Those are the eight years that writer Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the “Good Negro Government period.”6 Like the eight years of Black Reconstruction some 130 years prior to his first presidential contest—one that he would win handily—Obama’s Good Negro Government period was marked by black political competence and white fear. Political analyst Jamelle Bouie once said, during a joint interview we recorded for a radio program, that in the twilight of Obama’s final term it occurred to him that if this safely competent black man was not good enough for white America, then he would never be.