Obama Regrets Polarized Rancor. He Should.
24th January 2016
One of the “few regrets” of his presidency, President Obama said dolefully in his State of the Union speech, was “that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.” Were he endowed with “the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt,” he remarked, he could have done more to bridge the partisan divide. But he pledged to “keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.”
Did you experience a touch of déjà vu when the president said that? Four years ago, when he was in the home stretch of his first term and running for a second, he said much the same thing.
“I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted, where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest . . . I haven’t fully accomplished that,” Obama told an interviewer in 2012. “My biggest disappointment is that we haven’t changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked.”
Did he even try?
Hint: No.