{"id":3223,"date":"2018-06-03T23:58:05","date_gmt":"2018-06-04T06:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=3223"},"modified":"2018-06-04T05:02:36","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T12:02:36","slug":"post-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=3223","title":{"rendered":"“Obama \u2014 Just Too Good for Us”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 It was a moment of peak Spock.<\/p>\n

Hours after the globe-rattling election of a man whom Barack Obama has total disdain for, a toon who would take a chain saw to the former president\u2019s legacy on policy and decency, Obama sent a message to his adviser Ben Rhodes: \u201cThere are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps Obama should have used a different line with a celestial theme by Shakespeare: \u201cThe fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

As president, Obama always found us wanting. We were constantly disappointing him. He would tell us the right thing to do and then sigh and purse his lips when his instructions were not followed.<\/p>\n

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, Rhodes writes in his new book, \u201cThe World as It Is,\u201d<\/a> Obama asked his aides, \u201cWhat if we were wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n

But in his next breath, the president made it clear that what he meant was: What if we were wrong in being so right? What if we were too good for these people?<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe we pushed too far,\u201d the president continued. \u201cMaybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.\u201d<\/p>\n

So really, he\u2019s not acknowledging any flaws but simply wondering if we were even more benighted than he thought. He\u2019s saying that, sadly, we were not enlightened enough for the momentous changes wrought by the smartest people in the world \u2014 or even evolved enough for the first African-American president.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,\u201d Obama mused to aides.<\/p>\n

We just weren\u2019t ready for his amazing awesomeness.<\/p>\n

It is stunning to me, having been on the road with Barack Obama in the giddy, evanescent days of 2008, that he does not understand his own historic rise to power, how he defied impossible odds and gracefully leapt over obstacles.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

He did it by sparking hope in many Americans \u2014 after all the deceptions and squandered blood and money of the Bush-Cheney era \u2014 that he was going to give people a better future, something honest and cool and modern.<\/p>\n

But by the end of his second term, he had lost the narrative about lifting up people, about buoying them on economic issues and soothing their jitters about globalization. They needed to know, what\u2019s in it for them?<\/p>\n

He pushed aside his loyal vice president, who was considered an unguided missile, and backed a woman who had no economic message and who almost used the slogan, \u201cBecause It\u2019s Her Turn.\u201d Then he put his own reputation for rectitude at risk by pre-emptively exonerating Hillary Clinto<\/a>n on the email issue, infuriating federal agents who were still investigating the case.<\/p>\n

The hunger for revolutionary change, the fear that some people were being left behind in America and that no one in Washington cared, was an animating force at the boisterous rallies for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.<\/p>\n

Yet Obama, who had surfed a boisterous wave into the Oval, ignored the restiveness \u2014 here and around the world. He threw his weight behind the most status quo, elitist candidate.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t shake the feeling that I should have seen it coming,\u201d Rhodes writes about the \u201cdarkness\u201d that enveloped him when he saw the electoral map turn red. \u201cBecause when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we\u2019d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She\u2019s part of a corrupt establishment that can\u2019t be trusted to change.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n