Trump Slams Obama for Trying to Sabotage Transition

Editor: Philip Ragner | Tactical Investor

Trump Slams Obama

In 1968, there was a demand among voters for change, especially regarding Vietnam and foreign policy, and there was a backlash against some of the Great Society programs. Then, as now, the Democratic candidate was tied to the departing administration and hamstrung to differentiate a new set of policies.

As a result, the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert H. Humphrey, narrowly lost to the Republican, Richard M. Nixon, a candidate who was despised by a large percentage of the electorate.

One positive outcome of that election was the first organized transition from the departing to incoming governments. President Lyndon B. Johnson always believed that, after an election, Democrats and Republicans should come together to do what’s right for the country.

At the time, I was President Johnson’s appointments secretary, the position that has since evolved into the White House chief of staff. Right after the 1968 results came in, the president put me in charge of organizing a transition process, something that had never been done. “Nixon is an S.O.B., but he’s the only president we’ll have,” Johnson told me. “I want him and all of his team to be fully prepared to govern after the Inauguration at 12 noon on January 20.”

A few days later, Johnson and Nixon met at the White House along with Nixon’s top advisers, including H. R. Haldeman and John Mitchell. Full Story

All presidencies are historic. But no president since at least LBJ, and probably FDR, has arrived in Washington at a moment of greater historic urgency than Barack Obama. The man who took that oath of office seemed cut from American folklore — a neophyte politician elected senator only four years before, a prodigious and preacherly orator from the “Land of Lincoln” and the South Side of Chicago of the Great Migration. An embodiment not just of the American Dream as it had been imagined by the Greatest Generation of his own maternal grandparents but of a new version, too, one that might be embraced by his daughters — global, utopian-ish, post-boomer, “post-racial.”

More than “hope,” Obama’s candidacy promised “one America.” It is the deep irony of his presidency, and for Obama himself probably the tragedy, that the past eight years saw the country fiercely divided against itself. The president still managed to get a ridiculous amount done, advancing an unusually progressive agenda. But however Americans end up remembering the Obama years decades from now, one thing we can say for sure is that it did not feel, at the time, like an unmitigated liberal triumph. It felt like a cold civil war.

Or a never-breaking political fever. There was the tea-party rage and Occupy Wall Street. Every other week, it seemed a new shooting. Full Story

Trump Slams Obama

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