Obama called for workers “to unionize for better wages” and tax code reforms. He calmly urged white Americans to acknowledge the existence of institutionalized racism, pointing out that “the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the ’60s.” He made sense, but making sense in 2017 doesn’t get you very far. Trump gets away with being nonsensical because he appeals to raw emotion and rage, not intellect. Obama’s serene eloquence won’t appeal to Trump’s angry masses, and it’s difficult to imagine it galvanizing his own side.

Likewise, Obama talked about the “threats to our democracy,” but he missed an important one: the ineffectual political strategy of his own party. He asked the crowd: “How can elected officials rage about deficits when we propose to spend money on preschool for kids, but not when we’re cutting taxes for corporations? How do we excuse ethical lapses in our own party, but pounce when the other party does the same thing?”

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He shouldn’t be framing these as questions; it makes these “ethical lapses” sound almost hypothetical, abstract. In reality, these issues aren’t rhetorical questions — they’re the substance of real human lives.

The farewell address was also scant on spirited rallying cries for the future. “So if we’re going to be serious about race going forward, we need to uphold laws against discrimination — in hiring, and in housing, and in education, and in the criminal justice system,” Obama said, without mentioning that Congress is in the process of confirming Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, who according to the NAACP, has demonstrated “explicit and extreme denigration of civil rights organizations.” Why not get into the nitty-gritty of what’s actually going on, or dream bigger than simply upholding the status quo?

Obama isn’t wrong when he says “our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted,” but it might benefit him to note that because of voter suppression and the electoral college, we don’t live in a healthy democratic society to begin with. Because it doesn’t really fall “to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy” in, say, North Carolina, which is currently facing allegations of illegally disenfranchising black voters at the Supreme Court. It falls to the leaders who will directly follow Obama, who he could have called upon in that moment to act responsibly and virtuously, or face the consequences. Instead, he wished them well.

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The speech, by all counts, was safe and thoughtful, but the political predicament our nation finds itself in distinctly unsafe and hysterical. You can’t combat the looming threat of the Trump administration — which includes a man beloved by white nationalists and a vice president who believes in gay conversion therapy — with calm bipartisan dialogue. You can’t fight an impending fire with a thoughtfully written manual on how to extinguish flames.

I can empathize with Obama’s instinct to calmly appeal to Americans. It isn’t in the president’s nature to be vulgar or brash, and it’s a nice respite from the incoherent chaos of a Trump speech. Yet it also reeks of a certain academic, bloodless, hoity-toity liberalism that’s uninspiring to many. Calling on Americans to believe in our ability “to bring about change” is pretty empty considering income inequality is the highest it’s been since 1928 and we have an inadequate public education system. Those are the problems that call for leadership, not light, paternal reprimand.