We’re on verge of Obama finale

I find it somewhat amusing to see the amount of attention being paid to the fact that Barack Obama will soon no longer be president.

The next time Barack and Michelle Obama check out Chicago, it will be as D.C.-residing tourists. Photograph provided by the White House

All presidents are meant to be replaced, and Obama managed to win himself election to the post twice – the maximum allowed. Which is a good thing – no one should last too long in that particular post.

IN FACT, THE reality is that it is a good thing that political posts rotate around various political parties – neither of which should ever have total control. Not even Democrats, who in all honesty don’t do as much harm because they’re usually incapable of working together.

Which means that the real threat to our federal government during the next two (perhaps four) years isn’t that we elected Donald J. Trump as president. It is that we elected so many knuckleheads of the GOP persuasion to serve in the Senate and House of Representatives.

People who will be willing to rubber-stamp Trump’s egomaniacal actions so long as they coincide with their own partisan desires. Trump’s blow-hard tendencies wouldn’t be a threat if there was someone willing to stand up to him.

Which may well be why many people are so willing to make a big deal out of Obama’s departure. It will be the last bit of celebration that many of us will have in connection to our federal government for years to come.

WE LITERALLY HAD Michelle Obama make an appearance on Friday that was billed as her last public event as “first lady.” Then on Saturday, people were queued up as early as 6 a.m. all lined up to get the free tickets being issued to the Tuesday event at the McCormick Place convention center that is being billed as Barack Obama’s last public appearance as president.

For every crackpot out there whose political partisanship wants him to denounce this as the ultimate political non-event, there are the masses who truly want to hear one last bit of wisdom from the lone president our city has produced.

It has been quite a while since that moment in Metropolis (the version in Illinois). Photograph provided by Obama for America campaign

Personally, I think those people who are now expressing a willingness to pay mass amounts of money to get tickets from those who got the freebie passes given away during the weekend are a bit foolish.

I wouldn’t pay anything, particularly not the several thousands of dollars that some are asking for in order to be able to say they were there when Obama gave his national farewell.

EVEN THOUGH I’LL admit to feeling a twinge of regret that the Obama years are now over. Obama is someone I have been aware of since he first got elected to the state Senate (I was still a Statehouse reporter back then, and our times in Springfield overlapped by three years).

In fact, I still remember the first time I was introduced to the man – it was on the January 1997 day when he was first sworn in as a legislator. We were given a brief “hello” and handshake, and the token offer of “doing lunch” someday – which never actually happened.

Maybe I’m just the pinhead who didn’t fully appreciate the significance of the man I was meeting. Because I suspect that of all the people I have encountered during some two decades of writing about the Chicago and Illinois political scenes, Obama is most likely the only one of them with the ability and ambition to become U.S. president.

And now, all of that is over. A Hillary Clinton presidency would have given us someone born in Chicago and raised in its suburbs, but it wouldn’t have been the same for Chicago as the Obama years have been.

HILLARY, AFTER ALL, did leave us to attend college, then follow her husband, Bill, to Arkansas.

How many figured the one-time legislator from Hyde Park would become an admired (and reviled) chief executive? Photograph provided by Obama for America campaign.

It will be interesting to hear what, if anything of significance, he has to say on Tuesday. Personally, I’m not expecting something too profound!

It may well be a ceremonial farewell. A chance to say “Goodbye,” while the followers engage in one last chant of “Oh-Bah-Mah! Oh-Bah-Mah!!!”

While that 46 percent segment of the nation that actually voted for Trump to be president will shudder in disgust, then come up with a whole bunch of lame reasons why they think the next four years will be an improvement – even if it turns to be a loss of health insurance and a whole series of other actions that harm their own personal interests.

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Obama ‘farewell’ tour begins Wednesday; there’s nothing more to it

OBAMA: Bringing back memories?

Let’s be honest.

