Obama this week

Former President Obama had a kickoff summit for his Obama Foundation this week. Obama himself gave the closing keynote speech, which starts just after 1:56:00. Obama Foundation Summit Closing Session 11/01/2017:

The summit was for the purpose of training activist leaders. So Obama's speech sounds like what I imagine his presentations as a community organizer were in his early career. (Full disclosure: I was actually trained in "Alinskyist" organizing methods by the United Farm Workers union once upon a time. So I have a good idea of what community organizing presentations sound like.)

Hearing an Obama speech is a reminder of some of the things that made him so attractive as a politician. He's sharp, impressive, persuasive, professional, and upbeat. It was probably very much in the mood of the rest of the conference.

It was always ironic to me that rightwingers, for whom facts don't much matter, treated "Alinskyism" as though it was akin to a full-blown anarchist ideology or something. Because one of the criticisms of Saul Alinsky's approach to community organizing was that it was largely an ideology-free approach. It stressed organizing people around specific goals like, say, refurbishing a neighborhood park. That doesn't necessarily translate easily into organizing around a larger ideology and/or parties or pressure groups that deal with a wide variety of issues. Obama's often non-ideological, "bipartisan" presentation of issues is partially an echo of that organizing style.

And that's what strikes me the most about this speech. It talks about "change" in an almost completely issue-free context. He doesn't talk about organizing to address the climate crisis, or to promote labor unions, or for single-payer medical care, or for college-for-all. It's not that what he says is bad. It's just that there's nothing particularly politically liberal or progressive about it.

In this speech, he revisits his famous hope-and-change theme of the 2008 campaign. In the cautious, deliberate voice that marks his attempts to tiptoe around something, he says, "People always misunderstood, sometimes, that slogan we used. Hope, the audacity of hope."

Edward-Isaac Dovere reports for Politico on how Obama expanded on the thought (The strange, new-age Obama reunion 11/02/2017):

“Hope does not mean that tomorrow everything’s going to be better,” he said. “Where hope comes in handy is when you’ve put everything you have into something and it hasn’t worked yet —and it hasn’t worked the week after that, and the week after that, and six months later and a year.”

I found this comment a bit depressing. Because it walks right up to saying, hey, all that talk about hope and change didn't mean that I really wanted to change anything.

It seemed a miracle in 2008 that a liberal African-American man could be elected President of the United States. A big reason was that in his person and his rhetoric, he seemed to promise substantive change in the midst of the Great Recession after the Cheney-Bush Administration's war in Iraq and their stunning neglect of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And things like the 2009 stimulus bill and Obamacare were substantive, constructive kinds of change and improvement.

But he showed over and over again that on most other policies, we was very much a centrist. And in trying repeatedly to cut Social Security and Medicare, he was conservative. To use poli-sci language, he was a transactional President rather than a transformational one.

His speech Wednesday was mostly centrist boilerplate, however eloquently it was delivered. As noted above, he seem to be suggesting that "hope and change" was a largely empty slogan, meant more as a motivational slogan than a substantive program. Hope and Change didn't look much like the New Deal or the Great Society.

And the "fierce urgency of now" was not on evidence in the speech.

In bipartisan mode, he talked about long history of the civil rights movement as though there were no enemies involved. Classic Obama. No Martin Luther King-like jeremiads against "vicious racists" or mealy-mouthed self-styled moderates.

Obama's speech also reflects the comment that Dovere makes:

What the Obama Foundation will do, no one quite knows yet — including, admittedly, the former president himself. How the newly launched outfit fits in with like-minded groups or the former president’s own vision of using civic engagement to create political change is an open question, too.

The answers provided at the summit weren’t even close to what desperate Democrats are pining for: that Obama will save them by standing up to Trump, that he’ll stop the nuclear war they’re having nightmares about, or even just provide some reassurance they might start winning House races again.