President Barack Obama’s tenure as president, which comes to an end this year, has seen many broken hopes and a world still in chaos primarily due to Washington’s policies. It has also seen some change within the US, offering poorer Americans a modicum of change with more focus on healthcare and education in inner city schools, attended most often by those with almost no means. Obama’s speech in many ways broke from the norm, in that he did not dwell on policy issues but held out a vision for an American future that is more hopeful than is the case at the present. He used occasional humour and symbolism to highlight the ideas he believes in, and which he emphasised he had attempted to bring to the presidency, while also conceding that there had been many failures. Obama for example, always an eloquent orator, placed a gun on an empty seat in the First Lady’s box to emphasise his call for gun reforms – something which has been met with the most fervent opposition from the strong pro-arms lobby in the country. He also lashed out, without using names, at the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying that targeting a particular group would serve no purpose at all. Trump has been calling for Muslims to be banned from America.
But Obama also admitted, as he made his seventh and last State of the Union address to the US Parliament, that he faced a nation more divided than ever before. He noted that it was a nervous nation with many policy schisms having crept up within it. This we see in the especially strong rhetoric that has been heard in the US over issues including healthcare, guns, foreign policy, the treatment of Muslims and other matters. The economic decay the country has been seeing was also conceded by Obama. He however defended his foreign policy, arguing that Washington had done what it could in Syria – making no mention of the ten US soldiers taken captive by Iran a short while before his speech began. Efforts to rescue the men who had strayed into Iranian waters aboard small boats were successful. Obama did though, quite expectedly, speak about his nuclear agreement with Iran. A historic term, by the first non-white President in US history, then draws towards an end. This was Obama’s last major speech except for his upcoming address at the Democratic Convention in June. The attention will now turn to the tussle for the next presidency. The legacy Obama has left behind is a mixed one; it essentially consists of dreams that were not met and promises that were not fulfilled. But it is also true that President Obama did try to offer a more equitable country to the Americans – no matter how unjust American policies continued to be for the rest of us here outside of the US.http://www.thenews.com.pk/print/90656-Obamas-speech
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