With the exception of the self-deluding claim that race relations have improved under his presidency, Barack Obama’s Farewell Address was elegantly written and flawlessly delivered.
It celebrated the idea of one future and one people.
It was not a soliloquy for self-aggrandizement but one aimed at the unifying principles of what it means to live in America and to be an American.
It was an ennobling valedictory.
In the waning days of the 44th president’s term, Obama has also embarked upon a histrionic au revoir (a tone markedly different from the Farewell Address) festooned with all the ceremonial affectations of an army marching home after a victorious battle.
It’s a jubilee with all the earmarks of a “Hail the conquering hero” screenplay lauding Obama’s achievements during his eight years in office as if the nation had indelibly been changed for the better.
It’s a celebration Obama has wholeheartedly endorsed and I suppose that given his undeniable status as a genuine historical figure, feted and toasted by the media and cultural elites alike, it’s hard to imagine that he would not have acted their transcendent mythology.
Despite his mixed racial heritage and the abandonment by his father, Barack Obama did not suffer from a lack of prerogatives and opportunities.
No doubt he was very smart, literate and politically savvy.
Exhibiting a preternatural cool and unruffled demeanor, even under pressure, he had an air of someone always in control of himself and his circumstances even if this imperturbability contained a hint of condescension.
He overcame not only the compelling disadvantages of a fatherless childhood, but with gusto prevailed in the law, politics and as a devoted family man.
It was a question of character and in this he was not found wanting having, time and again, made the right decisions and steadfast commitments concerning his future.
With his gift for oratory, inexpungible civility and a strapping all-embracing smile, his political potential was easily apprehended and aggressively promoted.
So many prominent and influential people were willing to advance his storybook life as someone who beat the odds to live the American Dream.
His political ascent was meteoric and after delivering a stirring keynote address nominating John Kerry at the Democratic Convention in 2004, a jolt of electricity surged through the body politic signifying that this magnetic orator might one day become America’s first black president.
It was the birth of the Obama legend, soon swept up by a media swoon so pronounced and idiosyncratic that it could barely be distinguished from idolatry.
Emboldened by the ardor of his reception, this youthful first term senator defied political royalty and directly challenged the coronation of the most formidable political family the party had seen since the Kennedys.
Obama was seen as something utterly and spectacularly revolutionary.
Here was a young man who would not have been allowed to vote in the year of his birth in much of the South was now a leading contender for President of the United States.
If elected, Obama would become a living, breathing incarnation of the most definitive refutation of this nation’s troubled history with slavery and Jim Crow.
The media savored this prospect not only with the irrepressible excitement that Obama’s election would presumably bridge the great racial divide but would serve as an ablution of the nation’s original sin.
In progressive circles, it was an impiety to oppose him.
Voicing dissent about his historic candidacy would be a prodigious irreverence to the idea that the long arc of history always points toward justice.
Obama’s political bona fides became the fount and radiating center of a passion play for American redemption.
No knife cuts deeper in the national consciousness than remorse and Barack’s inspirational career and rise to power, in the very shadow past racial indignities and injustices, was as poignant and inspiring a tale as the life of Lincoln.
So the young Barack was showered with sumptuous praise, petted and caressed, humored and spoilt until a sublime unconsciousness about his own specialness took root and became within him an article of faith, as true and sure as Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics.
In the midst of a vast political constellation, one definitely not of his making, Obama stood athwart the world as something majestic, imperious, crested and supreme–capable of enormities.
He had become for his adulators a seamless indivisible; to fault one aspect of his character risked tainting the whole fabric.
Insulated as he was from the obligatory barbs and arrows of political criticism, who or what could stand against his unstoppable momentum, what power could slake much less extinguish the unquenchable fire that burnished his lofty image?
The unrelenting paroxysms of adulation were neither displeasing nor unconvincing to this progressive politician and he beheld his exaltation with a sense of welcoming expectancy.
It was then, at the very summit of his power and influence, where the great overreach to the ideological left was fatally commenced.
Like a tsunami exhausting itself into a breaking wave on some impossibly distant shore, the Obama agenda precipitated an insurrection among the improvident and wounded working classes who had staked so much on his promise and were left disillusioned and wanting.
Obama never saw the desertion of such vast numbers from his fold. He was so convinced of being beloved by the common clothe that an exodus of such breathtaking dimensions was not only mutinous but unimaginable.
It is a much exampled truth that a dauntless and unwavering self-confidence takes one only so far.
The poetry of abstract ideals is grand but the prosaic workman like details of governing require more than worshipping the god within.
It requires a measured response, the willingness to listen and to move cautiously and objectively while tactically and tactfully reaching out to shake hands across the aisle.
It needs the sweat and backbreaking exertions of forging consensus on legislation and always with a wary eye on the volatility of public sentiment.
Governing needs more than “I Am Who Am” mentality, something more than one who imperiously commands let there be light and there was light.
It was this presumptuousness that has made his victory lap, with trumpets blaring, sound more like the tremulous dirge of a funeral procession.
With the election of Donald Trump, the Obama presidency will not even die an honorable death.
His reckless shelving of the Constitution, a subtle instrument best approached with a moral solemnity and dignity that Obama reflexively recoiled from, became a soufflé of Executive Orders that embodied the very seed of its destruction once public sentiment congealed into political action.
As a purple pall gloomily settles over the Obama presidency, he is pitifully reduced to impotently watching his legacy being discarded with all the sacrilege of grave robbers digging up an old corpse and rifling its pockets for some overlooked loot.
Whatever artifice and imagination partisans might impose upon a conveniently, pliable past it will never soften the truth of what had aspired to be a transformative presidency was as transitory as the weather.
When the polls closed on November 8, this lesson in humility was perhaps not entirely lost on Barack Obama, at least not in his reflective moments.
But it’s a hurt easily soothed by the hollow cheers of an enduring and deluded cast of supporters that made such an ignominious failure possible.
Phil Guarnieri
Floral Park
