“I guess part of my over-all message here as I leave for the holidays is that, if we look for one explanation or one silver bullet or one easy fix for our politics, then we’re probably going to be disappointed,” President Obama said in a press conference on Friday. He will be in Hawaii for the next couple of weeks; that comment came in response to a question about whether, while he was gone, members of the Electoral College, which meets on Monday, should do something dramatic, and whether the whole electoral-college system needed scrambling. He demurred: “With respect to the electors, I’m not going to wade into that issue because, again, it’s the American people’s job, and now the electors’ job, to decide my successor. It is not my job to decide my successor.” It was his job, he said, to provide good information about the election, and during the campaign that came before, and he believed that he had done so. There had been “a lot of information,” above all, from the candidates: “The President-elect, I think, has been very explicit about what he cares about and what he believes in. So it’s not in my hands now; it’s up to them.”Democrats dismayed by Hillary Clinton’s electoral-vote loss despite her popular-vote margin, and by the consensus that Russia was involved in hacking the e-mail systems of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, her campaign manager, might have hoped for a little more. Some of the people who thought, eight years ago, that Obama himself would be a silver bullet might have been, too. But, at the end of a week, and a political year, of uproar, his tone and his message in the press conference were the right ones, and sanity-affirming. Saying that the Democrats need to be “showing up in places where I think Democratic policies are needed, where they are helping, where they are making a difference, but where people feel as if they’re not being heard” may be less satisfying than repeating that Clinton was robbed by Vladimir Putin. But it likely offers a better route for the Democrats to overcome Donald Trump.
That is not to say that Obama let Putin off the hook, or that anyone should. “Let’s just go through the facts,” he said. Early in the summer, his Administration was alerted to the possibility of Russian hacking. Once the Administration had some “clarity and certainty,” it had “publicly announced that Russia had, in fact, hacked into the D.N.C.” There hadn’t, initially, been much in those stories about motives, in part because in a “hyper-partisan” moment, “I wanted to make sure that everybody understood we were playing this thing straight.” Maybe that instinct bothers Democrats; it shouldn’t. And, Obama said, it wasn’t as though anyone, despite Trump’s claims, was confused about who the Russian action was hurting. (“I’m finding it a little curious that everybody is suddenly acting surprised that this looked like it was disadvantaging Hillary Clinton because you guys wrote about it every day.”) But he also suggested that the motives included an even broader disruption than just helping Trump—who, after all, almost lost. “Part of the goal here,” Obama said, “was to make sure that we did not do the work of the leakers for them by raising more and more questions about the integrity of the election right before the election was taking place—at a time, by the way, when the President-elect himself was raising questions about the integrity of the election.” His White House had, Obama said, “handled it the way we should have.”
The President is doing something helpful here by untangling what it means to say that an election has been “hacked.” The terminology has gotten a bit broad: at one end, it has descended into the metaphorical, with Paul Krugman, in the Times, saying that James Comey, the F.B.I. director, had also hacked the election; at the other, Jill Stein waged her recount drive in three states on the ground that voting machines there may have been hacked, resulting in incorrect tallies. (There is no evidence of that). In the middle, there is a foreign government illegitimately obtaining information by hacking a player in the election, and then releasing that information to influence opinion. Obama made it clear that the kind of hacking ”that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself” was his most urgent concern. He had, he said, confronted Putin at an international meeting “to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out, and there were going to be some serious consequences if he didn’t.” To Obama’s mind, that, too, had worked. When asked if it had been a “free and fair election,” he said that he could “assure the public” about the voting process and that “the votes that were cast were counted, they were counted appropriately.” Election Day was not hacked.
By then, though, WikiLeaks apparently had the e-mail files. (The Podesta ones were released later, the D.N.C. files earlier.) How much of a difference they made is a persistent question. Obama, asked directly, declined to give an opinion on whether the hacks had cost Clinton the election, saying that he would leave it to the pundits—“It was a fascinating election, so I’m sure there are going to be a lot of books written about it.” But Obama also insisted that a healthy political system should have been able to deal with them, to process them and recognize or reject them for what they were. (He didn’t exempt the press from this diagnosis.) That was the danger, and it remains, even if Putin never casts his glance this way again. Although Obama didn’t say so, his views on this may have been informed by his own experience as the object of elaborate conspiracy theories, even in the absence of WikiLeaks. A lot of what happens in campaigns is not fair.
“The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country. They are a weaker country,” Obama said. “But they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values.” A few minutes later, he added, “Our vulnerability to Russia or any other foreign power is directly related to how divided, partisan, dysfunctional our political process is.” This sounded like what Obama has also said, frequently, about terrorists; it’s worth saying.
There were other ways that Obama’s response was very distinct to him, in ways both satisfying and unsatisfying. “I know that there have been folks out there who suggest somehow that if we went out there and made big announcements, and thumped our chests about a bunch of stuff, that somehow that would potentially spook the Russians,” he said, before explaining why it wouldn’t have. He was still talking about the elections, but it fit with what he had to say about another topic: Syria. The news from Aleppo this week has been devastating. Families were trapped and dying as he spoke. “That’s something that, as is true with a lot of issues and problems around the world, I have to go to bed with every night,” Obama said. But he also made it clear that he had no regrets about keeping the United States out of a large-scale, all-in ground war, which was, he said, the only kind that would have really made a difference to the people of Syria, as opposed to meeting the desire to simply be doing something—anything. For that to be a moral stand, of course, the United States has to do what it can in terms of refugees and humanitarian aid. We haven’t yet, despite Obama’s sympathy. There will be less under Trump.
He and the President-elect had been talking, Obama said. He was ready to talk more, ready to help. There were other, more gentle reminders of the Obama who will soon be missed: his jokes at the beginning (“This is the most wonderful press conference of the year. I’ve got a list of who’s been naughty and nice to call on”); his calm when a reporter fainted (“All right, there’s Doc Jackson . . . The doctor is in the house”); his confession of getting “a little choked up” when he took his last picture with the President’s Marine Corps Band. (“I was in front of Marines, so I had to, like, tamp it down.”)
One intriguing moment came when Obama, briefly, hesitated. It was toward the end of the hour-and-a-half session, not long before his I’m-out-of-here “Mele Kalikimaka” (“Merry Christmas” in Hawaiian). Obama was talking, one more time, about the distortion field of partisanship. “How is it that we have some voters or some elected officials who think that Michelle Obama’s healthy-eating initiative, school-nutrition program is a greater threat to democracy than, uh”—he paused, for about ten seconds, as if mentally scrolling through, and curating, a long list of choices—“you know, our government going after the press if they’re issuing a story they don’t like?” That seemed like a good one. “Right? I mean, that’s an issue that I think we’ve got to wrestle with—and we will.” Under President Trump, we certainly will.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: Amy Davidson
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