Dear Commons Community,
New York Times columnist Charles Blow has a piece today welcoming Barack Obama back to the fight as he embarks on a series of speeches blasting President Trump and the Republicans. Blow explains how it has generally been the case that former presidents tend to stay out of the political limelight once their terms are over but that the times are such that the nation needs someone of Obama’s stature to take on Trump. Here is an excerpt:
“It appears that that moment has finally come for Obama, though, in all honesty, it came months ago for many of us.
We have been howling into the wind so long that people dubbed our extreme objection to this deeply immoral and unscrupulous man Trump Derangement Syndrome. But, in fact, the new Bob Woodward book and the Op-Ed in this newspaper by an anonymous administration official prove us right. The fact is that most Americans now believe that Trump’s relationship to the Russian hacking and the hush money payments to women who say they had affairs with him are unethical or flat-out illegal.
Although Obama has made some tepid, often glancing, remarks about Trump’s policies and rhetoric before, his speech last week at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the first time that he has blasted Trump by name.
It was a departure from the genteel tradition of the presidents’ club in which the exes try not to personally criticize the current one and vice versa, although Trump had never adhered to this tradition. He insults and condemns his predecessors without end, particularly Obama, the black man whom his largely white base most detests.
Nothing Obama said was particularly new or revelatory. It was that he was saying it at all that arrested attention.
For instance, he told the audience that “each time we painstakingly pull ourselves closer to our founding ideals” there are dark forces that push us back, and that “it did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause.”
He continued:
“He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years. A fear and anger that’s rooted in our past, but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.”
He could have read similar words in a thousand essays written since Trump was elected.
But, for me, I deeply appreciate his words for another reason: He is loosening Trump’s stranglehold on the news.
There is only so much time in a news day, only so many column inches in a newspaper, only so much prominent real estate on a website. Up to this point Trump has dominated the news by overwhelming it, and no one has had the weight to challenge that dominance. Obama has that weight. Just by speaking he’s altering the diet of the news people consume.
His very presence in the fight, as a presidential voice — even if former, for some he’s forever — is disruptive.
For this I say, welcome back Mr. President. Your country was crying for help and you heard it.”
Towards the end of the movie, Casablanca, Victor Laszlo welcomes Rick back to the resistance movement during World War II, and says with confidence “now I know our side will win.”
Victor was right. I hope Charles is right.
Tony
