PRESIDENT OBAMA: Hey! Hello, Illinois! I-L-L! AUDIENCE: I-L-L! PRESIDENT OBAMA: I-L-L! AUDIENCE: I-L-L! PRESIDENT OBAMA:I-L-L! AUDIENCE: I-L-L! PRESIDENT OBAMA: Okay, okay. Just checking to see if you’re awake. Please have a seat, everybody. It is good to be home. It’s good to see corn. (Laughter.) PRESIDENT OBAMA: Beans. I was trying to explain to somebody as we were flying in, that’s corn. That’s beans. And they were very impressed at my agricultural knowledge. Please give it up for Amaury once again for that outstanding introduction. I have a bunch of good friends here today, including somebody who I served with, who is one of the finest senators in the country, and we’re lucky to have him, your Senator, Dick Durbin is here. I also noticed, by the way, former Governor Edgar here, who I haven’t seen in a long time, and somehow he has not aged and I have. And it’s great to see you, Governor. I want to thank President Killeen and everybody at the U of I System for making it possible for me to be here today. And I am deeply honored at the Paul Douglas Award that is being given to me. He is somebody who set the path for so much outstanding public service here in Illinois. Now, I want to start by addressing the elephant in the room. I know people are still wondering why I didn’t speak at the commencement. (Laughter.) The student body president sent a very thoughtful invitation. The students made a spiffy video. And when I declined, I hear there was speculation that I was boycotting campus until Antonio’s Pizza reopened. (Laughter.) So I want to be clear. I did not take sides in that late-night food debate. The truth is, after eight years in the White House, I needed to spend some time one-on-one with Michelle if I wanted to stay married. (Laughter.) And she says hello, by the way. I also wanted to spend some quality time with my daughters, who were suddenly young women on their way out the door. And I should add, by the way, now that I have a daughter in college, I can tell all the students here, your parents suffer. (Laughter.) They cry privately. It is brutal. So please call. (Laughter.) Send a text. (Applause.) We need to hear from you, just a little something. And truth was, I was also intent on following a wise American tradition. Of ex-presidents gracefully exiting the politicalstage, making room for new voices and new ideas. And we have our first president, George Washington, to thank for setting that example. After he led the colonies to victory as General Washington, there were no constraints on him really, he was practically a god to those who had followed him into battle. There was no Constitution, there were no democratic norms that guided what he should or could do. And he could have made himself all-powerful, he could have made himself potentially President for life. And instead he resigned a sCommander-in-Chief and moved back to his country estate. Six years later, he was elected President. But after two terms, he resigned again, and rode off into the sunset. The point Washington made, the point that is essential to American democracy, is that in a government of and by and for the people, there should be no permanent ruling class. There are only citizens, who through their elected and temporary representatives, determine our course and determine our character. I’m here today because this is one of those pivotal moments when every one of us, as citizens of the United States, need to determine just who it is that we are, just what it is that we stand for. And as a fellow citizen, not as an ex-president, but as a fellow citizen, I am here to deliver a simple message, and that is that you need to vote because our democracy depends on it. (Applause.) Now, some of you may think I’m exaggerating when I say this November’s electionsare more important than any I can remember in my lifetime. I know politicians say that all the time. I have been guilty of saying it a few times, particularly when I was on the ballot. (Laughter.) But just a glance at recent headlines should tell you that this moment really is different.The stakes really are higher. The consequences of any of us sitting on the sidelines are more dire. And it’s not as if we haven’t had big elections before or big choices to make in our history. The fact is, democracy has never been easy, and our founding fathers argued about everything. We waged a civil war. We overcame depression. We’ve lurched from eras of great progressive change to periods of retrenchment. Still, most Americans alive today, certainly the students who are here, have operated under some common assumptions about who we are and what we stand for. Out of the turmoil of the industrial revolution and the Great Depression, America adapted a new economy, a 20th century economy – guiding our free market with regulations to protect health and safety and fair competition, empowering workers with union movements; investing in science and infrastructure and educational institutions like U of I; strengthening our system of primary and secondary education, and stitching together asocial safety net. And all of this led to unrivaled prosperity and the rise of a broad and deep middleclass in the sense that if you worked hard, you could climb the ladder of success. And not everyone was included in this prosperity. There was a lot more work to do. And so in response to the stain of slavery and segregation and the reality of racial discrimination, the civil rights movement not only opened new doors for African-Americans, it also opened up the floodgates of opportunity for women and Americans with disabilities and LGBT Americans and others to make their own claims to full and equal citizenship. And although discrimination remained a pernicious force in our society and continues to this day, and although there are controversies about how to best ensure genuine equality of