You didn’t build that, Mr. Obama

Barack Obama once delivered the line Republicans never let him forget: “You didn’t build that.”

Today, the Democratic Party could say something similar to him. Barack Obama didn’t build Barack Obama alone.

The transformation Obama promised in 2008 is still under way, and he is content to let others finish it.

The talent, intelligence, and ambition were his. But the stage belonged to the Democratic Party. Its donors supplied the money, its convention supplied the audience, and its voters supplied the office that transformed a little-known Illinois politician into a global figure.

Now the institution that helped build Obama is struggling to decide what it believes.

Obama turned 65 this month. He is four years younger than Donald Trump was when Trump descended the escalator and began remaking the Republican Party.

Whatever one thinks of Trump, the Republican Party did not build him. He arrived with his own fortune, celebrity, audience, and brand, then captured the party despite the resistance of much of its establishment.

Obama’s path was nearly the reverse. In 2000, he couldn’t even obtain a floor credential at the Democratic National Convention. Four years later, Democrats put him behind the convention lectern. Four years after that, he was their nominee for president.

The Democratic Party didn’t merely nominate Barack Obama. It introduced him to America.

For more than a decade, opposition to Trump supplied Democrats with something resembling a governing philosophy. Rage generated money, turnout, and unity.

But rage is fuel, not a destination. And Democrats are discovering that when Trump is removed from the sentence, they have difficulty completing it.

The party’s ascendant left has now captured Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination through Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Hasan Piker. After El-Sayed’s victory, Obama called him for what the candidate described as a “really warm” conversation.

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That call raises a question Obama has so far avoided: Does the party’s left represent an unruly faction, or is it becoming the party’s center of gravity?

Democrats talk endlessly about the virtues of a big tent. But a big tent without a center pole is just a tarp.

Obama remains the one Democrat with enough stature to supply that center.

He has not disappeared. He endorses candidates, gives speeches, and meets privately with lawmakers. Those appearances may help individual candidates. They do not provide direction for a party that increasingly seems unsure where it wants to go.

Obama once possessed the power to name a destination. “Hope and change” invited millions of Americans to imagine a country beyond the politics they knew.

Where is he asking his party to go now?

He could tell Democrats what liberalism must preserve, what progressivism must not replace, and what conduct the party will not tolerate.

Unless, of course, the ascendant left is the destination.

What are Democrats for when they are not against Donald Trump?

Endorsing candidates spends celebrity. Leadership spends political capital.

Democrats describe Trump as an existential threat who may destroy American democracy. Yet Obama confines himself largely to endorsements, private conversations, and measured speeches.

Either the danger is as grave as Democrats insist, in which case Obama’s restraint is difficult to defend, or the rhetoric is exaggerated, in which case his restraint helps expose it.

And if the party’s left threatens traditional liberalism, why won’t he confront it? If it represents the party’s future, why won’t he say so?

His warm reception of El-Sayed suggests a third possibility: The transformation Obama promised in 2008 is still under way, and he is content to let others finish it.

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Perhaps Obama believes his duty is done. Perhaps the party has moved somewhere he does not wish to follow. Perhaps he wants influence without ownership of the consequences.

Or perhaps the Democratic Party was always more useful to Barack Obama than Barack Obama intended to remain useful to the Democratic Party.

He once reminded successful Americans that they had benefited from institutions they did not create.

He was right about at least one American.

The Democratic Party helped build Barack Obama. Now the Democratic Party needs rebuilding.

Kennedy pointed to the moon. Reagan pointed to a certain wall he wanted torn down. Trump descended an escalator pointing toward a wall he wanted built.

Where is Barack Obama pointing the Democratic Party?