Obama's missing peace

I don't fault the president for not achieving peace. But I wish he at least mentioned it.

President Obama ignored one thing.
(Image credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama's farewell address on Tuesday was, as a piece of rhetoric, perfectly consonant with his presidency as a whole. From the beginning, he called his politics a politics of hope, one anchored in his faith that reasonable discourse led inevitably to progress.

His speech was peppered with phrases crafted to reinforce this framing. Surely we could all agree that facts are stubborn things. Surely we all care more about making people's lives better than about scoring points and taking credit. Surely we all want to be the best, highest version of ourselves, even if we disagree about what that version is. Who could reasonably disagree?

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.