The reason Barack Obama is coming to Springfield, Ill., on Wednesday is to begin the series of stops across the nation that will occur during the next year that are meant to provide a guide as to what the president wants his legacy to be perceived as.

IT KIND OF reminds me of the last couple of months of the Richard M. Daley stint as mayor when Hizzoner, Jr., literally made an appearance in each of the city’s 50 wards so he could boast of some local achievement.

I still remember when he visited my own native 10^th Ward – a stop at the site of the old Wisconsin Steel Works where my maternal grandfather once worked plant so he could brag about a new industrial plant that was being developed there.

No real news, but it was a touchy-feely moment meant to inspire mayoral good will.

That’s the same thing we’re going to get on Wednesday at the Statehouse. Barack Obama will reminisce a bit about his days as a state legislator, then (according to his aides) will offer up a speech meant to encourage political bipartisanship – something that definitely is lacking in Springfield these days.

OF COURSE, THERE wasn’t much in the way of bipartisanship back when Obama was a legislator either. The president’s early days in the state Senate were as part of a minority caucus that then-Senate President James “Pate” Philip went out of his way to treat as irrelevant.

Then, Obama became a significant member of the Democratic majority that Emil Jones used his presidency to let Republicans know what political payback felt like.

In short, the idea of a bipartisanship speech from Obama is too much of a stretch to take seriously. In all honesty, his presidency has been even more ideologically tainted than either those of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

Although that was largely because Obama came into a situation where the opposition party was determined to work to make his presidency a failure. Bipartisanship in the Obama years never had a chance.

Who'd have thought a century ago that someone like Barack Obama could set foot on these grounds as president?

THE ONLY THING that ever really could be accomplished was that the nation got a taste of what Chicago experienced back in the mid-1980s when a majority of the City Council was determined to thwart then-Mayor Harold Washington’s every governmental desire.

Maybe the Congressional types of the past eight years have been more subtle in expressing their bigoted motivations. But the sentiment was the same.

Of course, there’s one other political motivation for having the president speak in Springfield on Wednesday – it comes right after the primary in New Hampshire. Now as I write this, I don’t know who “won.”

But I’m sure there are people prepared to say that, regardless of what the electoral results turn out to be, it represents a repudiation of the Obama presidency. Without a trip to Springpatch, Obama would have to actually come up with answers to dopey questions.

INSTEAD, OBAMA WILL try to get away with talking the moral high ground of political bipartisanship, claiming he wants to work with everybody and it is their own reluctance to do so that has prevented any lasting change from occurring during the past eight years.

It is with all this in mind that I have to laugh at those people who are getting all worked up over the way in which Obama’s address to the General Assembly, to be given in the Illinois House of Representatives’ chambers, is so overly staged.

The capitol won’t be open to the public. Only certain people will even be allowed in the House chambers during the event. News media are being shifted to a separate room where they will watch the event on a television monitor.

There will be an after-party of sorts where people can see Obama – but only if they were pre-invited. In short, it’s a fake event. Completely staged so as to create the illusion of Obama addressing the great unwashed masses.

REAL PEOPLE WILL have to tune in their televisions to whatever local public TV station is broadcasting the event in their part of Illinois. Kind of like a political version of the recently-completed Super Bowl.

Only there won’t be all kinds of inane commercial spots to attract the attention of the politically-clueless. Although there will be all kinds of speculation about who “wins” from the event – Gov. Bruce Rauner, or da Dems?!?

As far as Obama? Heck, he couldn’t even pick the football Super Bowl correctly (he had Carolina beating Denver). What makes you think he can sway our self-absorbed politicos into supporting bipartisanship?

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Will cliches outlive the political candidates who choose to utter them?

I find government and electoral politics intriguing, but have never aspired to actually run for office myself – in large part because I would detest all the routine speeches that candidates often have to give.


I have heard so many of them throughout the years that I find them mind-numbing in their similarity.

BECAUSE THE KEY to a candidate managing to give a public speech while also avoiding saying something stupid that, more often than not, makes real news is to have a set speech in mind.

