After the Cool One Leaves

Obama gave his farewell address in Chicago in January 2017, and I watched it knowing it was the last time a US president would speak to me with the assumption that I was an intelligent adult. That sounds like hyperbole. You already know it wasn’t.

He wasn’t perfect. NSA surveillance, Guantánamo still open after eight years of promises, drone strikes the administration euphemistically called precision operations. Plenty of principled people had plenty of legitimate grievances. But he was measured. He was thoughtful. He could hold two ideas in his head at once without one of them being his own financial enrichment. In the context of what was about to follow, those qualities looked almost miraculous.

Donald Trump was waiting in the wings, and I couldn’t fully process what that meant. Not yet. My brain kept sliding off the reality of it. The man had been running a forty-year con on the public, and now he was going to run one on the entire government, probably while his financial interests quietly appreciated. He wasn’t going to govern. He was going to perform governance while leveraging the office into deals. I think he’d been mentally masturbating to the thought of it for months before the election.

Barack, I’ll miss you. Not uncritically. But genuinely. The speech was emotional and it stayed with me longer than most political speeches do, which isn’t saying much but is saying something. There’s a particular grief in watching someone decent leave a room and knowing exactly what’s coming next.