Obama was more sanguine about the forces at play in the world not because he was late in recognizing them, but because he’d seen them earlier. As an African American, he had an ingrained skepticism about powerful structural forces that I lacked when I went to work for him. After years of Mitch McConnell’s obstructionism, Fox News’s vilification, and growing tribalism at home and abroad, he had priced in the shortcomings of the world as it is, picking the issues and moments when he could press for the world that ought to be. This illuminated for me his almost monkish, and at times frustrating,
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