After leaving the White House in January 2017, Barack Obama and his family set out to do what all newly retired presidents have done—go back home, or find a new one. In Obama’s case, though, the new residence is in Washington, D.C. At first, the Obamas presented their choice as temporary—they wanted to let their younger daughter, Sasha, finish high school in Washington, they said—but their purchase of an 8,200-square-foot, $8 million mansion suggests a permanent stay. Obama’s postpresidency is thus shaping up to be virtually unique in American history: rather than departing Washington, he is planting his flag there, establishing, in effect, a shadow presidency.
Obama’s move breaks with long-standing precedent. Conscious of threats to the safe transfer of executive power in the young republic, America’s early presidents departed Washington on the expiration of their terms. After relinquishing his commission as general following victory over the British, George Washington was compared with Cincinnatus, the retired Roman general who assumed emergency powers, saved Rome, and then returned to his plow. Washington repeated his valiant act when he declined a third term as president—Garry Wills calls him a “virtuoso of resignations”—and set the standard for future executives by going home when his political work was done.
The American ideal of a president is essentially republican: a citizen steps forward to serve the government and returns to private life when his term is up. Washington’s diaries and correspondence of 1797 are consumed with matters of housekeeping, husbandry, and accounts. Mount Vernon had gone to seed, and Washington was forced to shore up his personal finances. Though he stayed abreast of national events and voiced his opinions to his associates, he stayed out of the affairs of government; keeping a safe physical distance from the capital reinforced that resolution.
Following Washington’s model, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe each returned to their farms, in varying degrees of insolvency. True, John Quincy Adams, finding retirement dull, soon returned to public service as a congressman, a role he embraced and thrived in, but his ambitions were not imperial. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren went home, too, when their terms in the White House were finished.
In the modern era, only one other former president remained in Washington after his term of office ended. Stroke victim Woodrow Wilson took up residence on S Street—just a few blocks away from the Obamas’ new Kalorama home. But Wilson was an invalid—indeed, he spent the last 18 months of his presidency in seclusion, with his wife largely managing the affairs of state. Unlike Obama, he was in no position to assert his postpresidential authority or impose himself as a presence on the national stage.
Harry Truman retired to Missouri, broke, in 1953. Dwight Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg, eight years later. In 1969, Lyndon Johnson lit his first cigarette in 15 years, telling his daughters, “I’ve now raised you girls. I’ve now been president. Now it’s my time!” He went to his ranch, grew a ponytail, and died within three years. Richard Nixon skulked off to California and reengineered himself as a statesman, Gerald Ford made himself rich, and Jimmy Carter became a professional humanitarian. Ronald Reagan rode off into the sunset. George H. W. Bush splits his time between Houston and Maine; his son George W., a full-time Texan, paints. Bill Clinton arguably broke the mold through his efforts to install his wife as president, but even that ambitious enterprise was centered in New York, not Washington.
True, some ex-presidents have plotted returns to office. When Grover Cleveland left the White House in 1889, his wife, Frances, told a staff member to keep everything in place because she and her husband would be returning in four years. They did. But Cleveland was an outlier. (He’s also the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.)
Traditionally, former presidents gave their successors a lengthy grace period, during which they refrained from critiquing them: George W. Bush waited until 2015 before criticizing Obama’s foreign policy. By contrast, Obama, only two weeks after Donald Trump’s November victory, announced that he would take on the new president “if necessary.” Necessity arose quickly: Obama held a conference call that month with staff members of his “social welfare” nonprofit Organizing for Action, the successor organization to his Obama for America campaign. The ex-president told the depressed troops to “get over it” and “move forward.” Ten days after leaving office, Obama said that he was “heartened” by anti-Trump protests. Now, recent news reports
indicate that Obama is planning a return to the national stage as soon as this Fall, and that he wants to take an "active role" in running the Democratic Party.
Obama’s new home in Washington has been
described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump
opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has
said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned
himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level
Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety
of groups organizing direct action against Trump’s
initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example,
features lectures by former campaign executive Sara
El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing
Handbook. Former White House deputy chief of
staff Jim Messina runs Organizing for Action.
Obama and his affiliated organizations are not addressing broadly humanistic policy goals, in the model of the Carter Center or even the Clinton Global Initiative. Rather, Obama is the spearhead of a movement seeking to obstruct the administration of his successor. By establishing himself so visibly within the nation’s capital, Obama is effectively turning the postpresidency—up to now, a venerable, if vague, institution—into something more ominous.
Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal and project director of the NYC Initiative at the Manhattan Institute.
August 16, 2017
Washington Post on Joe Arpaio: 'Authoritarianism' to enforce immigration law
According to the Washington Post, Sheriff Joe
on actual law. The Post never had a problem with
Obama and Eric Holder picking and choosing
which laws to enforce. Apparently, it's a sin to
enforce the law, while it's a virtue to consider
oneself above the law.
How about mayors, governors, and ex-presidents
who think they don't have to obey immigration laws?
Obama went after Sheriff Joe and Arizona for
wanting to enforce immigration laws while letting
people who flipped the bird at immigration laws
skate.
When Obama was president, cities and states had no
rights at all to enforce immigration laws, but now
that Trump is president, the states and cities have all
the rights.
I wonder if WaPo writers can spot the difference in
their own reporting.
SOARING
POVERTY AND DRUG ADDICTION UNDER OBAMA
"These
figures present a scathing indictment of the social order that prevails in
America, the world’s wealthiest country, whose government proclaims itself to
be the globe’s leading democracy. They are just one manifestation of the human
toll taken by the vast and all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty
JAMES
WALSH –
THE OBAMA HISPANICAZATION of
AMERICA
How the Democrat party
surrendered America to Mexico:
“The
watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama
administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices
Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington
Times
Europe falls to the Muslims as
America did to the invading
Mexicans!
The Goal of the
Democratic Party: Overthrow of 'The System'
The
Democratic Party has morphed over time from being a party that was pro-labor;
anti-greed; and, via the New Deal, a supporter of demand-side Keynesian
economics to being the party that is against "The System" and
anti-capitalist. Instead of upholding national goals and national
identity, it has taken the side of tribalism, where identity politics is the
end-all and be-all.
The
epicenter of this shift from being progressive or liberal to being neo-Marxist,
neo-fascist, and subversive of too many established social, political, and
economic norms began in the 1960s. Conceptual and practical shifts,
especially in the philosophy of education, merged with other developments both
in the anti-Vietnam War movement and in the burgeoning drug culture.
During
the sixties, Jonathan Kozol came out with a book Death at An Early Age, about his experiences teaching
for one year in the Boston public schools. His conclusion was that much
more money had to be spent to uplift the schools. This philosophy – if
you can even call it a philosophy – became his personal hobby horse for
decades. And it still is a mantra among liberal circles, only now
liberals have morphed into a radicalized leftist agenda that goes a lot farther
than the liberals of that earlier period. Throwing excessive amounts of
money at social and economic problems has become a norm – and it has not worked.
Kozol's
call for reform became hooked into the human potential movement and built on
the idea that a different attitude toward and relationship between the teacher
and student could get results that "traditional education" could not
attain. So these two streams – throwing more money at the schools via per
pupil expenditures and tinkering with traditional teaching modalities – began
to merge. Howard Gardner's "multiple intelligences" found
traction despite the lack of studies supporting it, and the realistic
understanding that some people were smarter than others was gradually diluted
by the centrality of self-esteem and need for more "cooperative learning"
(presumably opposed to traditional "competitive learning").
Fritz
Perls was a leading spokesman for gestalt learning. Here, the idea was to
get away from discrete facts, and to develop our capacity to see reality as a
whole rather than in a factual and limited way. He succeeded
marvelously. There are now millions of students in high schools and
colleges who will tell you that whites, especially white males, are inherently
racist. Ask them how they know this, and they will only be too happy to
tell you: look how Columbus treated the Indians, and we had slavery for
hundreds of years. That's gestalt!
Then
throw into the mix the anti-authority and anti-American pounding the left was
giving the USA during the Vietnam War. This played on the fear of high school
students in particular of being drafted into the army and being sent to risk
their lives in the jungles of Vietnam. Their basic fear – or shall we say
unpatriotic cowardice? – now became rationalized as a righteous antagonism
against a wicked, self-serving government. The antiwar advocates
portrayed the "hawks" of both parties as people whose irrational
anti-communist agenda had caused them to lose perspective.
SDS
and other antiwar groups claimed that the power-trippers of both parties were
so obsessed with their rigid and irrational anti-communism that they ignored
the legitimate need of the Vietnam people for unity and for self-governance
after years of colonial subservience to the French. For SDS and other
activist groups, communism was not the threat our pro-war leaders proposed;
instead, we had to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was a national hero of the
Vietnamese people who had their best interest in mind. Communism is just
another name for freedom in the Vietnamese context, and not the political
bogeyman our warlords were trying to make it.
