Obama's montage of American history darkens

Hey America, ICYMI:

Addressed to the summer's young protesters:

You can give our democracy new meaning. You can take it to a better place. You're the missing ingredient -- the ones who will decide whether or not America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed.

That work will continue long after this election. But any chance of success depends entirely on the outcome of this election. This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that's what it takes to win. So we have to get busy building it up -- by pouring all our effort into these 76 days, and by voting like never before -- for Joe and Kamala, and candidates up and down the ticket, so that we leave no doubt about what this country we love stands for -- today and for all our days to come.

Stay safe. God bless.

That's the 44th president of the United States warning that the 45th president will end democracy in America if we let him.

That warning represents quite a journey for Obama. He rose to prominence and won election by telling us that we are not as divided as we seem, that we are forever in the process of making our union ever more perfect, that Americans at pivot points in our history bent the arc of the universe toward justice.

Our failures of political rhetoric are asymmetric

The study of rhetoric can yield great insights into the way power is structured and masses of people are moved. But those who study rhetoric closely are prone to mixing up cause and effect.

So it is with an essay by New York Times CEO Mark Thompson that usefully traces The Dark History of Straight Talk -- that is, of politicians' claims to authentically channel the mystical will of the people. Simpson begins with Shakespeare's rendition of Mark Anthony's funeral oration for Caesar, in which he claims to be "no orator," but a "plain, blunt man," eschewing the rhetoric that was the chief marker of political authority in Rome. He moves on to reaction against the rationalist language of the Enlightenment, to the hookup of "anti-rhetoric" with nationalism and Heidegger's fetishization of "authentic" language, culminating in his embrace of Hitler. Finally he focuses on the anti-elitism and demonization of out-groups by the current crop of authoritarians in western democracies, culminating (for the moment) in Trump.

All good so far. But here's where I think Thompson confuses conditions that make large numbers people responsive to "authenticism" with the current condition of rhetoric itself:

What we have lost and must strive to regain is a conception of rhetoric that strikes a balance between the demands of reason, character and empathy, and that strives for genuine truthfulness rather than theatrical “authenticity.”

That makes me wonder whether Thompson has ever listened to a certain Barack Obama, who won the presidency by sheer force of rhetoric -- and whose rhetoric has arguably balanced "reason, character and empathy" as powerfully as any president's since Lincoln (whose rhetoric Obama constantly, consciously channels).

Re the qualities Thompson thirsts for: for empathy, I suggest watching Obama tear up when speaking of the Sandy Hook shooting, or listening to him sing Amazing Grace after the Charleston, or read how he delineates the emotional logic of those who perceive reverse racism in his More Perfect Union speech in March 2009*, or lays out the plights of individuals who lack health insurance in his speech to rescue the health reform bill in September 2009.**

In which Republican pundits hear Obama for the first time

A hard-baking meme in the commentary following the Democratic convention is that the Democrats stole traditional Republican thunder  -- projecting American exceptionalism, support of the military, economic optimism.

Granting that the speaker selection and crowd chants may have been a bit more rah-rah than the Democratic norm, this meme has its root in Republican reaction to Obama's speech on Wednesday night that says more about them than him.  The Times' Nick Confessore cites this example:

“What is Obama talking about? He’s talking about the Constitution. He’s talking about personal freedom,” said Craig Shirley, a conservative author and Reagan biographer, referring to the Wednesday speech in which President Obama invoked his Scotch-Irish roots and the homespun values of humility and hard work.

“Moving out several paragraphs, Reagan could have given that speech,” Mr. Shirley added. “This might be part of a dialectical change in American politics.”

Twitter abounded* with similar sentiments:

In Dallas, Obama returns to Gettysburg

Is suffering redemptive? Obama thinks it is.

Do violent upheavals lead Americans to recommit to and advance the nation's founding ideals? Obama professes faith that they do, and will.

