Our sore President
During his winning campaign to capture the White
House, Democrat
Barack Obama was harshly critical of the White House record of his predecessor George W.
Bush. But once in office, Obama — like nearly all presidents before him
— heeded the sage advice of a great chief executive also from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, who, when faulted for speaking kindly about the South during the Civil War, countered, “Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
President Obama said about Bush: “To know the man is to like the man, because he’s comfortable in his own skin. He knows who he is . ... He takes his job seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is a good man.”
Obama was a hard-hitting opponent, as a string of defeated Democratic and Republican opponents can attest, but when he was re-elected Nov. 6, 2012, he paid tribute to his opponent’s father, a former governor of Michigan who supported civil rights, and to his opponent’s mother, a popular Michigan first lady who ran as a moderate Republican nominee for U.S. Senate: “From George to Lenore to their son Mitt, the Romney family has chosen to give back to America through public service, and that is the legacy we honor and applaud tonight.”
Of the man who won more popular votes than he did, only to end up on the short end of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, President George W. Bush could quip in good humor later: “After he left office, Vice President Gore won an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize. Hey, I don’t know, I might win a prize — Publishers Clearing House or something.”
In so many instances, Donald Trump has stood as a dramatic exception to the presidential practice of offering an arm around the shoulder of or even a civil handshake to the person vanquished in a campaign. Time and again, when his White House has been confronted with bad news — for example, after his first national security adviser, former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI — President Trump has switched the subject to the woman whom he defeated. He has tweeted, “Many people in our Country are asking what the ‘Justice’ Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary ... deleted and ‘acid washed’ 33,000 Emails.” Since he was inaugurated, Trump has continued to allege that “Crooked Hillary Clinton is the worst (and biggest) loser of all time,” asking after the indictment of his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, “But why aren’t Crooked Hillary and the Dems the focus?”