opportunity, there’s been at least rough agreement among the overwhelming majority of Americans that our country is strongest when everybody’s treated fairly, when people are judged on the merits and the content of their character, and not the color of their skin or the way in which they worship God or their last names. And that consensus then extended beyond our borders. And from the wreckage of World War II, we built a postwar web, architecture, system of alliances and institutions to underwrite freedom and oppose Soviet totalitarianism and to help poorer countries develop. This American leadership across the globe wasn’t perfect. We made mistakes. At times we lost sight of our ideals. We had fierce arguments about Vietnam, and we had fierce arguments about Iraq. But thanks to our leadership, a bipartisan leadership, and the efforts of diplomats and Peace Corps volunteers, and most of all thanks to the constant sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, we not only reduced the prospects of war between the world’s great powers, we not only won the Cold War, we helped spread a commitment to certain values and principles, like the rule of law and human rights and democracy and the notion of the inherent dignity and worth of every individual. And even those countries that didn’t abide by those principles were still subject to shame and still had to at least give lip service for the idea. And that provided a lever toc ontinually improve the prospects for people around the world. That’s the story of America, a story of progress. Fitful progress, incomplete progress, but progress. And that progress wasn’t achieved by just a handful of famous leaders making speeches. It was won because of countless quiet acts of heroism and dedication by citizens, by ordinary people, many of them not much older than you. It was won because rather than be bystanders to history, ordinary people fought and marched and mobilized and built and, yes, voted to make history. Of course, there’s always been another darker aspect to America’s story. Progress doesn’t just move in a straight line. There’s a reason why progress hasn’t been easy and why throughout our history every two steps forward seems to sometimes produce one step back. Each time we painstakingly pull ourselves closer to our founding ideals, that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights; the ideals that say every child should have opportunity and every man and woman in this country who’s willing to work hard should be able to find a job and support a family and pursue their small piece of the American Dream; our ideals that say we have a collective responsibility to care for the sick and the infirm, and we have a responsibility to conserve the amazing bounty, the natural resources of this country and of this planet for future generations, each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. And you happen to be coming of age during one of those moments. It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. (Applause.) He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years. A fear and anger that’s rooted in our past, but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes. And, by the way, it is brief. When I heard Amaury was eleven when I got elected, and now Amaury’s starting a company, that was yesterday. But think about it. You’ve come of age in a smaller, more connected world, where demographic shifts and the winds of change have scrambled not only traditional economic arrangements, but our social arrangements and our religious commitments and our civic institutions. Most of you don’t remember a time before 9/11, when you didn’t have to take off your shoes at an airport. Most of you don’t remember a time when America wasn’t at war, or when money and images and information could travel instantly around the globe, or when the climate wasn’t changing faster than our efforts to address it. This change has happened fast, faster than any time in human history. And it created a new economy that has unleashed incredible prosperity. But it’s also upended people’s lives in profound ways. For those with unique skills or access to technology and capital, a global market has meant unprecedented wealth. For those not so lucky, for the factory worker, for the office worker, or even middle managers, those same forces may have wiped out your job, or at least put you in no position to ask for a raise. As wages slowed and inequality accelerated, those at the top of the economic pyramid have been able to influence government to skew things even more in their direction: cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans, unwinding regulations and weakening worker protections, shrinking the safety net. So you have come of age during a time of growing inequality, of fracturing of economic opportunity. And that growing economic divide compounded other divisions in our country: regional, racial, religious, cultural. It made it harder to build consensus on issues. It made politicians less willing to compromise, which increased gridlock, which made people even more cynical about politics. And then the reckless behavior of financial elites triggered a massive financial crisis, ten years ago this week, a crisis that resulted in the worst recession in any of our lifetimes and caused years of hardship for the American people, for many of your parents, for many of your families. Most of you weren’t old enough to fully focus on what was going on at the time, but when I came into office in 2009, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. 800,000. Millions of people were losing their homes.