If you are a conservative, you might have read President Obama’s parting shot to the media as a plea for leniency with the man who will succeed him, President-elect Trump.
“My hope is that you will continue with the same tenacity that you showed us,” Obama said at his last White House press conference.
Of course, the president wasn’t really telling journalists to go soft on Donald Trump. Obama’s parting shot to the White House press corps actually urged them to be tough on elected officials.
“You’re not supposed to be sycophants, you’re supposed to be skeptics,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be complimentary, but you’re supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power and make sure that we are accountable to the people who sent us here, and you have done that.”
One of the reasons Obama is handing over the White House keys to Trump rather than Hillary Clinton is that millions of Americans don’t believe the press has done that, or at least done it often enough. They’re still seeing the contrast between the celebratory coverage of Obama’s inauguration and Trump’s.
That’s why many people will interpret Obama’s defense of an adversarial press on his way out the door not as an exhortation to keep up the same level of scrutiny that he endured but as a call to step it up a notch now that the Republicans run the place.
For a man who was known for writing compelling memoirs before he even entered public life, Obama sometimes displays a stunning lack of self-awareness.
Consider the president’s farewell address in Chicago. Delivered not from his desk in a quiet Oval Office but in front of the roar of an adoring crowd (though we can be sure Trump would have done the same), Obama struck a familiar pose.
The president was thoughtful. He was professorial. He flashed empathy for the “middle-aged white guy” who has “seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change” and for all we know even voted for Trump.
“We have to pay attention and listen,” Obama said. We “all need to start with the premise that each of our fellow citizens loves this country just as much as we do.”
But in the next several paragraphs, Obama not too subtly began to describe his opponents’ views as dangerous and illiterate nonsense. He might have been talking about both sides when he mentioned “bubbles” and “safe spaces,” but only one side was implicated in his riffs about science and reason.
It was a common practice of his when he was first running for president a decade ago. Obama would lay out both sides of a political argument and sum up the conservative perspective more or less fairly but almost invariably come down on the liberal side.
The longer Obama was in office, the more the more tendentious his presentation of these arguments seemed. He grew tired of conservatives frustrating his objectives and obstructing his policy goals.
There’s nothing wrong with being a man of conviction. But ultimately, outside of any policy issue, that is one of the reasons Obama’s presidency has failed to live up to expectations even though a majority of Americans are still favorably disposed to him as a person.
In 2004, Obama burst on the national scene saying there was no red America nor blue America. The country had just gone from a period of post-9/11 unity to the divisions of the Iraq war and the sudden return of the culture war.
Americans craved a coming together of those who worshipped an awesome God in the blue states and loved their gay friends in the red states. There was a desire to heal the polarization.
Obama understood this. He spoke about it perhaps better than any politician of our time. But if a centrist “New Democrat” in the mold of Bill Clinton couldn’t deliver this kind of unity, what hope was there that a more progressive Democrat who rejected Clintonism could?
It turned out that there was still a liberal America and a conservative America. Eight years later, they are even angrier at each other than before.
