WASHINGTON—When President Barack Obama arrived in office eight years ago, the departing President George W. Bush essentially withdrew from public life, declaring that his successor “deserves my silence”. It was an approach that Obama greatly appreciated but does not intend to follow.
At the final news conference of his presidency, Obama made clear on Wednesday that he finds some ideas advanced by President-elect Donald J. Trump so alarming that he laid out markers that would draw him back into the fray.
“There’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” Obama told reporters in the White House briefing room.
He continued: “I put in that category if I saw systematic discrimination being ratified in some fashion. I put in that category explicit or functional obstacles to people being able to vote, to exercise their franchise. I’d put in that category institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press. And for me at least, I would put in that category efforts to round up kids who have grown up here and for all practical purposes are American kids, and send them someplace else, when they love this country.”
All of his red lines seemed to refer to positions taken in the past by Trump, foreshadowing the possibility of a periodic clash of ideas over the next four years between current and past presidents.
Unlike Bush, who retreated to Dallas, Obama plans to move just two miles from the White House after Friday’s inauguration, the first president to stay in Washington after leaving office since Woodrow Wilson.
Obama did say he was looking forward to some quiet time and does not plan to stay involved in the hurly-burly of politics. He has told advisers and friends that he wants to be careful not to become such a regular public critic of Trump that he alienates the mercurial new president.
Since the election, the outgoing president has tried to forge a relationship of sorts with his successor and hopes to keep lines of communication open to privately influence Trump to the degree that he can.
Obama also used his final formal meeting with reporters in the White House to defend his lame-duck decisions to commute the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning and rescind a preferential immigration policy for Cubans.
He sent what he called “a wake-up call” to Israel to make peace with the Palestinians and warned against lifting sanctions against Russia unless it reversed its intervention in Ukraine. He weighed in one more time on gay rights, race relations and war with the Islamic State.
The encounter had a last-day-of-school feel to it, as history wrapped up one chapter and prepared to open a new one. Reporters packed the White House briefing room, filling every one of the 49 permanent seats and crowding alongside young White House staff members into the aisles, craning to see Obama present his final thoughts from behind a podium with the presidential seal.
A few of the president’s still-remaining aides sat wistfully on the side of the room, taking a break from packing their belongings and sending out their personal e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers. Most planned to leave the West Wing for good on Thursday afternoon, making way for their successors in the Trump administration.
Obama faced the cameras and the bright lights for exactly 59 minutes, cracking a small smile occasionally as he methodically worked through his list of reporters and answering their questions one last time with a sense of melancholy. He ignored several reporters who tried to shout out questions, and paid little attention to the inevitable cell phones that interrupted.
Having spent more than a decade pursuing, and then occupying, the White House, Obama appeared to realize that the spotlight was finally swinging away from him: “I’m looking forward to being an active consumer of your work rather than always the subject of it,” he told the reporters. But he also seemed like a man all too aware that a part of his life was ending—perhaps the most invigorating part.
Obama leaves with rising approval ratings but an eight-year legacy that is already under attack even before Trump is inaugurated. He declined to comment on the decision of dozens of congressional Democrats to boycott Trump’s inauguration. “All I know is I’m going to be there,” he said. “So is Michelle.”
Playing to the audience in front of him, Obama used the occasion to implicitly urge Trump not to impose harsh new restrictions on the news media.
Trump has had a volatile relationship with reporters for years, and his aides suggested recently that they might move journalists out of the White House briefing room, but they have since backed away from the idea for now.
While needling reporters for their foibles, Obama said their presence inside the West Wing was important for democracy. “Having you in this building has made this place work better,” he told the reporters. “It keeps us honest.”
New York Times News Service
Image credits: AP/Evan Vucci