A series of thoughts, talking points, so to speak, that needs to be hit on regardless of the event.

Admittedly, the candidate has to try to localize it a bit. And there will be occasions when a specific issue must be the focus.

But the bottom line is that the candidate essentially gives the same speech every single time he speaks in public. It may be interesting a first time, or for those locals who have never heard it before.

BUT IT GETS awfully repetitive. Made all the worse by the fact that many political people either think too much of themselves or have aides who write copy that gets way to clichéd.

The former category probably includes President Barack Obama, who in his early years of running for office had a reputation for being someone who would rewrite his speechwriter’s copy. Apparently, being the author of an autobiographical book that didn’t sell much until after he became a name politically made him think he has something to say.

But the clichés are the worst. Certain catchphrases that the candidates might not even realize are ever so awful. Which is why I was amused to learn Sunday of the polifiller.com site that will review copy and automatically knock out phrases it is programmed to think of as repetitive nonsense and double-speak.

Now I don’t think I’d want to trust a computer program to review all copy. It really needs the human touch. Just think of all those automatic language translator services that manage to turn English into something else, then translate it back to English in some overly stilted, gibberish-like prose.

WE COULD SOON have politicians talking even more stupidly than they already do.

Although the polifiller.com website released the results of an online poll for the worst clichés used by too many government officials – when they think they’re sounding all omnipotent but come across as being more impotent than anything else.

“Hard-working families” is the worst cliché, although “Let me be clear” is a close second, usually because whoever says it probably isn’t being all that clear about what he (or she) means.

I found the most amusing cliché to be the number six item on the list, “the Great (fill in the blank) people” which is meant to let the speaker fill in the blank of whomever the person is speaking to.

AN ATTEMPT TO localize the talk, but creates the risk of the candidate having a brain cramp and filling in the blank with the wrong group. Or not being specific enough, such as whenever a politico makes a Chicago reference to a group of people from the rural part of Illinois.

Believe me, they get peeved at being reminded that their part of the state lacks a certain panache.

Although when it comes to certain catchphrases getting a little too comfortable in the speech pattern of a government official, perhaps the ultimate that I have ever heard was, “a whole host of issues.” That was the phrase that former Gov. Jim Edgar used to rely on ever so much whenever he tried to convey the idea that he was going to address multiple topics.

And there are still some reporter-types (myself included) who can still mock the way that phrase sounded coming from Edgar’s nasally-toned voice!

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EXTRA: Trying hard to be quotable?

“America is not about what can be done for us. It is about what can be accomplished by us” – President Barack Obama, victory speech at the McCormick Place.

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BIDEN: A new and lasting nickname?

It struck me that Barack Obama was trying to speak for the ages, just like there are times when I try writing a commentary out of the misguided notion that I’m writing a piece of copy that has the potential to be read for ages.

It usually results in some overblown copy that reads more pompous than anything else.

WHICH IS WHAT I kind of thought of the victory speech Obama gave early Wednesday at the McCormick Place.

That particular line he spoke struck me as an attempt to remind us of the famed John F. Kennedy line about “asking not” what we can get from our country, but what we can do for it.

Yet somehow, Kennedy comes off as more eloquent.

Obama even managed to try to steal from himself – specifically from that speech he gave at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston which was the moment when most people in this country first heard of the then-state senator from the Hyde Park neighborhood.

OR DO YOU think his line “We remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and forevermore will be, the United States of America” was something we’ve never heard before?

If anything, the moment of originality may well have come from Obama’s labeling of Vice President Joe Biden as the “happy warrior.” Will Biden ever live down that label?

Then again, maybe I’m being too harsh on Obama. Inspirational rhetoric doesn’t come along every day.

Just as we also ought to consider the concession speech given by Mitt Romney – which I have largely already forgotten. At least he didn’t say something stupid that we’d forever remember him for!

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