothers one of these days . . . along with a batch of T-shirts and political buttons.

And what will they (with the obvious exception of the suit) all say?

“Yes We Tan!