The ideas, as Obama has absorbed them, come from Lincoln above all others. At moments of crisis, he reverts to Lincoln's rhetoric. And so, in Dallas this week, he closed his funeral oration for the five murdered police officers by reprising (not for the first time) the Gettysburg Address:

And that’s what I take away from the lives of these outstanding men.  The pain we feel may not soon pass, but my faith tells me that they did not die in vain.  I believe our sorrow can make us a better country.  I believe our righteous anger can be transformed into more justice and more peace.  Weeping may endure for a night, but I’m convinced joy comes in the morning.   We cannot match the sacrifices made by Officers Zamarripa and Ahrens, Krol, Smith, and Thompson, but surely we can try to match their sense of service.  We cannot match their courage, but we can strive to match their devotion.

Coming today: An Obama message "for" Hillary?

Obama just sent an email  to supporters announcing a speech to be delivered this afternoon. I imagine it will be a message "for" Clinton -- both to support her and to model a coherent pitch for incremental change. There are hints in the letter, highlighted below.

Nine years ago today, I stood on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, to announce my candidacy for President of the United States.

I asked you to join me in taking up the unfinished business of perfecting our union -- to work together to build a better future.

Along the way, Americans like you have done that by playing the most important role in our democracy -- the role of citizen. You've taken on the painstaking work of progress. You've helped us find that middle ground where real change is won -- change like rescuing our economy from the brink of another Great Depression, protecting our planet, and helping millions of Americans gain health insurance.

How to love America, by Barack Obama

Obama gave another great speech on race today, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the 50th Anniversary of "Bloody Sunday. He told a story of America that he's always told, but he expanded its range and spoke with a steely urgency that bespoke battles fought and still to come.

He echoed Lincoln, as he likes to do, and he answered his stupidest critics as he defined in his own way what it means to love America, and he sought to recommit his fellow citizens to fulfill the promise of the nation's founding documents, reiterating his favorite theme: faith in the power of democracy to continuously create a more perfect, never perfected union. He laid out his most inclusive vision ever of who built America and who America is for and who America is.

He echoed and updated Lincoln in (at least) three ways. He borrowed Lincoln's diction of dedication at Gettysburg while explicitly extending the concept of devotion to heroes of peace -- and in particular, of nonviolent resistance -- as well as to heroes of war. And as he always does, channeling Lincoln, he cast that heroism as a devotion to fulfilling the ideals expressed in the nation's founding documents. And as Lincoln did at Gettysburg, he sought to inspire those listening to emulate those commemorated in their devotion to extending the promise of freedom and opportunity to all.

Here is the expanded concept of heroism:

Obama's seductive love for America

The irony in this "Obama doesn't love America" crap is that Obama got himself elected by holding up  to Americans a flattering mirror that was suited to the moment.

The national narrative that Obama put forward in 2007/8 had two salient points (okay, may it had three or four or five, but two come to mind here). It was, first, a bid to move the political center to the left -- to cast American history as a progression in which Americans at various crux points demanded and obtained new common investments in shared shared prosperity and new extensions of equal opportunity to an ever-widening and more inclusive circle -- African Americans, women, gays. In Obama's telling, the nation had veered off-course for eight or thirty years, but democratic self-correction was also part of the long historical pattern and would come with him.

That's a kind of "whig history" for America, and it resonated in the wake of a disastrous conservative presidency.  It was also a message essentially common to all Democrats and would have worked for almost any Democrat.

The real contest in 2008 was in the Democratic primary, and perhaps Obama beat Hillary by making this whig history sing, tapping a deep American mysticism previously tapped by Lincoln and -- somewhat more caustically -- by Martin Luther King. This second element was captured by Obama's "more perfect union" trope.  That is: America's founding documents expressed principles for the best ordering of human society, and while the nation has never lived up to these ideals, its democratic engine draws it ever closer -- ever more perfect, never perfected. Those ever-widening circles of inclusive opportunity are bending the arc of history toward justice. Martin Luther's famous "check" of equal opportunity, returned for insufficient funds, is being paid on a very long mortgage schedule.

OK, Krugman: How will hypocrisy help us?

