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Ron Paul See other Ron Paul Articles Title: Where Is Barack Obama? Where Is Barack Obama? Gabriel Debenedetti 12 hrs ago © Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images Obama jury duty Barack Obama was six months into his post–White House life when Donald Trump found a new way to grab his attention. It was a Tuesday morning deep in the mid-Atlantic summer, and, feeling a world away from the Pennsylvania Avenue grind, the former president was reading the New York Times on his iPad. The previous evening, Trump had visited West Virginia, where he spoke at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree. Addressing a crowd of roughly 40,000, who were expecting the usual talk about citizenship and service, the president uncorked a political diatribe packed with jabs at Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Washington, D.C., “cesspool”; reminders about the importance of saying “Merry Christmas”; and reminiscences of Election Night 2016 and the pundits he embarrassed. “You remember that incredible night with the maps, and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red it was unbelievable. And they didn’t know what to say,” Trump told the Scouts. They seemed bewildered at first but before long broke into chants of “USA!” Adult observers were openly horrified. Three days later, the Boy Scouts’ leader would apologize for Trump’s speech. In Washington, where the former president still works and lives with his wife, Michelle, and his younger daughter, Sasha, Obama stewed. Ever since the shocking election, he had resisted condemning his successor directly. Early on, he would muse to senior aides in private about what it meant that the country had chosen Trump, bouncing between writing off the election as a freak accident and considering it a rejection of his own vision of America. In the months after the inauguration, Obama referred publicly to the new president only sparingly — but still more than he expected to. He issued careful statements defending the Affordable Care Act and supporting the Paris climate-change agreement, avoided mentioning Trump by name, and largely let the resistance speak for itself. But the Boy Scouts speech really troubled him. Kids their age are the most impressionable group there is, Obama reminded friends at the time, likening them to sponges. If the president shoves a divisive political argument at them, that’s what they will absorb. It was a very Barack Obama thing to get agitated about. Throughout his entire political career, he has attached an unusual degree of significance to storytelling, and he has often spoken of the importance of modeling what it means to be a good citizen. He had recently concluded a two-month stretch full of international travel and was just starting to settle into his post-presidency, and that week was a busy one in Washington — Republicans were zeroing in on a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The Boy Scouts speech was relatively unimportant (mostly improvised, probably something Trump would forget about within a week), but perhaps it presented an opportunity. One of the most potent tools in Obama’s arsenal, as a retired president, is rhetoric. Even if he no longer enjoyed the bully pulpit, he could, if he wanted, fill the vacuum of moral leadership Trump had created and offer, to not only the Scouts but the entire country, a lesson in civics that no other Democrat is positioned to give. But then he did another very Barack Obama thing: He decided to stay quiet. Where is Obama? It is a question much of the country has been asking over the last two years, sometimes plaintively. “Come back, Barack,” Chance the Rapper sang in a Saturday Night Live sketch. “We all miss him,” Kobe Bryant said, speaking for other athletes. Even former FBI director James Comey admitted to German interviewers this spring that he misses Obama. Beyond the anguish is, often, simply bafflement: How did the most ubiquitous man in America for eight years virtually disappear? Over the course of his presidency, Obama cast himself as the country’s secular minister as much as its commander-in-chief, someone who understood the moral core of the nation and felt compelled to insist that we live up to it. What explains his near absence from the political stage, where he might argue publicly against the reversals of his policy accomplishments, and also from American life more broadly? What is keeping him from speaking more frequently about the need to protect democratic norms and the rule of law, to be decent people? Where is the man who cried after Sandy Hook and sang in Charleston, who after each mass shooting tried to soothe an outraged nation, who spoke of American values in his travels across the globe? And, tactically, what is behind the relative silence of one of the most popular figures alive just as American politics appears to so many to be on the brink of breaking? Earlier this month, weeks after news first came out of thousands of immigrant children being held apart from their parents at the border, and after Laura Bush had published an article excoriating her party’s policy, Obama and his team chose to make a rare foray into the news cycle. First, they decided that Michelle should take the lead, and she did so by retweeting Bush’s article approvingly (“Sometimes truth transcends party”). That received a further retweet from Barack, in a bid to keep the conversation about families rather than about politics — as he calculated it would have been had he weighed in directly. Two days later, with the crisis dominating the national news, Obama’s advisers saw an opportunity in World Refugee Day to issue a statement of his own that focused on American values rather than Trump-administration policy. It was an eloquent call for empathy. It was also, to Democrats desperate for him to break post-presidential precedent, the very least he could have done. Obama’s reticence is more than simply a matter of communications strategy. He has mostly opted out of liberal America’s collective Trump-outrage cycle. Though he reads the Times and other newspapers, he doesn’t follow daily Trump developments on Twitter or watch television news. He is upset by the administration’s actions, and he’s confided to friends that what worries him most is the international order, the standing of the office of the presidency, the erosion of