Former president Barack Obama, who has conspicuously refused to leave Washington DC after an election result which is widely regarded as a referendum on the policies of his party has given his first speech since leaving office this week. It was the introductory opening to a conversation with students at the University of Chicago but is being called a speech nonetheless.
The young man who delivered the introduction spoke of Obama’s promises of hope and change- never mentioning the fact that hope and change never materialized.
Obama entered the stage with his characteristic gregariousness, shouting “hey, hey,’ and shaking every hand available before sitting leisurely among a panel of young students. He evoked laughter with his signature charm and affinity for the crowd. He began, like any performer, by noticing how great it is to be in the town that he is in.
He spoke of his early days working as a community organizer in Chicago. He mentioned the racial tensions and economic devastation he witnessed in Chicago in those days without saying much about the decades of democratic leadership that should be held responsible for those problems.
But he did mention the fact that services and school quality available to people were uneven- and it would be nice if he would have said that his party was in charge of those unevenly distributed services- but he doesn’t.
He said that he wasn’t very successful in bringing about any significant change in those times- but that he himself was dramatically changed by his early experiences in political life. He said ‘this community taught me that ordinary people- when they work together can accomplish extraordinary things.’
It’s a statement that has no ring of truth to it, because for one thing- he says no significant change took place during his tenure as a community organizer- yet he still claims to have learned that the opposite is true. Well, who did he learn it from?
Maybe he learned it from the factory workers in the Midwest whose jobs would be sold out from under them by NAFTA, a Bill Clinton project which Obama supported and furthered during his presidency. Or maybe he learned it, albeit later on, from Trump supporters who delivered the biggest pro-people’s political upset in history- in what has been called the world’s first bloodless revolution.
“This community,” he said, “taught me that everyone has an important story to tell.” That’s a pretty ugly statement coming from the harshest persecutor of whistleblowers to hold the office of the president, who drove those who uncovered crimes perpetrated in the name of the American public into prison, into hiding, mysterious deaths, and suspicious suicides.
These lessons he says he learned as a community organizer, went with him into law school, into his time as a senator, and eventually as his role as the two-term president of the United States.
He then began to opine about what his role should now be as a private citizen. Again, this is a hollow statement that could only fly with an audience of youths who probably do not know that Obama currently lives in a mansion in Washington DC where he directs a team of political operatives working to subvert the Trump administration; who probably have not followed the developments of the wiretapping scandal from which evidence emerged that Obama was at least partly responsible –and certainly knew about it..
The audience waited anxiously to hear what Obama believes his new responsibility as a member of the private sector is. For, he says glibly, “my next job.”
“What I’m convinced of, although there are all kinds of issues that I care about and all kinds of issued that I intend to work on,” he said. “The single most important thing I can do is to help in any way I can to prepare the next generation of leadership to take up the baton and take their own crack at changing the world.”
Well, Mr. Former President, after a solid eight years of proxy wars, expansions of the Patriot Act, a resoundingly undeserved Nobel Peace Prize- given for promises that were never even attempted, we’re not interested in your idea of changing the world.
It is clear that Obama may be being positioned to recover losses to the democratic voting support base by plying the young with his winsome style. But we’re not interested in further degradation of race relations, a sluggish economy, and war without end.
That is why America needs to be made great, again and we don’t believe anyone tutored by Obama will have the skill to repair the damage he has done.
~ American Liberty Report
