The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects:

LISTENING TO PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA’S FAREWELL SPEECH TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AS PRESIDENT

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© January 10, 2017

I listened to several television commentators after the President spoke from Chicago, where he came as a twenty-year-old in search of a life, and found it in community service, which eventually led to the Presidency of the United States.

He has always been a marvelous speaker and for the first time I understood, and the commentators seemed to have missed this, it is because he tells us HOW WE SHOULD BE, not HOW WE ARE.

Senator Daniel Webster in the era of President Andrew Jackson, along with Senators Henry Clay and John Calhoun talked to the American people in the early 19th century, and more specifically to their own constituents on HOW THEY SHOULD BE and were repeatedly frustrated – in the case of Webster and Clay – from becoming president, and for getting his own way in matters of States rights in the case of Calhoun.

It confounded them why the American people would listen to a backwoodsman such as Andrew Jackson, and not to them who were sophisticated, articulate, well-read, cosmopolitan, well connected with movers and shakers not only in the United States but across the Western World.

Jackson was pragmatic, not sophisticated; thought and talked in language that was indigenous to the common man; didn’t describe eloquently the people’s misery or sense of disenfranchisement but acted upon it; was denigrated far worse than any previous president and commonly thought by the educated, the well-connected and the sophisticated to be a buffoon. 

Jackson not only changed the nation with eight years of his presidency (1829-1837) but had his legacy continued in future administrations moving Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. to write his biography as “The Age of Jackson.”

The incredible irony is that Barak Obama, our first African American president, although not especially high born, has had more in common with the wealthy, the privileged, the well born than with the common people because he understands them and their idealism from a distance in terms of HOW WE SHOULD BE.

Missing in this radical departure from convention in the election of Donald J. Trump is that, like Jackson, he makes connection with people who know HOW WE ARE as an actual people.  He talks as if he is a hayseed in the back country or can knowingly rub shoulders with an unemployed automotive worker, or a farmer who has had to sublet his farm to a corporation to survive, or to everyday Americans working paycheck to paycheck and always coming up short.

Trump doesn’t talk in the elegant style of an Alexander Hamilton, John Jay or James Madison who composed the Federalist Papers, which are the basis of the American Constitution, he talks about jobs, health care, staying employed and having some level of security by using such understandable terms as “building a wall” on the southern border of the United States; bringing back American jobs now in China, Indonesia and elsewhere; and “killing ISSI.” 

He may or may not accomplish any of this, but that is not the point.  Trump was elected because he spoke the language of common people, and Americans are common not sophisticated, not aristocratic and certainly not taking their cues from Paris or London or their likes where the patina of enlightened sophistication is like old make-up that just won’t rare off.  Grit and grime and the smell of work is part of the American lexicon.

Scores of people, actually hundreds have excoriated men for not “seeing the light” on how terrible a man the President-elect is.  That is not the point.  If he is terrible, why do 20,000 or 30,000 come out to hear campaign speeches, and have done so for the past eighteen months without let up.  Are these terrible misguided souls because they can relate to HOW THINGS ARE?


But like the commentators mentioned above, these e-mail writers, often abusive of me, miss the point.  This billionaire with not a single day in public office of any kind annihilated seasoned politicians across the spectrum of the Republican Party, and then repeated the process by beating the Democratic Machine that outspent Trump and the Republican Party four dollars to every one of theirs to the tune of a billion dollars, and still lost.

For the next four years, chances are they will be constantly focusing on the “hacking” of Democratic operatives and Vladimir Putin's influence that put a bad light on Democratic officials who failed to guard and secure their sensitive communications from such hacking with cavalier insouciance.  We make our own bed, politicians and citizens alike. 

So, whomever you are, now gloating in the admittedly marvelous farewell speech of the president, ask yourself: was he speaking to the American people on HOW WE SHOULD BE, or HOW WE ARE?