Your Oct. 22 editorial “Chicago, pining for the Obama years” gives a very straightforward list of all of President Barack Obama’s achievements both domestic and foreign that President Donald Trump is trying to undo. In short, the current administration is rolling back the clock, and your editorial recounted in great detail how this president is the polar opposite of the last one. I thought that I was reading a great and accurate recent history lesson until you discussed how, in 2008, Republicans mourned the end of an era when their guy lost. You said, “That’s how democracy goes.”
Yes, both parties usually mourn a loss when the other guy wins. But refusal to work across the aisle is only a very recent part of our political history. In the winter of 2008-09, Obama worked with President George W. Bush to secure a workable solution to the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression. They put the interests of the nation first in order to figure out a way out of a crisis that was bipartisan in its causation, and thus deserved to be bipartisan in its solution.
In 2006, Bush endorsed and pushed for a bipartisan immigration plan that U.S. Sens. Ted Kennedy and John McCain had worked both sides of the aisle to achieve. Throughout history, our foreign policy has been mostly bipartisan. The recent showing of Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” proved that five presidents (from both parties) were responsible for getting us into that war and that President Richard Nixon’s execution of the war was not that different than President Lyndon Johnson’s. Only very recently has one party shirked its constitutional duty (and therefore its oath to the American people) by refusing a hearing to a candidate for the Supreme Court, which left the seat vacant for months, only because the other guys nominated him.
Trump is not just trying to undo every decent idea that Obama and the Democrats have had. He is trying to undo all that was decent about America.
— Jan Goldberg, Riverside
