The other day, President Obama delivered a commencement speech at Howard University. It ran 45 minutes but you might want to watch it because it's a pretty good speech…
It was not, as some might have expected or even hoped, 45 minutes of Trump-bashing or even Republican-bashing. Much of it was critical of those on the left who demand immediate revolution. A lot of it will strike his critics as self-serving but as one who agrees with his main thesis — that America is a much better place than it was when he graduated high school — I don't see any way he could say that without implying a few victory laps.
How did this happen? Well, here's a lift from Obama's speech that strikes me as true…
If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you're not going to get what you want. And if you don't get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that's never been the source of our progress. That's how we cheat ourselves of progress.
I suppose some will take that as a swing at Bernie Sanders supporters. Some of the ones who've written me could stand to learn a message that Obama repeats several times in this speech: "Passion is vital but you've got to have a strategy." I would be quite happy to see Bernie Sanders as our Chief Exec but I'm kinda repulsed by the belief, expressed by those who think Trump will destroy America, that Trump would be preferable to not getting Bernie. It reminds me a lot of the folks to whom Jon Stewart has occasionally said, "You're confusing not getting everything you want with an attack on your religion."
After I started writing the above, I noticed that Jonathan Chait, a political writer I like, had noted Obama's speech and he wrote this about it. I'm not necessarily in agreement with the parts about "political correctness." That term is being used so widely with so many disparate definitions, that I think it's become largely useless. Clearly, what a lot of people think it means when they use it is not what a lot of others mean when they use it. But I do agree with Mr. Chait (and I guess, the President) that establishment politics is working in this country. It's not working as fully and quickly as some would like but the other kind ain't working at all.