<doc-sep>In a fiery campaign-style speech on Friday, former President Barack Obama attacked Donald Trump by name for the first time since leaving office. But then he went further than that — calling out the Republican Party by blaming it for Trump’s rise. “It did not start with Donald Trump,” Obama said of the current crisis in American politics in his address to students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “He is a symptom, not the cause.” He goes on: “Neither party has been exclusively responsible for us going backward instead of forward. But I have to say this because sometimes we hear a plague on both your houses ... over the past few decades, the politics of division and resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.” This is an out-of-character moment for Obama. He has certainly levied harsh critiques against the Republican Party in the past, but he built his brand on rhetoric that transcended partisanship. Lamenting the “smallness of our politics” and that “Washington is broken” were characteristic Obama pronouncements — critiques of a system but not of any actors, certainly not the opposing party. It’s a posture he’s cultivated further in his post-presidency, during which he hasn’t played much of a role in the controversial debates and policy fights of the Trump era. Like any vintage Obama speech, he did still call for common ground and bipartisan collaboration. But coming in the wake of what felt like an 18-month political hibernation — and with two months to go before crucial midterms — Obama’s lambasting of the Republican Party stood out. It’s a bracing analysis of how we got here, in an environment where critiques of Trump frequently stop with him and not the party enabling him. And it suggests a new turn for Obama, who has a habit of opting for post-partisan positioning when the partisan trench warfare is more what the moment calls for. Obama tried to work with Republicans. He’s learned his lesson. Liberals were frustrated for years with Obama’s ongoing attempts to negotiate with Republicans, to try to get even a single vote for his priorities. It never worked, but Obama kept trying. He tried to find compromise on priorities ranging from health care to gun control to the future of the welfare state. He sought to have a bipartisan Cabinet (to mixed success). After Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell declared in 2010 that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he still kept trying. Today’s Obama appears to have learned his lesson. He called the Republican Party beholden to wealthy interests: None of this is conservative. I don’t mean to pretend I’m channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that’s not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party. It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical. It’s a vision that says the protection of our power and those who back us is all that matters even when it hurts the country. It’s a vision that says the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions set the agenda, and over the past two years, this vision is now nearing its logical conclusion. So with Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, without any checks or balances whatsoever, they’ve provided another $1.5 trillion in tax cuts to people like me — who I promise don’t need it — and don’t even pretend to pay for them. Obama argues that the party is willing to make a Faustian bargain with Trump — let him do what he wants in exchange for signing Republican legislation — even though they know it’s dangerous. They could check him, but they don’t: In a healthy democracy, there’s some checks and balances on this kind of behavior, this kind of inconsistency, but right now there’s nothing. Republicans who know better in Congress — and they’re there, they’re quoted saying, yeah, we know this is kind of crazy — are still bending over backward to shield this behavior from scrutiny or accountability or consequence, seem utterly unwilling to find the backbone to safeguard the institutions that make our democracy work. It’s a sweeping condemnation of one of America’s two major parties. And it’s also, for reasons my colleague Ezra Klein has explained, correct: Republicans in Congress really do have the power to check Trump, to launch investigations into his most egregious scandals and block him from firing special counsel Robert Mueller and messing with core American international agreements. But they choose not to, for essentially the reasons Obama suggests in his speech. Does Obama go far enough? Obama’s solution to the problem he outlines in the speech is clear enough: Democrats should win elections. But when he tries to give them advice on how to do that, his analysis begins to sound a little more familiar. Consider the following passage, a veiled criticism of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “deplorables” comment. Obama argues that Democrats shouldn’t write off any Americans as irredeemable bigots, instead considering everyone a potentially persuadable voter: We won’t win people over by calling them names or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist or sexist or homophobic. When I say bring people together, I mean all of our people. This whole notion that has sprung up recently about Democrats needing to choose between trying to appeal to white working-class voters or voters of color and women and LGBT Americans, that’s nonsense. I don’t buy that. I got votes from every demographic. We won by reaching out to everybody and competing everywhere and by fighting for every vote. There’s a part of this that feels like it’s ignoring reality. Political science research on the 2016 election suggests that Trump won because a huge chunk of voters responded positively to his racism and sexism. Voters who scored high on tests of racial resentment were unusually likely to support Trump, as were voters who scored high on measures of hostile sexism. These voters did not tend to be particularly stressed economically; this wasn’t displaced economic resentment. Rather, they seem to genuinely share the current