From
being the heroic saviors of Europe in WWII and of Korea in the early fifties,
we found ourselves internally being portrayed by the antiwar militants as
demonic exploiters of the Vietnamese people and a force for no good in
Southeast Asia.
Thus,
as noted, liberal blame of our educational institutions for student failure to
learn, and blame of society for its unwillingness to sufficiently support
education, expanded to connect with the human potential movement. Then
those two streams intersected with the intense anti-authority stream of the
antiwar movement. These three streams in turn converged with a fourth
that also began in the 1960s – namely, the counter-culture embrace of the
expanding drug culture. In that culture, not only was "weed"
king, but a new hallucinogenic drug, LSD, was being used by increasing numbers
of high school students, as well as college undergraduates and graduate
students.
Use of
this drug was promoted by Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary. Both had
begun their careers as Harvard professors who promoted the use of LSD on the
Harvard campus, at which point they were fired. They were portrayed by
their supporters as modern-day Socrateses – like Socrates, persecuted for
corrupting the youth while actually freeing the youth from the bondage of their
own middle-class, commercially oriented mindsets.
This
writer was personally informed by a friend who had taken 75 "trips"
on LSD that it freed one from his ego and fixed ideas of "reality"
and opened the door to an alternate universe. After his 75
"trips," my friend had to be straitjacketed and forcibly removed from
his apartment to be incarcerated for drug withdrawal and observation at
Massachusetts General Hospital for 45 days.
As these
four streams of antisocial and anti-authority ideology converged, they became a
raging river, lasting until our very day. That raging river is called
"We Hate The System."
What
is "The System"? The system is the entire legal and economic
structure that can be designated as capitalism combined with the legal and
political structures of law roughly called "constitutionalism."
Constitutionalism includes (1) federalism, which balances the respective
authority of the states and the federal government; (2) checks and balances
among the three branches of government – legislative, executive, and judicial;
and (3) the sociological unity founded on the more vaguely stated, yet
nonetheless real, premises of one nation under God; protection of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and the abiding presence of natural and
inalienable rights. In this conceptual troika, personal liberty and
responsibility are forever intertwined. Both the law and the individual
receive total respect, and each complements the other.
Thus,
we can see over the 50 years, from the mid-sixties to the present, that we are
facing an attack on our cultural, political, social, legal, and economic
identity. The attack has been embraced not merely by demonstrators or by
an immature counter-culture. Rather, it has been embraced substantially
by one of our two political parties. Dark and difficult days lie ahead as
we struggle to maintain the viability of the institutions we need and love.
FROM THE FIRST DAY OF HIS FIRST TERM, BARACK OBAMA AND ERIC HOLDER HAD COMMENCED BUILDING A MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP FUNDED BY CRONY BANKSTERS AND MEXICO.
*
*
“Obama’s new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level
Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety of groups organizing direct action against Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing .”
August 16, 2017
Washington Post on Joe Arpaio: 'Authoritarianism' to enforce immigration law
According to the Washington Post, Sheriff Joe was an authoritarian who somehow was very strict on actual law. The Post never had a problem with Obama and Eric Holder picking and choosing which laws to enforce. Apparently, it's a sin to enforce the law, while it's a virtue to consider oneself above the law.
How about mayors, governors, and ex-presidents who think they don't have to obey immigration laws?
Obama went after Sheriff Joe and Arizona for wanting to enforce immigration laws while letting people who flipped the bird at immigration laws skate.
When Obama was president, cities and states had no rights at all to enforce immigration laws, but now that Trump is president, the states and cities have all the rights.
I wonder if WaPo writers can spot the difference in their own reporting.
JOHN BINDER
CALIFORNIA MOVES CLOSER TO FINAL ANNEXATION BY MEXICO
DE FACTO CITIZENSHIP PER LA RAZA:
NO TEST, NO BACKGROUND CHECKS ON CRIMINALITY, NO BACK TAXES, NO
FINES.... JUST JUMP STRAIGHT TO VOTING BOOTHS! AND VOTE OFTEN!!!
In 2013, California lawmakers passed legislation that allowed illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses if they can prove to the Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) their identity and state residency. The plan was one of the largest victories to date by the open borders lobby.… JOHN BINDER – BREITBART.com