Rather than celebrating the extraordinary bravery and immense personal sacrifice of America’s founding fathers, former President Barack Obama used the debut of his presidential center on Thursday to emphasize their failures, telling attendees that the nation’s founders “fell terribly short” of the ideals they espoused.
He said:
The success of this experiment was never a given. In forming our union, the founders fell terribly short of the Declaration’s promise, leaving slavery intact, allowing states to restrict the franchise to white men who owned property. But in drafting a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, they did have the foresight, the genius, to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect.
He knows very well why abolition was not included in the Declaration of Independence. The founders’ “failure” to abolish slavery at the nation’s birth was not the result of indifference to the contradiction between liberty and human bondage. Many recognized it. In fact, Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the document included a passage condemning the slave trade, but it was removed to preserve unity among the colonies.
The reality is that the American experiment likely never would have begun had the founders insisted on immediate abolition. The colonies were deeply divided on the issue, and without a united front, independence from Britain would almost certainly have failed. The founders made a fateful compromise, choosing first to secure the nation’s existence and leaving future generations to grapple with slavery’s ultimate abolition.
And, as Obama is also well aware, Americans fought a bloody war to end the scourge of slavery that left more than 600,000 mostly white men dead.
Obama went on to emphasize the work that lies ahead for America and the need to find points of unity in an increasingly divided political climate.
Oddly, and perhaps as a subtle jab at President Donald Trump, Obama invoked the “values” of John McCain and Mitt Romney, two of Trump’s most prominent Republican critics: “Every president here today, as different as we are, has tried our best to uphold the values that John McCain and Mitt Romney believed in no less than I did.”
He ended on a hopeful note:
It is our greatest inheritance. The story of America at its best, because it reflects a basic faith in the decency of our fellow citizens and the possibility that, despite all of our differences, we can see each other and understand one another and make common cause together. That’s what I hope every visitor to this center takes away from their experience.
I would gently remind Obama that he, too, “fell terribly short” of one of his central campaign promises: healing the nation’s racial divisions.
While America was not a colorblind society when he took office, race relations had improved markedly over the preceding decades. The country had come a long way since my days as a student in the 1970s, when racial identity often defined how people viewed one another. By the time my children attended school in the 2000s, I saw something different. They didn’t describe their classmates as black, white, or Asian; they described them by their names. The progress was real, even if it was incomplete.
Obama was given a historic opportunity to build on that progress. Instead, neither he nor Michelle Obama appeared willing to abandon the identity politics that shaped their worldviews. The rhetoric may have evolved, but the underlying framework remained the same: black versus white, oppressed versus oppressor, grievance versus responsibility. Rather than encouraging Americans to see one another as fellow citizens, Obama often reinforced the notion that they belonged to competing groups with competing interests.
It is little wonder, then, that polls consistently show majorities of Americans believed race relations deteriorated during his presidency. For all of his soaring promises of unity, Obama’s legacy on race remains far more divisive than transformative.
His rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail, particularly his shaming of black men who would not line up behind Kamala Harris, made clear that he still sees the world through a rigid racial lens, and Americans, less as individuals than as members of racial voting blocs.
From Fox News:
While the Obama Presidential Center officially opens to the public Friday, the dedication featured a slew of former diplomats, officials and celebrities, such as former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, Oprah Winfrey, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Steven Spielberg, Hillary Clinton, and former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Joe Biden….Overall construction costs were reported to be $830 million in 2021 and have likely climbed past the $1 billion mark.A recent Fox News Digital investigation identified multiple construction firms claiming losses ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of millions. [Matt covered this story here.]
Obama’s full remarks can be viewed below:
https://x.com/WaqarM2024/status/2067759222532534293?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY