Has a man ever gotten away so easily with flattering his country by complimenting himself?
Nearly eight years later, Obama’s vision of himself as America’s healer hasn’t aged well. And the much-jeered criticism that Hillary had offered during the campaign rings truer. She made fun of him then: “The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect… Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be.”
Democrats will be giddy from the speech, but their belief in a transformational presidency was robbed from them by an unprecedentedly hostile Congress. And some of them hold Obama’s aloof style with Congress responsible.
And what is the state of our politics at the end of the Obama era? The divisions are worse, in part because partisan differences are filtering down to every cultural experience. They show up in what movies, music, and athletes we like. More troublingly, in the last eight years, reactions to incidents like George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin, or the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, became much more partisan than they had been before.
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