Barack Obama’s farewell as president to the US was, alas, perhaps the biggest misfire of his public career. Which is too bad, because there was a terrific speech in there somewhere trying to get out. I’ll start with what went wrong. The basic problem was that the event, and the speech, couldn’t make up their minds about what they were doing. The core of the speech, as far as I could tell, was a classic farewell address in the spirit of George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower: serious advice to the nation, distilling something he had learned from the last eight years, meant to be taken seriously and remembered. Unfortunately, this was mostly lost in the mess of a long, split-personality speech. Obama ricocheted back and forth between a campaign rally, a recitation of the administration’s greatest hits (bin Laden! Jobs! Cuba! Marriage!), a State of the Union-type laundry list of future policies he supports, an opportunity to personally give thanks to his family, staff, supporters, and...
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