What Obama Talks About When He Talks About Trump

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/obama-says-trump-doesnt-belong-oval-office/576883/

What Obama Talks About When He Talks About Trump
At an appearance in Houston on Tuesday, the former president had no trouble explaining a reference to Trump as Voldemort.
Edward-Isaac Dovere
Nov 29, 2018


How do you say you’re against everything—or even just most of what—Donald Trump stands for and not get sucked in to a constant nyah-nyah race to the bottom of being just anti-Trump? People across politics have been trying to figure that out, looking for how to resist a president chipping away at America’s core without having their words reduced to a zinger tweet or monster-truck-rally headline.

This is an issue for the Democrats gearing up to run for president who insist that their campaign can’t be about just Trump, and for the few Republican critics left in Washington who want to have a debate outside of a Twitter feed.

But no one’s grappling with it quite like Barack Obama.

Obama wants to talk about what wasn’t political or personal before Trump made everything political and personal, but every time he does, it feeds into their dynamic—in part because Trump and his supporters and the media want the mud fight, and in part because his exasperation keeps making him slip in jokes at his successor’s expense.

He wanted to be mostly done with politics, but he decided Trump gave him no choice but to step back in through the fall. Now that Obama is done with his midterm campaigning that was all about opposing Trump, he wants to be seen as standing up for civility and facts and an international order. It’s only because those things stand in such contrast to Trump that they become an attack on Trump.

Months ago, Obama’s aides pointedly scheduled this event on Tuesday night at Rice University in Houston as part of a long-term plan to try returning him to statesman mode after his two-month burst of rip-roaring campaigning against Trump. The atmosphere seemed right: the 25th-anniversary gala for the Baker Institute, with Obama and former Secretary of State James Baker in black tie, in a conversation moderated by Jon Meacham, George H. W. Bush’s biographer.

And while he tries his level best to avoid talking about Trump, Obama did make it clear Tuesday that he doesn’t think Trump deserves to be in the Oval Office, based on his behavior, and that Trump’s politics is rooted in a perverse “hatred” that he can’t abide.

snip//

Tuesday night in Houston, Obama told a story that he said will appear in the memoir he’s been working on, likely out next year, of his own first time in the Oval Office, there as president-elect himself to meet with George W. Bush.

“There was a reverence there for that office that is independent of you, and if you don’t feel that, then you shouldn’t be there. Because a lot of fights, a lot of sacrifices, a lot of bloodshed is represented in that office. Not just soldiers at Iwo Jima. It’s maids in Selma and it’s workers in a coal mine and it’s farmers in the dust bowl. You’re carrying that vessel. I never lost that reverence for that office,” Obama said. “Every day I would come and say I’m going to make mistakes, there are decisions that are going to be compromises … Through all those ups and downs, you had to have a part of that, and the Bushes had that, and Ronald Reagan had that, and Bill Clinton had that, that sense of this is sacred.”

It was impossible to miss who was missing from that list.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/obama-says-trump-doesnt-belong-oval-office/576883/

[vlyons]

1. What I most appreciated about Obama was

how careful he was with his speech. Frequently pausing in mid-sentence to find just the right word or phrase to communicate clearly without unnecessarily arrousing misunderstanding. Mindful speech.

[FakeNoose]

5. Yes he was always prepared when he spoke

For Obama nothing was ever off the cuff, he planned what he wanted to say and I believe he still does that. PBO spent many hours every day reading reports and getting briefings on all the important aspects of government. This is something that Cheato never does, and probably can't do because his concentration is so minimal.

[CrispyQ]

8. A friend posted this on FB today.

[liberalmuse]

2. How do you discuss a piece of shit.

When you aren't a piece of shit, without getting the stink of shit on you? I also love that President Obama is careful with his words, and you can be assured he's thought out what he's going to say well beforehand. We need more of this, instead of people saying whatever crap comes into their heads. The right wing shills have always claimed this is just being honest. It's not. It's letting the ID run amok and allowing information to enter and leave the mind without running it through complex thought processes first.

[vlyons]

6. We Buddhist aspire to perfect speech

Speech is very powerful.

[Niagara]

7. Your first sentence nailed it perfectly!

[lastlib]

9. This is totally spot on!

So much of what passes for "thought" is really nothing more than gut reaction, processed through a lens of uneducated, uninformed nonsense, emitted without being filtered through existing knowledge and higher thought processes. You have hit the proverbial nail on the proverbial head!

Our problem today is how to fix that in a culture that rewards it, that demeans serious, deeper analysis.

[pdsimdars]

3. Long story short, Obama gets it right yet again.

[murielm99]

4. Voldemort.

I know people who truly believe 45 is the anti-Christ.

I agree with our real President on the sacrifices. I have been thinking a lot about that lately. I know people who did not vote because they did not feel they could vote for either person. What? Voting is not just a right, it is a responsibility. Those non-voters endanger our democracy.

Yes to the maids, the farmers, the miners. And when women tell me that I mention the suffragettes. They were laughed at and treated like freaks. They were jailed, beaten, starved and abused. I try to tailor my message to non-voters to the groups they hold most in esteem.