president’s values, agreeing that the way to “Make America Great Again” is to slow or even roll back social change. Many of these voters seem to have been motivated by Obama’s own victories. Research by UC Irvine political scientist Michael Tesler has found that over the course of Obama’s two terms, the country polarized significantly along racial lines — with Republicans in particular adopting more hostile views toward black people and civil rights. Race came to shape every issue — even people’s opinions on Obama’s dog Bo. This would suggest that a Democratic Party that wants to be diverse and egalitarian can’t win over some of those voters and really shouldn’t try — because trying would mean betraying women, people of color, LGBTQ Americans, and the like. That’s the tension Obama was alluding to — but instead of grappling with it honestly, he decided to mostly pretend it didn’t exist. This actually mars his analysis of GOP complicity in Trump’s rise, too. The problem isn’t just the institutional actors in the Republican Party — it’s the party’s supporters too. Gallup shows that 85 percent of Republican voters currently approve of Trump’s job performance, and that the number has been fairly consistent throughout his presidency. If we don’t confront the fact that a huge chunk of America’s voters truly are reactionary, we can’t honestly grapple with the crisis of the Republican Party. But the fact that Obama’s analysis doesn’t go quite far enough shouldn’t distract from the main point here. A president who began his national political career by declaring that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America” but rather “a United States of America” is now blaming one party for breaking the government and dividing the country, for essentially selfish reasons. This speech was a searchlight, illuminating just how much American politics has changed over the past couple of decades.<doc-sep>
Barack Obama stepped back into the fray on Friday with a ferocious speech aimed squarely at not only his successor in the White House but the entire Republican Party. The ex-president uttered the name “Donald Trump” for the first time in public since Trump’s inauguration in his speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Obama chastised a politics of fear and resentment, but argued that Trump himself was “a symptom, not the cause.” “It did not start with Donald Trump,” he said. “He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, a fear and anger that’s rooted in our past, but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.” The speech reintroduced the president to American voters just before he begins campaigning earnestly for Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms. Obama sought to portray the November elections as an opportunity to regain “some semblance of sanity to our politics.” He even spoke positively of emerging progressive policies, like Medicare-for-all, that he would not have endorsed in his more center-left administration. But more than anything, Obama abandoned the posture he’s cultivated over the past 18 months as an elder statesman who largely stays out of the ruckus and refrains from directly criticizing Trump or Republicans in Congress. In doing so, he seemed to hope to convey a sense of urgency, arguing that the republic is at a crossroads and it will require a mobilized body politic to change direction. “This is not normal. These are extraordinary times, and they’re dangerous times,” Obama said. “But here’s the good news. In two months we have the chance, not the certainty, but the chance to restore some semblance of sanity to our politics.” Here are seven key moments from the speech: “Demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems” Obama criticized Trump and Republicans more directly than he ordinarily would, but he still placed the current politics of resentment — the coded racial language, the dehumanizing of the Other, and the fear-mongering in what is actually the safest time in recent history to live in America — in a grander historical context. “America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division,” Obama said, is a tale “as old as time.” And he heavily implied that Trump follows in those demagogic footsteps: Even though your generation is the most diverse in history with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do, that’s an old playbook. It’s as old as time. And in a healthy democracy, it doesn’t work. Our antibodies kick in, and people of goodwill from across the political spectrum call out the bigots and the fear mongers and work to compromise and get things done and promote the better angels of our nature. But when there’s a vacuum in our democracy, when we don’t vote, when we take our basic rights and freedoms for granted, when we turn away and stop paying attention and stop engaging and stop believing and look for the newest diversion, the electronic versions of bread and circuses, then other voices fill the void. A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold and demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems. No promise to fight for the little guy, even as they cater to the wealthiest and most powerful. No promise to clean up corruption and then plunder away. They start undermining norms that ensure accountability and try to change the rules to entrench their power further. They appeal to racial nationalism that’s barely veiled, if veiled at all. Sound familiar? “What happened to the Republican Party?” Obama’s rise to the presidency began, in earnest, with his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech professing his belief that there was not a Red America or a Blue America — that there is more that unites Americans than divides them. He has therefore been reluctant throughout his career to paint too broadly in his critiques of his political opponents.