Here Are the Very Best Bits from President Obama’s Emotional Farewell Speech

“Reality has a way of catching up with you.”


President Barack Obama gave his farewell address on Tuesday night from McCormick Place, a huge convention center in Chicago.

News cameras captured images of the jubilant, 20,000-strong crowd crying and waving smartphones throughout Obama’s speech. “Four more years!” they chanted. (“I can’t do that,” Obama joked.)

The speech capped a turbulent day in the political life of the country, which began with sometimes-fractious confirmation hearings of attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, and ended with news that intelligence officials told president-elect Donald Trump that Russia might be keeping a compromising dossier on him.

And Obama didn’t waste any time mentioning the upcoming inauguration. “In ten days, the world will witness a hallmark of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power from one freely-elected president to the next,” he said. “I committed to President-elect Trump that my administration would ensure the smoothest possible transition, just as President Bush did for me.”

He didn’t mention Trump again.

Obama argued he was now leaving the country in better shape than when he took office in 2008—a big applause line came when he spoke about securing “the right to health insurance for another 20 million of our fellow citizens”—while warning that “there are no quick fixes” to some of the country’s most entrenched problems.

Watch some of the best bits from Obama’s final speech above.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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