President Obama is expected to use his final presidential address to the nation Tuesday night to urge President-elect Trump not to undo his legacy, a tough sell when nearly 60 percent of voters believe the U.S. is headed down the wrong track.
From the steel-and-glass interior of Chicago’s McCormick Place, where Obama celebrated his re-election victory in 2012, the outgoing commander in chief will deliver his final address to the nation after eight years of progressive policy triumphs and just as many lost opportunities for lasting bipartisan reforms. The farewell speech could be Obama’s last public appearance before Jan. 20, when he turns the White House over to Trump, who’s vowed to undo several of Obama’s executive actions and erase many of Obama’s achievements.
“Expect him to use his rhetorical flair to pressure President-elect Trump to keep the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank, and to not make any sudden moves that would destabilize the global economy,” said one veteran of the current administration.
“Obama is facing an unusual position in the sense that his predecessor has threatened to undo much of what he’s devoted his last eight years to creating,” Mike Boyle, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and political science professor at La Salle University, told the Washington Examiner.
Observers say that Obama’s actions and remarks since Trump’s stunning victory in November suggest his farewell address will marry a vigorous defense of his presidency with a spirited call for Democrats to keep the faith and fight harder for their party’s policy priorities under the next administration.
Meanwhile, critics of the outgoing president are bracing for a speech littered with self-congratulatory toasts to domestic and foreign policy reforms they believe have left Americans worse off and less safe. Those include the nuclear agreement with Iran, restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba, Obamacare and a surge in banking and energy regulations.
“I would say he’s probably going to tout Obamacare as his signature achievement, even though his administration’s projections have not translated into reality,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and the chief economist of the U.S. Labor Department under President George W. Bush. “[Obama] said costs for health insurance have gone down. They’ve gone up and are supposed to rise by 25 percent this year.”
“The Congressional Budget Office said 24 million are going to be insured on the exchanges this year and it’s about 12 million,” she continued. “They said Americans could keep the plans their doctors and their plans, but millions have lost the health insurance plans they liked.”
If recent social media activity is any indication, the president will also offer a robust defense of his economic policy, specifically what he has done to spur job growth and increase labor-force participation.
“Facing the worst financial crisis in 80 years, you delivered the longest streak of job growth in our history,” the White House posted in a tweet on Monday.
Furchtgott-Roth said Americans who tune into Obama’s address should be wary of the examples he will likely use to build his case.
“He’ll almost certainly talk about Dodd-Frank, but small community banks have gone out of business. Interest rates have been at zero, but there has been less lending because of regulations on banks,” she explained. She added that “labor-force participation is close to the 1978-level right now, which is around the time many women went into the work force.”
But perhaps Obama’s most daunting task in his final salute to the nation will be justifying foreign policy decisions that Republicans and Democrats often cite while discussing regional chaos in the Middle East.
“In his view, he essentially solved the Cuban problem and diffused a major tension in the Middle East through the Iran deal,” Boyle said. He predicted that Obama will cite those examples while “walking away from issues that are uncomfortable to him … and arguing that he has had a distinct approach to foreign affairs.”
The left-leaning Obama critic described the current administration’s foreign policy as bifurcated, acknowledging that the 44th president “has a series of high-profile accomplishments, but then also a low-grade dirty war that has spread all the way across the Middle East.” He advised viewers of Obama’s farewell address to pay attention to what he omits.
“What you will see in this is him highlighting a few things that you can see as high-profile accomplishments,” Boyle explained. “But what he’s not going to talk about is Afghanistan, Libya, the fact that he essentially caused a civil war in Syria.”
“I would expect that those shadow wars are pushed off the tables in this speech,” he added.
At least two Republican Hill staffers told the Washington Examiner they also expect Obama to play up his quest to normalize relations with Cuba, despite the Castro regime’s continued violation of religious freedoms and imprisonment of political dissidents.
“The changes Obama made there were unilateral and can be undone by the incoming administration,” one staffer noted. “He should keep that in mind before he goes lauding something as a permanent change in regards to Cuba.”
In a statement last week, Obama said he was “just beginning to write [his] remarks” for the final speech of his presidency.
“But I’m thinking about them as a chance to say thank you for this amazing journey, to celebrate the ways you’ve changed this country for the better these past eight years, and to offer some thoughts on where we all go from here,” he declared.
