Dear President Obama,
I thought long and hard before deciding to write this.
After all, we all grow weary of the cat-and-ball-of-yarn syndrome that choreographs our politics these days: Roll out the tiniest thread of a thought, and the opposition reflexively pounces, battering it into oblivion because that’s what the opposition is wired to do.
Let them. With the clock steadily ticking toward the end of your presidency this Friday at noon, I and many, many Americans like me have but one thing to say.
Thank you.
It’s indeed disheartening – not to mention entirely predictable – that congressional Republicans who have opposed you so myopically for so long already are hard at work dismantling what they call, with a partisan sneer, the “Obama legacy.”
They likely will repeal the Affordable Care Act – “Obamacare,” as even you eventually came to call it. I harbor little doubt that whatever replaces it will fall short of the protections it offers for people with pre-existing conditions, high medical costs and low incomes.
Your opponents also insist, with self-bestowed immunity from all irony, that we can’t afford to go any longer with an unfilled vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Your nominee, the truly middle-of-the-road Chief Judge Merrick Garland, has been reduced to a historical footnote.
They talk with starry eyes about the nation’s need to “recover” from your eight years in the White House.
Recover from what? An unemployment rate that’s dropped from 10 percent to 4.7 percent in the past six years? The rescue of the U.S. auto industry? The capture and killing of Osama bin Laden?
But here’s what they can’t touch, Mr. President. They can’t lay a glove on your integrity.
Perhaps it’s faint praise to note that yours was an administration sans scandal. No clumsy burglaries, no illegal arms for hostages, no stained dress, no war launched on false pretenses …
Some call it the “Jackie Robinson effect.” The simple, painful reality that as America’s first black president, your path from day one paralleled the edge of a perilous cliff: The slightest moral misstep, the tiniest chink in your character, would surely bring your political downfall.
Yet you never stumbled.
Come hell, high water or the congressman who hollered “You lie!” – you held your head high. You can look all of us, not to mention your wife and daughters, in the eye knowing that at no time did you enshroud your administration in shame.
That, to borrow a well-worn adjective, is huge. And of that, history will take note.
I juxtapose two pictures: one of you walking out onto the stage in Chicago on election night in 2008, the other of you returning to the same platform last week. Like we do at times like this, I marvel at how your hair has grown so gray.
But gray, while marking the inexorable passage of time, is good.
It connotes maturity achieved through hard work, persistence in the face of overwhelming odds, courage to say what needs to be said.
For multiple reasons, Mr. President, I doubt your successor’s hair will change at all.
There’s no need to dwell on President-elect Trump here – whatever awaits us these next four years, he will stand or collapse on his own merits. Just like all you chief executives do.
But since Trump’s stunning election last November, I’ve been struck by the hopeful note you continue to sound.
Your insistence that this country is far bigger than one man is as pitch-perfect now as it was when you first took the oath yourself eight years ago.
You left a lump in many a throat last Tuesday when you said, “I leave this stage tonight even more optimistic about this country than when I started.”
Some surely must have thought your euphemistic nature had gotten the best of you, one last spin before twirling your way back into private citizenship.
Not me.
If I’ve come to believe one thing over your two terms, it’s that deep down, you actually are as hopeful as you so often sound.
I’m convinced, beyond any reasonable doubt, that your love for and faith in this democracy eclipses that of detractors who lambaste you as “un-American” in one breath and then chant “USA!” in the next.
Un-American? Unlike you, Mr. President, I don’t have a copy of my birth certificate at the ready. Given my Irish-German pigmentation, nobody’s ever asked for it.
Were you perfect? Of course not.
Given what you know now, would you take a mulligan on your “red line” in Syria, your deadline-driven withdrawal from Iraq, your rocky rollout of healthcare.gov?
Who wouldn’t?
But here’s one thing I doubt you’d do over: your demeanor.
Two years ago, in a piece titled “Why History Will Be Very Kind to Obama,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait noted your “inclination to play Spock even when the country wants a Captain Kirk.”
Some called it your cool. Others called it your arrogance. Some said you carefully measured the global implications of your every utterance. Others said you were out of touch.
Looking back, I think history will say you were simply being yourself in an era when one impulsive quip, one thoughtless rejoinder, can hijack the news cycle in seconds and dominate it for days on end. (See: @realDonaldTrump.)
So off you go, Mr. President. This time next week, you’ll be no different from the majority of us – watching a new administration take the reins and wondering, with more than a little trepidation, where this new ride is headed.
I’ll steady myself with words I heard you speak while I and close to 2 million others – the largest crowd ever to gather in Washington, D.C. – shivered on the National Mall eight years ago this Friday.
You said, “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
Well said, Mr. President. And well done.
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