Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

The best comedy about President Obama has been the series of Key & Peele sketches featuring Luther, the “anger translator” who screams the unexpurgated thoughts the first black president would scream if he weren’t so chill, so deliberate, and so unwilling to scare white people. “I have greatly enjoyed my time as your president,” the Obama character intones in the final installment, Obama and Luther’s Farewell Address. To which the frenetic Luther responds: “Except, you know, when the Republicans wouldn’t let me do shit, and then that one dude said I wasn’t born here, and Y’ALL ELECTED HIM!”

It’s funny, as they say, because it’s true, emotionally if not quite literally. When the real President Obama gives his real farewell address tonight, he’ll have an extensive list of policy achievements to brag about, but it could have been more extensive if Republicans hadn’t marched in near-lockstep against nearly everything he proposed over the last eight years. And now America has chosen the ultimate anti-Obama in President-Elect Donald Trump, who has never apologized for his birtherism, and has vowed to undo just about everything the president has done.


It’s also true that Obama has actually needed an anger translator—or, perhaps, an anger generator. He’s been a policy success but a political failure, presiding over eight years of steady economic progress and brutal Democratic losses, enacting most of his original Change We Can Believe in Agenda only to watch voters elect a new change candidate who didn’t believe in any of it. And if you had to pinpoint one specific thing he’s done badly, you might start with his perplexing failure to get riled up about rile-worthy behavior, his no-drama reluctance to pick defining public fights. Obama has an anger over-management problem.

He never denounced the Republican back-bencher who yelled “You lie!” during his speech to Congress. He never spoke up for the federal officials who found themselves in an armed standoff with a scofflaw Nevada rancher and a clan of anti-government militia types. Even Obama’s campaign attacks on his would-be Republican successor were rather tepid—even after Trump openly called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and even after federal intelligence agencies concluded Russia had done just that. There’s a lot to be said for steady leadership, for a president who doesn’t lash out indiscriminately and behave like his hair is always on fire. But Obama’s Spock-like, let’s-not-overreact approach sometimes made him seem like a cold fish. Tonight, with his legacy in peril and his supporters in a near-panic about Trump taking over nuclear codes, climate policy, and federal law enforcement, Obama is likely to give a typically measured and reasonably upbeat assessment of the last eight years.

Obama’s low-key demeanor is sometimes strategic. He doesn’t display rage over ISIL beheadings because he believes stoking public fury creates pressure for rash military overreactions. He released an anodyne statement that whitewashed Fidel Castro’s history of repression because he didn’t think a thundering denunciation of a dead dictator would further his goals in Cuba. Even when Republicans have trashed him personally—or threatened to force his government into a catastrophic default on its debt, or refused to even consider his Supreme Court nominee—he has tried to maintain a willing-to-compromise, above-the-fray public posture, in part because he thought it was good politics to highlight GOP intransigence. But even when it’s not strategic, low-key and above-the-fray is how Obama rolls. He’s a measured, professorial, hyper-rational guy. He genuinely believes most people are good at heart and open to factual persuasion. He’s not comfortable fulminating or tweet-ranting or shaking his fists for the cameras. His rhetorical weapons of choice against Democratic critics as well as Republican opponents have been logic, dry sarcasm, and persistent whining.

But Trump’s id-driven rise is a jarring reminder, after a series of relatively mild-mannered commanders-in-chief, that anger can be a politically powerful force. He has used his bully pulpit for actual bullying, and many Americans seem excited to see that kind of rhetorical muscle deployed on their behalf. Obama would never use his Twitter feed or—with one annual exception—his podium to lob personal insults at random critics or call out political enemies as stupid, lying, crooked losers and clowns. He sees that kind of behavior as unpresidential. But it apparently isn’t, because the next president does it all the time. Trump isn’t even president yet, but his ferocious verbal assaults have already made it clear to allies and adversaries at home and abroad that there can be serious public-relations risks to crossing him, a threat Obama consistently failed to convey.

By contrast, Obama has kept reminding a polarized public in his modulated way that a house divided cannot stand—even as his party lost both houses of Congress, a slew of state houses, and finally the White House. It’s hard to think of a politician who has suffered any pain for crossing him. His unflappable, conciliatory nature helped get him elected during a financial crisis, but in a raucous shirts-and-skins era of tribal politics, it became comedy fodder. “It’s more important than ever that we move on as a country united,” the faux Obama says in his Key & Peele farewell.

