Still My President

[owlmoose]

President Obama gave one of his final press conferences today. The transcript is an interesting read, and this version has some annotations from Washington Post reporters. I'd call his tone guarded but hopeful, particularly in terms of the future prospects of the Democratic Party:

I believe that we have better ideas. But I also believe that good ideas don't matter if people don't hear them.... We have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere. We have to work at a grassroots level, something that's been a running thread in my career....

And the challenge for a national party is how do you dig in there and create those kinds of structures so that people have a sense of what it is that you stand for. And that increasingly is difficult to do just through a national press strategy. It's increasingly difficult to do because of the splintering of the press. And so I think the discussions that have been taking place about, how do you build more grassroots organizing, how do you build state parties and local parties and school board elections you're paying attention to, state rep races and city council races, that all, I think, will contribute to stronger outcomes in the future. And I'm optimistic that will happen.

For Democrats who are feeling completely discouraged, I've been trying to remind them, everybody remembers my Boston speech in 2004. They may not remember me showing up here in 2005 when John Kerry had lost a close election, Tom Daschle, the leader of the Senate, had been beaten in an upset. Ken Salazar and I were the only two Democrats that won nationally. Republicans controlled the Senate and the House, and two years later, Democrats were winning back Congress, and four years later I was President of the United States.

Things change pretty rapidly. But they don't change inevitably. They change because you work for it. Nobody said Democracy's supposed to be easy. It's hard. And in a big country like this, it probably should be hard.

Considering that Obama has already said that he plans for his main political cause post-presidency to be getting Democrats elected locally and fair redistricting for the House of Representatives, I think he's going to put his money -- and his time -- where his mouth is on this one. And I hope to support this effort every step of the way.

Although I haven't read it yet, he did an extensive exit interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin in September's Vanity Fair, and apparently in that interview he suggested that once he's out of office, the gloves are coming off. I think we've gotten a bit of a preview in the last couple of years, and I can hardly wait for the rest. (Except for the part where I really, really don't want him to leave. Especially not now. *clings like a limpet*)