democratic norms, and the struggles of people who are suddenly unsure of their immigration status or the future of their health-care coverage. Still, in conversations with political allies, Obama insists that today’s domestic mess is a blip on the long arc of history and argues that his own work must be focused on progress over time — specifically on empowering a new generation of leaders. He says his legacy is not what concerns him. (“Michelle and I are fine,” he tells those who ask about it.) And while he often says he misses the day-to-day work of fixing people’s problems, he has even less patience for day-to-day politics than he did as president. In fact, in private conversations, Obama rarely mentions Trump at all. Those who’ve visited the office he’s leased from the World Wildlife Fund in Washington’s West End say he’s eager to talk for hours about the world’s ills. When informed about the latest presidential tweetstorms aimed at him, he chuckles and changes the subject. One friend of Obama’s recalled that after a 45-minute meeting that avoided the subject of Trump entirely, the pair ducked into an aide’s office and saw on television that the president was claiming to have been absolved in the Russia inquiry. Obama’s eyes flicked toward the chyron and his face took on a decidedly bemused aspect for a beat before he turned back to their conversation as if nothing had happened. “The important thing to think about with Obama in the context of politics is what his overall goals are,” says Jim Messina, his 2012 presidential-campaign manager and informal adviser. Obama’s first goal is to adhere to the precedent George W. Bush set, leaving him alone and respecting the peaceful transfer of power. The second is to engage a younger generation of leaders. “And then, three, how to carefully decide when you have to sacrifice one and two, especially one. He has been really careful about No. 1,” Messina says. “He could pick a fight with Donald Trump every day, and (a) the only winner would be Donald Trump, and (b) we would kind of get into this back-and-forth the Clintons have gotten themselves into: Is there too much Obama? Not enough Obama?” One of Obama’s friends repeatedly described the former president as newly “Zen-like,” a striking descriptor given that Obama’s impossible calm has been a hallmark of his entire time on the national stage. To those who’ve known him longest, his confidence in the decision not to wade back into the political muck is the product of the same hyper-self-aware posture he’s had since childhood, growing up straddling worlds and then writing a book about himself in his 30s. “This has been a difficult thing for him, and for me, to see what this administration has done to the policy initiatives that we put in place and that were proving to be successful,” says Eric Holder, Obama’s friend and former attorney general. “But I think it’s really been true — we’ve had conversations about this — he’s been encouraged by the amount of progressive energy he’s seen around the country.” To Obama, the Women’s Marches and the wave of gun-control activism after the Parkland school shooting are more influential than anything he might do to alter the news cycle, especially since his presence as a Trump counterweight often consolidates the otherwise fractured GOP base. “Even when we were in the White House, he wasn’t interested in discussing the day-to-day of politics, whether it was Speaker Boehner or Speaker Ryan or Leader McConnell, or whatever was the news of the day,” says Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s closest advisers. “Wasting time on things he can’t control is not of interest to him. Getting sucked into a conversation over someone who he has no ability to influence? What’s the point?” Of all his political gifts and tools, Obama has always been most hesitant to wield raw power, circumscribing the options available to him by dismissing the bluntest tools as either immediately or eventually counterproductive. If one philosophy governed his political activity in the final stretch of his presidency, it was articulated by Michelle at the 2016 convention: “When they go low, we go high.” Built into that code of conduct is his famous long-term optimism about historic progress as well as a confidence that his empathetic approach to governing will ultimately be more successful than dishonest tactics or mean-spirited politics. But there was always a flip side to both of these assumptions: alongside the optimism, a fatalism about human nature and political incentives, and alongside the confidence, a streak of resignation, a sense that he alone can only do so much. Throughout Obama’s administration — even before, during the 2008 campaign — liberals agonized over his temperament, afraid that he was squandering opportunities or bringing knives to gunfights. As he finished his second term, Obama took a victory lap, and it was easy to believe that he’d been right all along. Then came the Trump era — and with it, a greater test of Obama’s philosophy than he ever imagined it facing. And yet, for all of the new president’s radical transformation of the nation, he’s done little to alter the character of his predecessor, or reshape Obama’s vision of the world. Obama believes more than ever in his capacity to spark an immediate backlash among Trump fans and to make any policy matter far more partisan. The calls from former staffers and allies who want him in the field, actively protecting his policy legacy — whether it’s through speeches, organizing, or lobbying — are considered but mostly brushed aside. “I know it isn’t usually done that former presidents weigh in, but these are not usual times, and protocol seems to have vanished,” says Susie Tompkins Buell, a major Democratic donor. “On the immigration stuff, if he were willing to go way over the line and get arrested, or something way out there, that would be a galvanizing event,” says one frustrated leading Democratic operative in the midst of the 2018 campaigns. Poster Comment: Why would we miss someone who deliberately tried to take down the U.S.A.? That is why he was POTUS to begin with. He was choice of Rothschild's to bring down America. Obummer was a member of Council of Foreign Relations and was an internationalist. Populism is the way to go, for the people. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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