Silke Jasso
In an NBC Nightly News special, “The Reality of Hope,” NBC News host Lester Holt and departing President Barack Obama take on the final days — and the past eight years — of his presidency, including what went wrong and what Obama will be leaving to Donald Trump, who takes the oath of office in just days.
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The interview was filmed as President Obama returned to Chicago to make his farewell address. The name of the special is a variation of the title of a book written by Obama, “The Audacity of Hope.”
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In one unforgettable clip, Obama reflects on the night he realized that the mantle had been taken from the Democratic Party and the way he and his team felt in the immediate aftermath.
“There was just surprise,” he begins. “Not just me, but my team, have been pretty good at seeing something coming. Partly because the the polling was so off, the data was off, there was a surprise.”
He extends that surprise to President-elect Trump as well, saying, “It’s not clear whether he or his team thought they were going to win.”
President Obama also concedes disappointment at the loss, as well as losses in the Democratic Party at large. His party lost over 1,000 posts at the federal and state levels during his time in office. Some of it, he says, was bad luck — he says “we were gonna lose seats” in 2010, when the recession was strong and Republicans were able to re-draw lines to benefit their present and future races.
But that doesn’t explain all of it. President Obama also says he just didn’t manage it well himself, despite his own background in organizing.
“It was difficult for me to both do the work of managing the economy, foreign policy, and dealing with terrorism […] and building the grassroots party apparatus that I think ultimately makes democracy work.”