“United in the fact that we can’t fucking stand each other!” Luther translates.

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It’s hard to discuss Obama’s mild responses to provocations—from Rush Limbaugh dubbing him “the Magic Negro” in 2007 to Trump calling him the founder of ISIS in 2016—without mentioning race. The subtext of the Luther joke is that Obama knows it would be politically deadly to be perceived as an angry black man. The big crisis of his first campaign was the revelation that his pastor had furiously denounced America, prompting him to distance himself from his pastor; he has more subtly tried to distinguish himself from racial-activist politicians like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Trump obviously enjoys starting verbal brawls that fire up his base, even when his targets are obscure private citizens like the Muslim parents of a Gold Star hero, a former Miss Universe from Venezuela, or a union rep who questioned his claims about saving an Indiana factory. But Obama has tried to avoid them—especially after he stumbled into a bruising one early in his presidency.

It happened in July 2009, after a white police officer investigating a reported break-in arrested the famous black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates on his own porch. When Obama was asked about the incident at a news conference, he noted that he hadn’t been there, didn’t know all the facts, and wasn’t sure what role race played in it. But he said that it appeared that the officer “acted stupidly,” since Gates had shown his identification to prove he was at his own house, and that historically minorities have been stopped disproportionately by law enforcement. “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry,” Obama said.

The rest of the news conference was meaty and substantive—Obama’s most elaborate effort to defend his health reforms—but nobody remembers that part. Instead, the big news the next day, and for the next week, was “stupidly.” It seems an astonishingly mild rebuke in the age of Trump, but Obama paid a huge PR price for appearing to question a cop’s decision. He soon invited Gates and the officer to the White House for a “beer summit” to try to smooth things out and turn the furor into a teachable moment; he would later say he regretted his initial comments. He’s been a lot more circumspect since then, although there was a similar furor over his comment – this time without judgment about the incident – that Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager killed by a pugnacious neighborhood watch activist near Orlando, could have been his son. Suffice to say that Obama tends to tread even more delicately than usual around racial issues.

It’s hard to recall any other subsequent example of Obama taking a whack at a private citizen, other than the time he called Kanye West a “jackass” for disrespecting Taylor Swift. He did describe unnamed Wall Street bankers who raked in huge bonuses after Washington rescued their firms as “fat cats,” a comment that is still often cited by financial types as evidence of his deep animus against their industry, even though he never repeated it. He rarely even criticized specific politicians, directing most of his complaints at “the Republican leadership” or “the other side.” In general, he seemed to conclude that punching down was a quick way to get in political trouble. It must gall him when Trump’s over-the-top tweets bashing specific reporters, talking heads, actors and political operatives fail to inspire beer-summit-level media freak-a-thons, quickly getting overtaken by the next insult or provocation.

As Trump has demonstrated with his rhetorical crusades against Hollywood, the media, and Never Trump Republicans, among others, the naming and shaming of enemies can be clarifying and cathartic to supporters. It can frame debates in ways the framer wants them framed. And Obama had his chances. For example, he could have turned Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who refused to pay fees he owed the government for grazing his cattle on federal land, into a symbol of anti-government extremism. And he could have tied Bundy to the GOP obstructionists who were fighting him on everything: some Republicans had hailed Bundy’s resistance to the Obama machine before he began airing his racist ideas about “the Negro.” But even when Bundy was literally taking up arms against federal officials, Obama’s press secretary said the president considered the situation a local matter. He didn’t even comment on it himself.

Except, that is, for a joke he told at the White House Correspondents Dinner, his once-a-year escape from propriety. Obama observed that sentences beginning “Let me tell you something I know about the Negro,” the opening of one Bundy diatribe, generally don’t end well. (Bundy promptly sued, seeking $50 million in damages for the president’s “threatening, mocking, and disparaging comments.”) Obama often seemed to let out pent-up bile at that annual Beltway-media circus, most memorably when he groused that he didn’t want to get a drink with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It was at the so-called “nerd prom” in 2011, shortly after Obama released his long-form birth certificate, that he quipped that Trump could now focus on more vital issues like whether the moon landing was faked—a roasting that supposedly contributed to Trump’s desire to take his job.

