ONE CHICKEN THAT CAME HOME TO ROOST...:

When I joined Obama on a campaign trip to North Carolina just four days before the election, Hillary Clinton was hanging on to a lead in nearly every poll. Surely, the professionals said, her "firewall" would hold and provide a comfortable victory. David Plouffe, who ran Obama's 2008 campaign, said that Clinton was a "one hundred per cent" lock and advised nervous Democrats to stop "wetting the bed." In battleground states, particularly where it was crucial to get out the African-American vote, Obama was giving one blistering campaign speech after another.

"I'm having fun," he told me. But, thanks in part to James Comey, the F.B.I. director, and his letter to Congress announcing that he would investigate Clinton's e-mails again, the race tightened considerably in its final week. When Obama wandered down the aisle of Air Force One, I asked him, "Do you feel confident about Tuesday?"

"Nope," he said. [...]

As the plane headed to Charlotte, I sat with Roy Cooper, the attorney general of North Carolina and its Democratic candidate for governor, and David Simas, Obama's political director. Cooper, who had worked in the tobacco fields as a kid, now seemed as disconnected from the Trump voter in rural North Carolina as any pointy-headed quote machine in the CNN greenroom. "I'm as perplexed as the next person," he said.

Simas was more analytical. He was the numbers guy, who knew every twitch of voter movement in every county, or hoped he did. He was nowhere near as sanguine as Plouffe, and, as he went through the early-vote tallies in Florida, North Carolina, and Nevada, he was concerned about the somewhat modest African-American turnout, though emboldened by a "tsunami" of support from Hispanics. Meanwhile, he said, "the so-called hidden Trump vote" was not showing up in any outsized way.

I asked Simas why he seemed more confident than Obama. He smiled and said it was a matter of roles: "I haven't been the President of the United States for two terms and now looking to confirm my legacy." Yet Simas, too, knew that there was potential trouble ahead. "Within ten days of the Republican Convention, Trump consolidated the Republican base faster than Romney did in 2012," he said. "The base of the Republican Party is also different from what we thought. For movement conservatives, the assumption is that Democratic or Republican voters are ideological on issues. The Trump candidacy shows otherwise. They rally around the team and the antipathy to Secretary Clinton."

What frustrated Obama and his staff was the knowledge that, in large measure, they were reaching their own people but no further. They spoke to the networks and the major cable outlets, the major papers and the mainstream Web sites, and, in an attempt to find people "where they are," forums such as Bill Maher's and Samantha Bee's late-night cable shows, and Marc Maron's podcast. But they would never reach the collective readerships of Breitbart News, the Drudge Report, WND, Newsmax, InfoWars, and lesser-knowns like Western Journalism--not to mention the closed loop of peer-to-peer right-wing rumor-mongering.

"Until recently, religious institutions, academia, and media set out the parameters of acceptable discourse, and it ranged from the unthinkable to the radical to the acceptable to policy," Simas said. "The continuum has changed. Had Donald Trump said the things he said during the campaign eight years ago--about banning Muslims, about Mexicans, about the disabled, about women--his Republican opponents, faith leaders, academia would have denounced him and there would be no way around those voices. Now, through Facebook and Twitter, you can get around them. There is social permission for this kind of discourse. Plus, through the same social media, you can find people who agree with you, who validate these thoughts and opinions. This creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once thought unthinkable. This is a foundational change."

That day, as they travelled, Obama and Simas talked almost obsessively about an article in BuzzFeed that described how the Macedonian town of Veles had experienced a "digital gold rush" when a small group of young people there published more than a hundred pro-Trump Web sites, with hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers. The sites had names like TrumpVision365.com and WorldPoliticus.com, and most of the posts were wildly sensationalist, recycled from American alt-right sites. If you read such sites, you learned that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump and that Clinton had actually encouraged Trump to run, because he "can't be bought."

The new media ecosystem "means everything is true and nothing is true," Obama told me later. "An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers' payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal--that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation." [...]

[A]fter the sitdown with Trump, Obama told staff members that he had talked Trump through the rudiments of forming a cabinet and policies, including the Iran nuclear deal, counter-terrorism policy, health care--and that the President-elect's grasp of such matters was, as the debates had made plain, modest at best. Trump, despite his habitual bluster, seemed awed by what he was being told and about to encounter. [...]

Perhaps the more acute personal sadness for White House staffers was the vision of Obama and Trump sitting side by side in the Oval Office. A President who fought with dignity to rescue the country from economic catastrophe and to press for progressive change--from marriage equality to the alleviation of climate change--was putting on a mask of generous equanimity for a visitor whom he had every good reason to despise, an ethically challenged real-estate brander who had launched his political career by promoting "birtherism," and then ran a sexist and bigoted campaign to galvanize his base. In the Oval Office, the President was quick to comfort the young members of his staff, but he was, an aide told me, even more concerned about the wounding effect the election would have on the categories of Americans who had been routinely insulted and humiliated by the President-elect. At a social occasion earlier this year, someone asked Michelle Obama how it was possible for her husband to maintain his equipoise amid so much hatred. "You have no idea how bad it is," she said. His practiced calm is beyond reckoning.

Tweet   @brothersjudd