• by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, January 11, 2017

“Yes, we can! Yes, we did!”

President Barack Obama gave his farewell address to the nation yesterday evening in Chicago, carving out one hour of prime time to speak to the country that elected him to two terms, nine days before Donald Trump takes the oath of office.

The speech was, in part, a defense of the President’s record over the past eight years, offering a few heartfelt clauses, when his administration came up short, as well as a warning to citizens.

Quoting from a passage of our founding president George Washington’s farewell address, Obama gave a solemn warning about the direction our nation is heading:

“Self-government is the underpinning of our safety, prosperity, and liberty, but ‘from different causes and from different quarters much pains will be taken... to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth.’”

“And so we have to preserve this truth with ‘jealous anxiety;’ that we should reject ‘the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties’ that make us one.”

President Obama mentioned Trump only once in his address, when describing the importance of a smooth transition. He did however, raise questions about some of the worries pervasive in progressive circles about the president-elect.

“Without some common baseline of facts, without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, then we’re going to keep talking past each other,” Obama said of current threats to our democracy.

Obama strongly invoked the “lure of fascism and tyranny” in the context of The Great Depression, with a mirror to the contemporary behavior.

Despite what some Republicans falsely claim, President Obama has made huge strides over the past eight years in various sectors of American life. “Today, the economy is growing again. Wages, incomes, home values and retirement accounts are all rising again. Poverty is falling again… Health care costs are rising at the slowest rate in 50 years.”

He spoke at length about the virtues of American democracy, exiting the stage with the same poise and grace that has been a byword in the executive branch for the past eight years.