Cockeyed Optimist

The President in a valedictory mood delivered his final State of the Union Address, and instead of the usual wish list that an adversarial Congress only would scorn and ignore, he chose to offer a return to the themes with which he began – “Yes, we can,” and “Hope and Change.”

How perverse. Have seven years as a punching bag taught him nothing? The opposition from the beginning has been committed to the slogan “Oh, no you can’t.” They have mocked the idea of hope as jejune. And if the change he was seeking was to something new rather than a return to something old, they’ve been against it. When they have succeeded in scotching his plans, they have celebrated, as when Sarah Palin warbled, “How’s that hope-y, change-y thing goin’?”

And even the leading Republican candidates to succeed him use their orations not to promise a better future, but to tell the American people the end is near, we are surrounded by enemies foreign and domestic, the world is on fire, the economy is in ruins, and the American dream is dead.

Yet, like Nellie Forbush, Obama seems to be “stuck like a dope with a thing called hope” and he can’t get it out of his heart. So he used the speech to refute the prophets of doom. Yes, ISIS is a nasty development, but we are incredibly powerful and slowly and steadily we can destroy their nihilist ideology by substituted a more life-affirming alternative.

Yes, climate change is a concern, but we can deal with it and create jobs and profits in the process if we simply quit denying it is real and apply American ingenuity to the problem.

Yes, the change from an analog to a digital world, from a bipolar economy to global markets, and from a majority white country to a majority minority country is unsettling to many. But America has always been the land of new beginnings and dizzying change. While others have stood still, we have forged ahead with creative resourcefulness and adaptability.

Only once did the president admit to being a bit downcast. He had come to office promising to strive for a less divided government and got a more polarized one instead. But he promised to keep trying to do better for the rest of his time in office, which was rather touching. His foes have preferred to embrace hopelessness and stasis until they could rid the country of this unwanted, alien president.

For seven years the president has been accused of not being an American, or a capitalist, or a Christian or a patriot. He supposedly was not qualified to be president because he was born in Hawaii or Kenya. He was a traitor, a Manchurian candidate, a socialist. He was weak, feckless, naïve, arrogant, aloof, and lazy. Not tough enough to stand up to our enemies. Too tough to schmooze politely with bitter enemies.

No sooner did he begin speaking than his detractors started tweeting. While Speaker of the House Paul Ryan sat behind him stony-faced, his office was firing off prerecorded tweets damning the speech for “lofty platitudes and nostalgic rhetoric” that don’t provide “a real path forward to restore a confident America….We can do so much better.” Clearly Ryan didn’t care what Obama was going to say, he was already going to be against it. But at least no one bothered to shout “You lie” at him this time.

This may be because his time is about up, and the Republicans are delighted that at long last they will be granted their fondest wish, to “take back their country” from this president. But the choices to replace him suggest that we may soon realize how lucky we’ve been. When Hamlet compared his kingly father to his usurper Uncle Claudius, he said: “So excellent a king, that was, to this, Hyperion to a satyr.”

After a year or two of President Trump or Cruz, aren’t we, just maybe, going to feel the same? Despite the constant slings and arrows, the president has conducted himself with grace and decorum and equanimity. He has embodied even in dire times the World War II British slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.” He has been an admirable role model as a husband and father. He’s brought to the job intelligence, patience, and prudence.

Some of the attacks on him have been for being too cool. He never seems to have his hair on fire. He has seemed, if not aloof, at least preternaturally unflappable. He’s responded to anger most often with wit or with the kind of bland dismissal reserved for the misbehavior of children not one’s own. This untouchability has seemed to rile his critics all the more. He golfs. He shoots hoops. He goes about his business. He rarely gets down in the mud with them. You get the feeling the word they apply to them in their heads is “uppity.”

The usual criticism of Obama State of the Unions is that he is lecturing people, talking down to them, acting superior. Why didn’t he just go teach college, since he’d rather do that than lead. This is a curious critique. Apparently he is too articulate and confident and informed to be a good president. Which makes one wonder what they’d prefer, until you see what they prefer. We have had State of the Union Addresses in various keys. They have arguably been too folksy, too swaggering, too inarticulate, too dull, too long, too phony, too paranoid, too threatening, too avuncular, too sentimental, but complaining that a president acts too smart is a new one. These people would have really disliked Madison and Jefferson.

Apparently it rankles that he is an elegant, dignified, self-possessed presence — Sidney Poitier, by way of Harvard Law Review. But what is he supposed to do, act stupid or folksy just because his critics are stuck playing the Rod Steiger part from “In the Heat of the Night?” One is put in mind of Sam Spade responding to a peevish Joel Cairo: “You always have a very smooth explanation ready.” Spade: “Should I learn to stutter?”

Yes, he has his failings. He can barely keep a note of asperity out of his voice and body language when his critics oppose what seem to him self evidently facts. The climate is changing. The economy is evolving. Where the Republican default position is to accuse the other side of dark, anti-American plots, Obama’s default position is to regard the loyal opposition as dimwits. Suffering fools easily comes hard to him. He doesn’t really revel in horse trading. He may be somewhat tone-deaf to the psychic and emotional needs of others when making policy. He’s often too much Spock and too little Kirk. But, it would have been a tough seven years for any president.

We’ve been through a huge market quake and deep recession in an economy already undergoing structural change. Islamic terrorism metastasized in new and unpredictable ways. China and Russia sought to assert themselves. Iran marched on toward nuclear weapons. And there was stress on the homefront from income inequality which only exacerbated culture clashes over immigration, gay rights, gun violence, you name it.

The president’s critics blamed him for all of it, but it could have been a lot worse. The temptation in many of these cases would surely have been to haul off and act in haste and repent at leisure. By and large, Obama has been deliberate, rational and calm, often committed to playing a long game amid the clamor for instant gratification.

I do not intend to paint him as a new Lincoln, but he did find himself at a time when half the country wanted to one direction and the other half was bitterly, intensely committed to the reverse. He had very little chance to fully please either. He could only steadily try to advance where he could. For that reason it may be apropos to quote the eulogy of Frederick Douglass who had often been highly critical of Lincoln’s foot dragging.

“Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

In retrospect, we may well decide we were lucky to have had eight years of him, given the alternatives. To paraphrase Churchill, he was the worst president we could have had for the last eight years, except for all the others.

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