Maureen Dowd: Obama thinks he was ‘too good’ for America

“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?” Dowd wrote in a column Saturday. “’Maybe we pushed too far,’ the president continued. ‘Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.’”

“So really,” Dowd wrote,” Obama was “not acknowledging any flaws but simply wondering if we were even more benighted than he thought.” Instead, she argued Obama was “saying that, sadly, we were not enlightened enough for the momentous changes wrought by the smartest people in the world — or even evolved enough for the first African-American president.”

After quoting Obama telling his aides, “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” Dowd surmised, “We just weren’t ready for his amazing awesomeness.”

But Dowd believes the fault lied with Obama himself. She explained that by the end of his second term, he had lost touch with the reason why he was appealing to disaffected Americans in the first place.

“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,” she wrote. “Yet Obama, who had surfed a boisterous wave into the Oval, ignored the restiveness — here and around the world. He threw his weight behind the most status quo, elitist candidate.”

On Twitter, in sharing her opinion piece, Dowd quipped that Obama could use his new multi-year production deal with Netflix to explore when, in the future, the U.S. will be ready for him.