Obama’s birthday party and the challenge of bad-faith criticism

August is often seen by newspapers as “silly season”, a time when news lines are few and far between and a time when the people who generate them – politicians, foreign correspondents, footballers (whether British, who restart their season in the middle of the month, or American, who start in September), book publishers – put their feet up and head for the beach.

This year, of course, is very different, not least because the Olympic Games in Tokyo are in full swing and Covid is restricting beach trips for most of us who don’t live by the sea in sunny climes. Silly season can hardly be counted on amid a pandemic and the biggest sporting event of the past four years. But summer still does hail the return of wealthy Americans’ favourite pastimes: packing up their SUVs and heading out of the big cities toward vacation homes in the Hamptons, Connecticut, Maine and islands like Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. These temperate areas are escapes for the well-heeled professionals of New York City and its surrounding areas on the east coast, just as Lake Tahoe and Big Sur tempt down tech bros from San Francisco in the west. Little surprise, then, that former president Barack Obama had planned his 60th birthday party as an outdoor event at Martha’s Vineyard.

And what a controversy that birthday party caused. Initially intended to be a star-studded 700-person event for the vaccinated, the details of the do hit the press early this week. Republicans and right-wing commentators were practically frothing at the mouth. How could liberals – LIBERALS! – defend their hero acting in this way during a pandemic? If Covid is real, then why are hundreds of people from The Establishment able to gather on a beautiful shoreline in Massachusetts while the Delta variant brings back mask mandates in some Democrat-led states?

Needless to say, after a couple days of this kind of commentary, the Obama family elected to scale back their event to just “close friends and family”, cancelling the celebrity appearances previously expected. The actual liberals – that is, the everyday ones who live in the US – hadn’t jumped to defend the 700-person party, either. As Voices contributor Noah Berlatsky wrote, the messaging was hardly ideal, though a 700-person outdoor event for the fully vaccinated should be responsible in theory. Unfortunately, the Delta variant – which is largely being spread by the unvaccinated and emanating mainly from red states – has now led to a surge in Massachusetts, making those hated mask mandates necessary, as well as the cancellation of all such events. Those yelling about the birthday party presumably have short memories, considering the thousands-strong rallies Trump boasted about holding during his presidency at the first and second wave of Covid infections.

There are many – like other Voices writer Stephen Lyons – who were deeply unimpressed by Obama having booked the party in the first place. A liberal through-and-through, Stephen told me he was disappointed in the former Democratic president and thought he was behaving like “any rich old American man”. There was a nugget of truth in the criticism, both Stephen and Noah agreed. But, as Noah pointed out, the fact that it all focused on “the hypocrisy of liberals” rather than the ongoing pandemic was proof of the agenda behind the commentary.

Running an opinion department is always tricky at times like these. Mostly, it’s important for us to stay honest to ourselves, and to remain open-minded to criticism of those who we may hold more politically dear. In doing so, we retain our integrity – and everybody knows that we mean it when we laud the achievements of those people on the same side.

Yours,

Holly Baxter

Opinion editor (US)