Paul Krugman, Jeremiah of galloping income inequality in the United States, today manages a rather half-hearted tribute to the nation's long-term fidelity to its founding ideals. Half-hearted, because seeing those ideals subverted by encroaching oligarchy, he takes rueful solace only in our national hypocrisy:

Of course, our democratic ideal has always been accompanied by enormous hypocrisy, starting with the many founding fathers who espoused the rights of man, then went back to enjoying the fruits of slave labor. Today’s America is a place where everyone claims to support equality of opportunity, yet we are, objectively, the most class-ridden nation in the Western world — the country where children of the wealthy are most likely to inherit their parents’ status. It’s also a place where everyone celebrates the right to vote, yet many politicians work hard to disenfranchise the poor and nonwhite. 

But that very hypocrisy is, in a way, a good sign. The wealthy may defend their privileges, but given the temper of America, they have to pretend that they’re doing no such thing. The block-the-vote people know what they’re doing, but they also know that they mustn’t say it in so many words. In effect, both groups know that the nation will view them as un-American unless they pay at least lip service to democratic ideals — and in that fact lies the hope of redemption. 

So, yes, we are still, in a deep sense, the nation that declared independence and, more important, declared that all men have rights. Let’s all raise our hot dogs in salute.

Left unspoken here is how hypocrisy helps. It's said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue -- bad conscience with a cover. The question is, how productive will our ethical unease prove? Now that our income distribution (and opportunity distribution) has reverted to roughly where it was before the Great Depression and the New Deal, will this retrogression prove, to borrow a bit of econ-speak, 'secular or cyclical'?  That is, will we readjust, as Obama in '08 argued we must, from a 30-year Reaganite right turn turbo-charging pressure on wages powered by automation and globalization? Will we find means to train our youth to create and fill "good-paying jobs of the future"? Or was the relatively weak American version of the welfare state merely a one-time strategic retreat by elites that have more recently tightened a now unshakable proprietary grip on the means to prosperity?

Obama on kinks in the arc of history

One passage in Peter Beinart's stirring ode to Obama's gun control efforts set me thinking again about how Obama views (and frames) U.S. history:

Republicans often describe America as a country that was once pure—at its founding, before the New Deal, or before the 1960s—was sullied and now must now be redeemed. Obama, by contrast, describes America as a protracted struggle to honor our best ideals by overcoming our evil past, a struggle in which heroes often die without ever seeing their labors bear fruit. It’s no coincidence that a month after Newtown, he swore his inaugural oath on the bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and spoke of “the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall.” It’s no coincidence that he so often quotes King (who was himself quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker) as saying, “Even though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.”

I would slightly edit this acute observation, altering "overcoming our evil past" to "overcoming the evils in our past" or "overcoming our more limited past."  Due in part perhaps to political necessity, Obama puts a relentlessly positive spin on the national historical saga, casting it as a tale of continual progress toward a more perfect union.  The circle of those included in the "all are created equal" widens in concentric historical ripples, "through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall." It's a presentation of American history modeled on Lincoln's concept of what Garry Wills tagged in Lincoln at Gettysburg as "continual approximation" of the ideals embedded in the Declaration of Independence.  Wills cites Lincoln setting forth that concept in the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

How's that "more perfect union" working out?

His high praise of Obama notwithstanding, Adam Gopnik thinks the president is kind of bullshitting us (and himself, perhaps) with his renewed declaration of national unity:

his political intelligence is so keen that he knows when unreality best serves his ends. Political intelligence is as distinct and intuitive a gift as any of the other kinds of intelligence—the situational intelligence of the athlete or the analytic intelligence of the intellectual—and a large component of political intelligence lies in being faithful to your own fictions. The new Spielberg-Kushner-Lewis movie, “Lincoln,” reminds us (or will, once widely released) that Lincoln’s entire conduct in office during the war was based on the fiction that the secession had never happened—that the South was not a rebellious nation but, rather, a bunch of outlaws running around in gang regalia. What you could see had just happened—a bunch of states becoming an alien nation—had not. This fiction of continuity, of an indissoluble union in the face of its rather evident dissolution, was essential to Lincoln’s case and to his credo.

