H. Brandt Ayers: Loud in, quiet out H. Brandt Ayers – WBNews

Deep in your heart, although you may not want to admit it out loud, don’t you already miss the slender, athletic, quiet and thoughtful Barack Obama who made some mistakes, did some significant things, but never embarrassed America in the eyes of the world?

Barely three weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump has unleashed a clanking policy tank whose giant threads are tearing up cherished American values through a war against First Amendment freedoms, reversing rules meant to protect against another Great Recession and that require investment houses to consider customer interests first, and ordering an anti-Muslim immigration policy that sparked demonstrations at home and condemnation from the world.

Reflecting on the damage already done to fair play and the bulwark of our democratic values, the warning in President Obama’s farewell address is well worth inscribing on the walls of offices and the nation’s classrooms.

Analyzing the speech in a New Yorker essay, George Packer wrote, “that American democracy is threatened — by economic inequality, by racial divisions, and above all, by the erosion of democratic habits and institutions.” (emphasis added)

Trump’s inaugural speech writer inserted George Washington’s caution against domestic factionalism but omitted the Founding Fathers’ more pungent and relevant warning against partisan demagoguery:

“It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasional riot and insurrection …”

As Trump’s driverless tank, ungoverned by any thought-out ideology, rumbles randomly from Trumpian whim to Trumpian whim — its turret spewing tweeted insults to federal judges, undermining the rule of law and critics great and small — there will be a democratic call to arms.

While leaders and citizens at home and abroad await with a sense of dread what new assaults on norms worth preserving will spring from the Trumpian brow, it is worth a preliminary examination of what we have lost.

As a parting gift to Trump, Obama left an economy in an upswing with 7.5 million jobs gained by the second quarter of 2016, 227,000 in January alone.

When Obama inherited the Great Recession from George W. Bush, caused by corporate fraud and excess that Dodd-Frank put brakes on (now reversed), the economy had lost 2.6 million jobs — 524,000 the month of his inauguration.

It can arguably be said that President Obama saved the American economy as he rescued the automobile industry, now thriving. It should also be noted that he did so over determined Republican opposition, which dedicated itself not to economic revival but instead, according to Mitch McConnell, to Obama’s failure.

He kept NATO and the Western alliance united in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine. In an amazing feat of statesmanship, he convinced China and Russia to join in a pact to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat. And he suffered innumerable partisan House investigations into the unpreventable tragedy of Benghazi, which found no wrongdoing.

His failures domestic and foreign were the flip side of personal attributes. His total concentration on the writing and passage of his historic health-care act during the depth of the recession blinded him from feeling the economic desperation of a majority, who needed the presence and reassurance of their president. His admirable caution against making a big, long-lasting mistake in the Middle East left on his conscience the death of the great city of Aleppo.

Who knows what further damage Trump and his Rasputin, Steve Bannon, can do before defeat at the polls or impeachment.

This much can be said for Obama. He left democratic norms and foreign alliances intact. And, significantly, he stitched into the bipartisan fabric of citizenship the necessity of health care along with a job, a decent place to live and a touch of joy in his life.