President Barack Obama, a thoughtful man of unwavering decency, said goodbye on Tuesday night to the nation he has led for eight years. He did so as only Obama can, with a cadence measured yet soaring, a voice rich in warm compassion and cold truth. His words were those of a man looking both behind and ahead, purged of illusion but fortified by hope, and delivered with humility born of hard-won wisdom.
Wages, incomes, home values and retirement accounts are rising and poverty is falling, he said. Unemployment is lower than it’s been in a decade and more people have health insurance than at any time in this nation’s history. Health costs are rising at the slowest rate in a half-century. The Great Recession is over, bin Laden is dead and the auto industry is rebounding. America, Obama said, is in the midst of longest stretch of job creation in the country’s history.
But all is not well in this fragile republic. As the president reminded us, inequality, racial division and political partisanship are among the greatest threats to democracy.
The wealthiest few, he said, continue their rise at the expense of the middle class, which is further harmed by the pace of automation. The power of workers to form unions for better wages is under attack, and the tax code allows too many corporations and individuals to escape their financial obligations to the greater good. Race relations, while better than they were even a decade ago, he said, are not where they should be. The idea of the first black president ushering in a post-racial America “was never realistic.” Meanwhile, the divide between the political left and right has rarely felt wider or more volatile.
The president knows that progress is never a straight path, and so on Tuesday night he tried to shepherd the people toward the most promising route: “Regardless of the station we occupy, we all have to try harder; we all have to start with the premise that each of our fellow citizens loves this country just as much as we do; that they value hard work and family just like we do; that their children are just as curious and hopeful and worthy of love as our own.”
We understand that there are plenty of people here in New Hampshire who are not fans of President Obama. Maybe over the years you disagreed with him on matters of policy or felt as though he was part of a liberal elite looking down its collective nose at rural, conservative America. Maybe for eight years you saw a man at odds with your principles, and once you see a person as a threat to what you hold dear it’s hard to see them as anything else. Maybe political opposition slowly turned to personal hatred. And so when it came time to pick a new president, you chose a man who could not be less like Barack Obama.
But if you watched Obama speak on Tuesday night, we hope you saw the man we saw – at least for one night.
There he was, the still-young leader of the free world speaking to every man, woman and child in America like a proud father. After two turbulent, frustrating terms in office, the nation’s first black president was more convinced than ever of the potential of the American people to achieve the promise of this still-young democracy. Greatness, he suggested, doesn’t exist in some bygone moment but in a future that the people themselves craft.
We didn’t always agree with Obama, but we will certainly miss him. For eight years, we were able to tell our children, “The president is a good leader and an even better person.”
For eight years, it was true.