To this list of—what shall we call them?—higher liars (sounds harsh, though it conveys something of the idea) most other great politicians might be added. F.D.R., with his assertion that fear was all there was to fear when there was so much real stuff to be frightened of; and Reagan, for that matter, with his many repeated myths and mantras. By now Obama must know the virtues of fighting and the limits of the invocation of unity, but he knows, too, that a cool man who does not cherish his own warmest rhetoric becomes a mere hot-air artist. If that knowledge can make him seem at times naïve, or even willfully perverse—well, after all, he’s the one who’s the phenomenon, not you.

Stimulating, methinks, but not the whole story. No doubt, Obama's "not just red states and blue states" mantra puts forward a national image that's highly, shall we say, idealized -- that is, part bullshit. But only partly, because Obama lays the real beside the ideal, embracing disunity within unity -- as in his victory speech last night:

Of the tribe of Barack

Obama's statement on Trayvon Martin was an appeal to the better angels of our nature -- complicated but far from compromised by Obama's reference to his own blackness. For some, no doubt, that note was discordant with his universal appeal to parents to put themselves in the Martins' shoes, which came first:

And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together — federal, state and local — to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.

The way in which his personal note chimes or clashes with that appeal is complex:

But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. And I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we're going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.

That declaration, "if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," is literally addressed to the Martins -- and by extension, to all black Americans. That segues into a challenge to all Americans to acknowledge that the burdens still imposed on African Americans are a problem and responsibility for us all. That's where the risk comes in. It's a glimmer of the Jeremiah Wright speech: America's drive toward a 'more perfect union' is in some way centered on our continuing struggle with the legacy of slavery. That's implicit. And I imagine a lot of people still don't like it one bit. 

My personal reaction set me thinking -- not for the first time -- about Obama's hold on me. The clip teared me up. As is often the case when his speech strikes a chord, I recalled  the mildly self-mocking words of an academic friend. This time, I pulled them from her email of August 2009:

Of presidential candidates and Langston Hughes

There's an irony behind the irony of Rick Santorum accidentally borrowing a campaign slogan from Langston Hughes:

Santorum by and large stayed on message but was tripped up a bit when a student asked him if he knew that the choice of his slogan, "Fighting to make America America again," was borrowed from the "pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes."

"No I had nothing to do with that," Santorum said. "I didn't know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn't inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that."

The really funny part is that Obama's favorite trope about America, his constant recourse to the paradox inherent in the phrase "a more perfect union," is embodied, in a bitterer vein, in Hughes' poem.

Let America be America Again. is a poem of fathomless pain, an anthem of the excluded. It begins with a pious, nostalgic wish that meets a harsh (anonymous) counterpoint:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

The Gospel according to Obama

Update: Original Sin at Notre Dame

Christianists insist that the United States is a Christian nation. Obama is not a Christianist. He told us in his inaugural address that "our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth." While he believes that moral values absorbed through religion have a place in the public sphere, he imposes strict ground rules on those who would invoke religious teachings:

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason (The Audacity of Hope).

Obama's religious allusions accordingly are usually of the most universal kind: I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper. And yet, a second look at his inaugural address made me feel that his thinking is more specifically informed by Christian scripture than I had previously believed. Early in the speech, he swerved into slightly less familiar Biblical language -- the Apostle Paul's "when I became a man, I put away childish things." The full context of that Pauline dictum, I believe, opens a window on the extent to which Obama's understanding of America's secular scriptures, the Declaration and the Constitution, are underpinned by his reading of Christian scripture.

Here is Obama's allusion to 1 Corinthians 13:

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

The call to put away childish things had a simple denotation, familiar to anyone who has followed Obama's speeches: to get past the Rovian attack politics that according to Obama have paralyzed our policymaking -- "a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism," as he put it in his March speech on race. The way he followed that thread, identifying other "childish"political tenets and practices he asked us to move past, is worth a separate post.

