Obama says ‘yes, we did’ in emotive farewell address

Chicago, Wednesday

Barack Obama addressed America and the world for the last time as US president yesterday, in a speech that was both a tearful goodbye and a call to arms. Capping eight years in the White House, Obama returned to his adopted hometown of Chicago to recast his “yes, we can” campaign credo as “yes we did.”

Surveying the staging posts of his presidency — from the Iran nuclear deal to reforming healthcare — the speech sought to lift supporters shaken by Donald Trump’s shock election. Obama urged them to pick up the torch, fight for democracy and forge a new, fairer, “social compact.”

“For all our outward differences, we are all in this together,” he said, warning that naked partisanship, racism, and inequality all threaten democracy. “We rise or fall as one.” “All of us, regardless of party, should throw ourselves into the task of rebuilding our democratic institutions.”

The incoming Republican president has smashed convention, vowed to efface Obama’s legacy and hurled personal insults left and right, while in a virtually unprecedented move US intelligence has accused the Kremlin of seeking to tip the election in Trump’s favour.

Democrats, cast into the political wilderness with the loss of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives plus a majority of statehouses, are struggling to regroup. Obama painted the task ahead as a generational challenge. —AFP

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