Obama’s anti-Trump quest
She remembers dodging through a euphoric crowd of 350,000 in Chicago’s Grant Park to stand just 150 feet from the stage when President-elect Barack Obama appeared.
She remembers the tears, the fist pumps and the perfect strangers who hugged one another. And she remembers black, white and brown parents pausing to explain the significance of the moment to their children, as teenagers ran through the streets yelling, “Obama won! Obama won!” Even Mother Nature seemed to join in. The temperatures hovered in the 50s though it was a November night near Lake Michigan.
Yet she also remembers what followed: “The insults, the backstabbing and the lies” Obama faced during his two terms. The Republican lawmaker who yelled at him, “You lie!” How “Yes we can” segued into “Make America Great Again.” But ask Spooner if she’s turned pessimistic since that night, she offers a different answer.
“I don’t think in terms of optimism or pessimism,” says Spooner, a freelance writer and editor in Chicago. “I am more determined.”
The term “post-racial” is now used more as a punch line than a rallying cry. Hope and change have been replaced by tweets and tribalism. And millions of Americans with varying political beliefs may wonder if Obama’s election in 2008 was not the beginning of an era, but the end of a sense of optimism they may never experience again.
Even Obama has voiced his doubts. Full Story
Just as Barack Obama was warning that America is in the grip of a politics of fear that undermines norms and political accountability, President Donald Trump was unleashing his latest assault on traditions of governance that underpin the nation’s democracy.
“These are extraordinary times. Dangerous times,” Obama warned in an extraordinary indictment of the behaviour of a successor to whom he handed power in January 2017 and who has torn at the conventions that restrain presidents ever since.
It was a revealing moment in an enthralling clash of philosophy, temperament and style that unfolded Friday between a current and former president who epitomize opposing currents in an epochal political moment and are now in direct conflict ahead of the midterm elections.
The campaign trail face-off between Obama and Trump also capped a consequential week that saw the awakening of the Washington establishment after John McCain’s funeral turned into an indictment of Trumpism and in which Trump battled an enemy within his own administration.
Obama, ditching his self-imposed political exile, warned of a moment of unique national peril, in which demagogic forces — aka Trump — are undermining the structures of democratic government to build their own omnipotence.
“They start undermining norms that ensure accountability and try to change the rules to entrench their own power,” Obama said in a major speech in Illinois. Full Story
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