But here, I'm more interested in a family likeness between Obama's historiography and Paul's theology. For Paul, becoming a man means achieving, to borrow a favorite phrase of Obama's, a more perfect union:

1If I speak in the tongues^[a] of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames,^[b] but have not love, I gain nothing.

4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. 11When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. 12Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

For Paul, to become a man means to become perfect in love. It means to fulfill a human potential that can never be completely fulfilled in this life: to love God perfectly. This life is a quest for a more perfect union that will be attained in the next.

Obama, like Lincoln, and the Transcendentalists before him, and countless Americans afterward, asserts a similar movement in American history. The Declaration and the Constitution express political principles as perfect in their way (so Obama's invocations of them imply) as Paul's love. Indeed, Obama has asserted that they are in effect political translations of that love. Here's how he put it in his great speech on race in Philadelphia on March 18:

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

The title of that speech was "A More Perfect Union." The premise was that the principles expressed in the Constitution have not been fulfilled but are in process of being fulfilled -- that what distinguishes America is the country's constant progress toward fulfilling them:

This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.

In the inaugural address, Obama portrayed our progress toward realizing our ideals as being in midstream, and projected their eventual fulfillment beyond our shores to encompass the world:

And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

Once again, his core message was hope. Faith. Love. Those three. Ultimately, Obama keeps it simple.

Audacity of Obama: Embracing Wright and Grandma

Obama's speech on race and Wright will go down in history, beside Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech, as a defining moment in America's conception of itself. Its organizing trope is the oxymoron in the preamble of the Constitution -- the aim to create a "more perfect" union. Obama's overarching vision is of an America that's a work in progress. He embraces the commitment to "perfecting" while portraying the instruments -- Wright, his own grandmother-- as flawed but but fundamentally to be embraced as instruments of progress.

With regard to Wright, he repudiated the words but not the man. He set Wright's anger in full historical and cultural context and explained precisely how his own thought differs:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made, as if this country– a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Talk about audacity -- in affirming what he gained from Wright, even as he repudiated his bitter and paranoid view of America, he paired Wright's role in his development and affections with those of his own grandmother. Without self-aggrandizement, he effectively identified himself as the locus of the unity he wants the nation to strive for:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

That is absolut Obama. He demonstrates the strength of his commitment through criticism. He pairs Wright and has grandmother as parts of his, and our, identity to be embraced.

The speech was anything but narrowly personal; it addressed the predicaments and attitudes of the entire nation. It included compressed and accurate capsule portraits of the disabling force of racism on blacks and the anger against race-based privilege in whites being whipsawed by the eroding power of workers in the U.S. Obama acknowledged the legitimacy of anger on both sides and challenged both to move beyond. He identified forces -- larger than individuals but products of human agency too -- that he invited all of us to recognize as the true adversaries:

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

Obama's signature mental and rhetorical move is to double back. One of his favorite grammatical structures is "just as." He consistently recognizes at least a core of legitimacy in points of view he seeks to rebut or transcend. And so, while 'black anger' and 'white resentment' are presented as forces to transcend, there's this acknowledgment:

And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama issues a challenge to all who would make their religious belief a basis of teaching to make it universal - to appeal to those outside the faith not on the basis of the authority of the scriptures but on the evident rightness of the values you take away. So, here, his call for national unity boils down to the simplest scriptural precepts, which Obama is at pains to convince us are universal:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

Obama has put the ball in our court. No one in his right mind could listen to this speech and come away believing that Obama secretly harbors racial resentments or anti-American sentiments. He has delved into his own identity, and our national identity, and called on us to acknowledge that we are all wounded, we are all flawed, and all part of an unending project to form 'a more perfect union.'

Related posts:
Audacity of Respect: What Obama Owes to Reagan II
Obama's Metapolitics
Obama gets down to tax brass
Obama brings it back to earth in Virginia
Feb. 5: Hillary's Speech was Better than Obama's
Truth and Transformation
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him
Obama: Man, those Clinton Kids are Something