At the correspondents dinner in 2015, after explaining that he was “a mellow sort of guy,” Obama announced that he had brought a surprise with him—his anger translator. “Hold onto your lily-white butts!” Luther warned the crowd. Most of the bit was Obama talking earnestly about the importance of a free press while Luther, played by Keegan-Michael Key, ranted about media follies like the over-hyping of the Ebola virus. (“For two whole weeks we were one step away from the Walking Dead! And then y’all just got up and moved on to the next thing! By the way, if you haven’t noticed: YOU DON’T HAVE EBOLA!”) But the punchline came at the end, when Obama began talking about how every serious scientist says global warming is a serious problem, “and instead of doing anything about it, we’ve got elected officials throwing snowballs in the senate!” The joke was that the president was getting…angry.

“It’s crazy!” Obama yelled. “What about our kids? What kind of stupid, short-sighted, irresponsible bull—“

“Whoa!” Luther cut in. Here’s the video. Seriously, have you ever seen Obama look or sound that angry when he wasn’t putting on an act?

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To some critics, Obama’s anger deficit is a moral failing, producing sins of omission like his failure to oust Syrian president Bashar Assad or throw Wall Street scofflaws in jail. Reasonable people can disagree with those policies, but it’s not usually a good idea for presidents to decide who to oust and who to jail based on emotions.

I see Obama’s insistence on maintaining an even keel at all times as more of a political failing. Trump has crudely exploited the way many Americans define their politics through what they can’t stand; Obama didn’t need to resort to pure divide-and-conquer politics to remind most Americans that they share his distaste for cutting rich people’s taxes, cutting off working-class people’s health care, and grinding up the gears of government. Obama has put up with a lot of stupid, short-sighted, irresponsible bull—and he’s failed to get the message across to Americans that it’s stupid, short-sighted, irresponsible bull. I’m not sure it would have helped Obama to get pissed off about birtherism, or false accusations about “death panels,” or Republican opposition to longtime Republican priorities once he embraced them, or Democratic complaints that he didn’t pass liberal priorities he didn’t have the votes to pass. But it probably couldn’t have hurt. The country has recovered from the meltdown he inherited in January 2009, with unemployment now below 5 percent, the deficit down by two thirds, the stock market at an all-time high, the high school dropout rate at an all-time low, and almost all our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s mostly failed to break through the prevailing narrative of malaise, not only among Republicans but in his own party and the media. His own approval ratings have soared to nearly 60 percent, but the Democratic Party is in shambles nationwide.

It must be said that Vice President Joe Biden, who’s supposed to be the folksy political savant with people skills, has been similarly deficient in the anger department. He constantly tells the story of former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield warning him never to question what’s in another man’s heart; he’s cordial to everyone, which is why just about everyone in both parties likes him, but has contributed to the widespread feeling in Washington that there is no cost to defying the administration. Biden did pledge when he decided not to run for president that he would come down hard on any candidate, Republican or Democrat, who failed to acknowledge the tremendous progress the country has made over the last eight years—but he didn’t, even though every candidate in both parties ended up accentuating the negative.

Obama and Biden are both genuine optimists. They are also institutionalists, deeply committed to respecting the norms of governance. And those twin beliefs made them, like so many other Washington politicians, particularly ill-equipped to deal with the rise of Trump. Obama had plenty of good rationales for reacting to Trump’s daily outrages with his usual moderation, starting with the conventional wisdom about why it’s dumb to mud wrestle with a pig. He also wanted to give Clinton space to run her own race. And since she seemed to be winning anyway, he didn’t want to appear to be putting his thumb on the scale by hyping Russia’s efforts to influence the election, even though they amounted to a serious act of foreign aggression against US democracy.

Now that Obama’s hard-won legacy of health reform, Wall Street reform, economic progress and climate action is in serious peril, he’s still trying to project a dignified, business-as-usual tone, as if Trump were just another tweak in the long arc of the moral universe. He did acknowledge in a post-election interview with VICE that he’s worried about American democracy, that too many Americans are “giving up on the core values and basic institutions that have helped us weather a lot of storms.” That’s a pretty important thing to worry about, but he delivered it in a very measured way, with no proper names attached.

Publicly, he still sounds a lot like the Obama in the Key & Peele skits, trying to reassure his supporters and the nation that “if Trump succeeds, we all succeed.” But his private thoughts probably sound a lot like Luther’s response: “Unless he succeeds with all the shit he promised to succeed with! In that case, we’re fucked!”