How President Obama Broke My Heart

The Story of Two Farewell Addresses

It’s election night 2008 and I have fifteen minutes before the polls close. I’m walking west on 57th street in Manhattan, and I have no idea who I’m voting for. In my back pocket is George Washington’s Farewell Address, given in New York City in 1796.

For months leading up to the election I’d felt torn. I liked Barack Obama. He was eloquent. He made me smile. The idea of our first President of African American descent was amazing — I loved the idea. Much of what he said felt right to me. However, the people I was encountering in my city who had decided months before that they were voting for him didn’t feel right to me.

My mother is an immigrant. She was born in Hungary; her family escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Romania. Her father, of noble birth, was then arrested and put in a Gulag in 1946 where he died eleven years later.

In 1970 she first came to America on a work visa; in 1973 she met my father and in 1978 I was born. My grandmother and uncle remained in Romania and we visited them often. I saw first hand what it was like living in Soviet Romania and with the fear of the secret force of the Securitate — the power behind the Communist Party of Romania. I know zealots. I know propaganda. I know irrational love of leadership and ideals that sound wonderful and truly generous of spirit, but lead to terrible and often violent results.

Barack Obama did not sound like these people. But his determined voters did. One day I was sitting in a diner with people who were my friends. They asked me “who are you voting for?”

I said, “I don’t know.” They pushed me further into the booth and angrily said “How can you say that? The Republicans are evil! Bush is evil! Obama will save our country! What’s wrong with you?!”

This was six months before election day.

So for months I was not debating the candidates’ merits as the leader of our nation. I was finding myself sensing something else was just not right. I could not put my finger on it. And the vitriol and attacks continued. So I avoided all conversation regarding the election completely. And, I lost friends. Many. I found myself alone.

Election night 2008 I sat and began reading the founding documents I’d read in High School and I found George Washington’s Farewell address. Finally, about forty-five minutes before the polls closed these words helped me get out the door and believe I could — somehow — vote.

Here, perhaps, I ought to stop. But a solicitude for your welfare, which cannot end but with my life, and the apprehension of danger, natural to that solicitude, urge me, on an occasion like the present, to offer to your solemn contemplation, and to recommend to your frequent review, some sentiments which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all-important to the permanency of your felicity as a people. These will be offered to you with the more freedom, as you can only see in them the disinterested warnings of a parting friend, who can possibly have no personal motive to bias his counsel. Nor can I forget, as an encouragement to it, your indulgent reception of my sentiments on a former and not dissimilar occasion.

Interwoven as is the love of liberty with every ligament of your hearts, no recommendation of mine is necessary to fortify or confirm the attachment.

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.

For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.

But these considerations, however powerfully they address themselves to your sensibility, are greatly outweighed by those which apply more immediately to your interest. Here every portion of our country finds the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving the union of the whole.

— George Washington Farewell Address September 19, 1796.

As I stood in the booth, for a long moment I gazed upon my options. I still had no idea what to do. I decided to vote for the Independent Party. I did not vote for a man. I voted for a Party that day.

This election year, my choice was not to vote for the Executive Branch. Why? Because upon years of reflection, I remembered that voting in Romania was compulsory and I did not feel any of the candidates were good enough for my vote. My vote was a non-vote.

I observed this last election cycle objectively. When Donald Trump won my reactions were; I was grateful to live in a country where we could be surprised by the results of an election. I was grateful to live in a country where people could speak poorly of the President Elect. I was grateful to live in a country where people could peacefully protest. However, recently my reaction has changed. President Obama’s Farewell Address broke my heart.

In his speech, Obama quoted George Washington’s Farewell Address:

Which brings me to my final point — our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted. All of us, regardless of party, should throw ourselves into the task of rebuilding our democratic institutions. When voting rates are some of the lowest among advanced democracies, we should make it easier, not harder, to vote. When trust in our institutions is low, we should reduce the corrosive influence of money in our politics, and insist on the principles of transparency and ethics in public service. When Congress is dysfunctional, we should draw our districts to encourage politicians to cater to common sense and not rigid extremes.

And all of this depends on our participation; on each of us accepting the responsibility of citizenship, regardless of which way the pendulum of power swings.

Our Constitution is a remarkable, beautiful gift. But it’s really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power — with our participation, and the choices we make. Whether or not we stand up for our freedoms. Whether or not we respect and enforce the rule of law. America is no fragile thing. But the gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured.

In his own farewell address, George Washington wrote that self-government is the underpinning of our safety, prosperity, and liberty, but “from different causes and from different quarters much pains will be taken…to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth;” that we should preserve it with “jealous anxiety;” that we should reject “the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties” that make us one.

We weaken those ties when we allow our political dialogue to become so corrosive that people of good character are turned off from public service; so coarse with rancor that Americans with whom we disagree are not just misguided, but somehow malevolent. We weaken those ties when we define some of us as more American than others; when we write off the whole system as inevitably corrupt, and blame the leaders we elect without examining our own role in electing them.

— Barack Obama Farewell Address January 10, 2016

In one moment, our President managed to take George Washington’s words and bastardize them into the very thing he had warned us against — he divided us. He placed us all into the same booth in the diner I was in in 2008. This, is unforgivable in my book.

Recently I came across this meme in social media.

I was reminded of the contentious election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and the yellow journalism that went along with it.

The voice of Abigail Adams came to mind as well, and the fact that Jefferson and Adams later in life became friends again and that they died on the same day, fifty years after our Independence on July 4th with the same words on their lips “Thank God Adams still lives.” “Thank God Jefferson Still Lives.” This friendship was inspired with the help of Abigail. Be like Abigail.

I urge everyone right now to understand that the behavior of all our people is not the problem, from Progressives to Conservatives and all in between. The problem is with our extreme leadership; just like the Securitate that I saw in Romania. They are the ones inspiring discord.

I don’t even truly blame President Obama — although he could have and should have refused to have given that speech. I cannot forgive that; unless he apologizes for what he must have known was a manipulation of our first President’s intentions. I blame the people motivating the far left, who — right now — are the most dangerous. The far right have been a danger in our country as well, but right now — it is the far left. Often, they circle and meet each other because both want only one thing, even if their methodologies differ — power.

The far left sings a sweet siren song that is incredibly difficult to resist. They promise freedom, support, care for all. But the cost is so high — dependence and true prejudice. We don’t hear that word often anymore because they can’t use it. They are prejudiced.

I am a classical liberal. I believe in social freedom, economic freedom, humanism and opportunity for all. What is being touted as liberalism right now — it isn’t. It is a bastardization of it. And I’ve seen it before.

What President Obama did to George Washington’s Farewell Address, the speech that gave me confidence to vote in 2008 and the understanding that not voting was a vote in 2016 proves it.

This is a tale of two Farewell Address. And it is a history lesson we should know and tell each other to understand what went wrong and hold our future Presidents, Donald Trump included, to a higher standard. We have nothing to fear if we follow these lessons of history. George Washington said so.