President Obama’s farewell address wasn’t ominous enough, believes The Nation’s Joan Walsh. “It didn’t quite rise to the present danger,” wrote Walsh late Tuesday night, not long after Obama left the stage in Chicago. “Generally, he directed his mild criticism at all of us, not at the white backlash that elected [Donald] Trump.” In fact, the speech “could have been delivered even if Hillary Clinton was the president-elect.”
Walsh argued that Obama’s election “triggered the backlash that gave us both Dylann Roof and Donald Trump,” but acknowledged that his remarks “could not fully grapple with the threats they both represent…The optimism of [the] speech was its own kind of resistance to Trump. But at moments, it felt surreal.” She opined that the address “took the high road…It was like Obama was leaving a time capsule for Americans to dig up after the Trump debacle, to discover who we were and who we could be again. And maybe that’s necessary.”
As much as Obama “tried to change” America, it remains “inadequately changed,” which may explain why Hillary lost (bolding added):
Obama gave this speech to the America that elected him, personally – this extraordinary man, black but raised by white people; from a struggling family and also from the Ivy League, who represents the best of sentimental “American exceptionalism.” That America loved him, but some of it didn’t support many of his achievements, or endorsed successor, or his party. I’m not even sure that America exists anymore.
