Former President Barack Obama had the attitude that he was "too good" for the American public who were "constantly disappointing him," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote on Sunday.
This mindset has been put on stark display in "The World As It Is," a new book written by his adviser Ben Rhodes, where Obama asks, "What if we were wrong?"
However, according to the book, "in his next breath, the president made it clear that what he meant was: What if we were wrong in being so right? What if we were too good for these people? Maybe we pushed too far. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe."
Dowd said this illustrates that Obama is not "acknowledging any flaws, but simply… saying that, sadly, we were not enlightened enough for the momentous changes wrought by the smartest people in the world – or even evolved enough for the first African-American president," emphasizing her point with another excerpt from the book in which Obama stated that "Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early."
Dowd said that Obama lost the narrative of sparking hope for a better future that he once had in the early days of his presidency, best exemplified by throwing his support behind Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate and Rhodes recalling the "darkness" that enveloped him as Donald Trump won the election.
Rhodes wrote that "Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we'd run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She's part of a corrupt establishment that can't be trusted to change."
Dowd said this only hammered home the point that by the last part of his presidency, Obama had forgotten about "lifting up people, about buoying them on economic issues and soothing their jitters about globalization. They needed to know, what's in it for them?"
Dowd explained that "Obama could be deliberative, reticent and cautious to a fault, which spurred an appetite for a more impulsive, visceral, hurly-burly successor."
She also said Obama had disdain for trying to explain himself to the public, stating that Rhodes' book shows that even after he warned Obama weeks after the election that a narrative was developing that they didn't do enough about the Russians and fake news, Obama replied, "And do you think that the type of people reading that stuff were going to listen to me?"
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