What Obama’s Giant Trash Bin Says About His Legacy

On Thursday, former President Barack Obama opened his monstrosity: the Obama Presidential Center.

It looks like a trash bin. 

I don’t mean that there’s trash everywhere. I mean, it’s nice and clean — and it also looks like a trash bin. It is a hideous structure that rises from the area around the lake in Chicago. It resembles the transporter, the gigantic machine used by the Jawas in Star Wars Episode IV.

Obama showed up. President Donald Trump did not. The entire opening was a subtweet of President Trump.

Barack and Michelle Obama were on the publicity tour, and Barack Obama announced that the next chapter in his life is “fun,” while Michelle’s next chapter is “me.”

I thought her last chapter was “me” and the one before that, and well, pretty much all the chapters, actually.

The salient point is that Barack Obama has been masquerading for his entire career as a man who cares about common American values. As I’ve said before, the disappointment with Barack Obama as a politician and human being is that in 2008, he ran as the great unifier, and by 2012, he was running as the great disunifier. He was running as a man who divided Americans based on race, based on sexual orientation, and based on political acumen. And then he would proclaim that only if you were good, true, and decent, and perhaps victimized, could you join in the project of America.

Now he is back to “I’m a unifier. Donald Trump is the divider.”

Obama, an unbelievably divisive politician, is good at this. President Trump is not a uniter; he’s obviously quite divisive. But he also says all the quiet parts out loud.

Barack Obama’s entire shtick for years was that he would pretend that he was trying to unify Americans while offering some of the most divisive rhetoric in American history. He stated Thursday:

They are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share, regardless of party values. Values every president here today, as different as we are, has tried our best to uphold. Values that John McCain and Mitt Romney believed in no less than I did. It is our greatest inheritance, the story of America at its best, because it reflects a basic faith in the decency of our fellow citizens and the possibility that, despite all of our differences, we can see each other and understand one another.

This guy destroyed John McCain, then proceeded to destroy Mitt Romney as a human being. The “values we hold in common with John McCain”? He suggested that John McCain was just George W. Bush, part III. He went after Mitt Romney; his super PACs said that Mitt Romney was a person who was getting people killed with cancer because of his terrible record in the capital markets. His campaign pushed out propaganda about Mitt Romney forcibly cutting the hair of gay kids when he was a teenager and strapping a dog to the top of his car. His vice president went out there proclaiming that Mitt Romney wanted to re-enslave black people.

Listening to Barack Obama talk about divisiveness and how he wants to stop it is like O.J. Simpson’s book, “If I Did It.”

You did it, dude.

He continued along these lines:

Deep in our gut, we want to find a way to turn towards each other again, not further away. I believe this because I’ve seen it all across our country and cities that have worked together to reclaim their streets from crime, and rural communities that have rebuilt their economy, and businesses that are finding new ways to make housing affordable. And those ordinary people in the Twin Cities who braved frigid temperatures, risked their own safety, standing shoulder to shoulder to look out for their neighbors and sometimes look out for strangers because they knew that was the right thing to do. 

Barack Obama as a great unifier? It was always pathetic. 

This is why Donald Trump shattered the bizarre media consensus that everybody had to be friends.

This is one of my major points of irritation with George W. Bush. There are a lot of things that have been directed at George W. Bush incorrectly; I think that many of the ways people talk about the war in Iraq and what George W. Bush did during that war are awful.

With that said, Bush’s “We’re all in solidarity,” or the Bushes acting as though they were chummy with the Obamas while the Obamas divided the country, was hard to stomach.

Donald Trump didn’t do that. It was a breath of fresh air.

So what is Barack Obama really seeking? He is seeking “complexity” around the American narrative. By complexity, he means “America sucks,” but if you slap an American flag on top of the “America sucks” message, then that’s “complexity.” He stated:

I think it’s complicated. As I said, I think it’s possible to celebrate the founders and appreciate what they did as well as look objectively and critically at how their values strayed very far from what they professed. I think it’s impossible to say that there were populists in rural America and the South and white America that really did believe in equality and justice — for white folks and helped to make progress in giving more people opportunity and not ignore the fact that that was to the exclusion of others. And that’s the kind of complexity that I hope people get a little bit of a sense of.

American history is indeed complex, but the question is whether America is fundamentally good with complexity or fundamentally bad with complexity. And Barack Obama gives different messages on that matter all the time.

But when he’s doing his big, soaring speeches as he did at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, then it’s all back to 2008 Obama: “No red states, no blue states, just the United States, no more perfect union, etc.”

If he had not spent years dividing Americans on the basis of race, if he had not spent years weakening American foreign policy in dramatic ways, if he had not spent years pretending to be moderate while acting as a radical, that would have helped a lot.

It’s stomach-churning to listen to a figure as divisive as Barack Obama pretending that he was some sort of great unifier.