I was on active duty in the Army in 2004. I spent the vast majority of the year in Iraq, dividing my time between Camp Victory in Baghdad, and Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib (yes, THAT Abu Ghraib) near the edge of the Anbar province as the brigade judge advocate for the 504th Military Intelligence Brigade. Some of us were lucky to get a two-week vacation during our year-long deployment and mine happened to coincide with the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
An obscure state senator from Illinois who was running for the United States Senate got the opportunity to give one of the “big speeches” at the Convention. Some guy just a few years older than I was called “Barrack Hussein Obama”. I don’t remember his entire speech (or where my keys are right at this moment) but there were a few phrases that stuck with me (some of which I later downloaded from the Internet and taped to my office door in Baghdad). One of the most stirring passages from the speech was “there is no red America, there is no blue America, there is only the UNITED STATES of AMERICA.” I remember thinking that this guy might do okay in national politics some day.
Four years later and I was again on active duty, this time at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Obama, by then a US Senator, was challenging then-Senator Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. My high school and New Mexico Military Institute classmate Chris Smith had taken a leave of absence from his day job and was working for Obama and he urged me to do the same. In the end, I did not -- largely because I was on active duty at the time -- and Chris went on to become deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Energy (which is pretty cool).
I have been a political junkie my entire life (in high school my favorite activity was Youth in Government and I got to do a lot of cool things at the Texas capital because of it) and I am a big (YUGE) student of American history and politics. I can honestly say that Obama had a grasp on politics and the ability to inspire that I could only compare to Jack and Bobby Kennedy’s. I watched tonight’s farewell speech by President Obama in Chicago and it moved me just as much as State Senator Obama’s did years ago. History may or may not remember Obama for being a great president (he will surely be remembered as the first non-white president) but he knows what the highest ideals of this country are and he inspires people of all ages to be as good as the promise of this country. He has not had ONE SINGLE PERSONAL OR FAMILIAL SCANDAL during his presidency. Not one.
Our Constitution purposely divides political power between the President and two houses of Congress (and, perhaps not in the way the founders intended, in the Courts) so the degree that the President gets what he (and someday “she”) wants is limited by the political needs of each independently elected constitutional actor. In other words, no President gets everything that they want. Still, there have been no scandals swirling around President Obama. No special prosecutor has been appointed to investigate him, no long articles in the Washington Post have detailed the wayward escapades of his children. He has had one wife, and even his mother-in-law has lived with his family at the White House to help the Obamas raise their children.
Perhaps if I was President Obama’s father or son I would be more proud of the way he has lived his public and private life and the way has has executed the duties of his presidency. But in any event, I will be very sad at noon on January 20th, 2017 when his second term expires.
He is not just important because he is the first non-white president, the first president who even remotely looks like me. He is important perhaps in spite of that. He has done (or at least tried to do) what he said he would do. He has inspired millions of people around the world to have faith in the ability of an ordinary person with talent to achieve the most important office in our nation and, arguably, the world in spite of institutionalized racism (birthergate, anyone?) and in spite of a fierce opposition political faction that has, on occasion, taken liberties with the truth (cough cough, birth certificate, cough).
I will not say “goodbye” to this good and decent man. He has many good years left in front of him. He will write a memoir of his life at the White House, he will build a Presidential Library in Chicago or Hawaii (probably Chicago), he will see his beautiful daughters graduate college and begin their lives as the good and decent women that they have been raised to be by their good and decent parents.
And no child, no matter which gender they are, no matter what color their skin is will EVER again be born in this country with the idea that there are limits to what they can do in life. Not very long ago people were told that there were things that they could not do because of their gender or because of the color of their skin or because of their sexual orientation. Those days are over now, and we have Barrack Obama (and Hillary Clinton) to thank for that.
So I bid President Obama “farewell” and I wish Mr. Trump “good luck”. Right now, some smart kid -- a boy or a girl who may be black or white or hispanic or Asian or gay or lesbian or transgender -- might be thinking about a life in politics. This is the greatest country in the world. President Obama didn’t make his presidency possible, people like Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. did. President Obama stood on their shoulders, and that next “first” in American public life should be proud to stand on his.
So, thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for being what you seemed to be in 2004. Thank you for being a good and decent man. Godspeed.
