Barack Obama Mistakes Good Taste for a Political Program
Standing inside the Cleveland Public Auditorium on Saturday, October 24, Barack Obama delivered what was instantly crowned the viral punchline of the midterm season. Donald Trump’s ongoing $900 million renovation of the White House complex, the former president announced to a cheering crowd, had turned the executive mansion into an architectural farce: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” It was a polished performance from the Democratic Party’s preeminent orator, expertly engineered for late-night television and affluent suburbanites. But in Northeast Ohio, it laid bare an enduring institutional pathology: the conviction among professional-class liberals that the crisis of American democracy is fundamentally a dispute over vulgar taste rather than concentrated wealth and power.
The Cleveland Public Auditorium, opened in 1922, was constructed as a monument to civic mass democracy—a cavernous civic hall designed for union rallies and the industrial working class whose labor built the region before trade pacts and shuttered steel mills hollowed it out. In 2026, Ohio households face elevated consumer prices, volatile utility rates, and fuel spikes stoked by an eight-month conflict with Iran and Trump’s retaliatory tariffs on Canada. Yet the marquee national surrogate dispatched to rally voters ahead of the November 3 midterm elections treated the gathering as an opportunity for interior design criticism. “He seems very focused on home renovations,” Obama quipped. “He should be on HGTV.”
Obama dutifully enumerated the aesthetic offenses. Trump had erected a private ballroom larger than the mansion itself, paved over the Rose Garden with limestone slabs, built a South Lawn granite helipad, and coated the state rooms in garish gilt. The White House and its defenders have cited prosaic institutional justifications: official planning documents dating back to 2000 called for a permanent ballroom to halt the expensive ritual of pitching temporary event tents on the grass for foreign dignitaries, while National Park Service filings note that limestone paving and granite pads meet upgraded presidential transport and security standards. Conservative commentators predictably countered by pointing to the cost overruns and multimillion-dollar scale of Obama’s own private presidential center in Chicago. But the architectural merits of limestone versus lawn are beside the point. What matters is why the joke works so effortlessly on liberal professionals: for a credentialed elite, Trump’s greatest outrage is not that he strips workers of security, but that his design sensibilities are embarrassingly, irredeemably tacky.
Trump and his political movement offer plenty of genuine depravity to confront. In the Ohio governor’s race, where Obama came to endorse Democratic nominee Amy Acton alongside Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, the contest has descended into extraordinary cruelty. Acton’s opponent, Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, spent $4 million on a television advertisement featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, who had had no contact with her daughter since 1978, when Arthur’s husband was indicted for abusing a twelve-year-old Acton. Facing bipartisan condemnation, the Ramaswamy campaign trimmed the broadcast from sixty seconds to thirty seconds on Saturday. Acton addressed the attack head-on at the rally, refusing to let childhood trauma be weaponized for political survival, while Obama correctly condemned a politics without basic human decency.
Yet moral revulsion and aesthetic mockery cannot substitute for an egalitarian economic program. Brown and Acton are fighting tight statewide contests by speaking directly to household survival—promising to curb utility rates, lower prescription drug costs, and expand child care. But when the national party establishment arrives from the coasts, those structural fights are promptly drowned out by jokes about Middle American dining chains. Donald Trump carried Ohio by eleven percentage points in 2024 because right-wing demagogues feast on the vacuum left when working people are offered culture-war punchlines instead of economic justice. Trump characteristically fired back on Monday, October 26, complaining before boarding Air Force One that Obama was a “lousy president” who failed to appreciate his upgrades, and he is scheduled to return to Ohio on Wednesday, October 28, to boost Ramaswamy and incumbent Senator Jon Husted.
The ritual serves both parties well enough. One side channels working-class anger into xenophobia and deregulation, while the other assures itself of its moral and cultural refinement. With early voting underway through November 1, working people in Ohio do not need an HGTV arbiter or a lecture on good manners from a technocratic aristocracy. They need a political movement that takes their economic survival as seriously as its consultants take their decor.