Com­plet­ing his sev­enth year as the world’s most pow­er­ful politi­cian, Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma used his final State of the Union address to tell us what is wrong with pol­i­tics: his polit­i­cal opponents.

The Pres­i­dent doesn’t debate his foes; he diag­noses them.  They are, the Pres­i­dent told us, in the clutch­es of irra­tional fear – of the future, of change, of their own coun­try­men – and they instill fear, igno­rance and hate in their followers.

They want to “slam the brakes on change” and believe the nation’s glo­ry can be restored “if we just got some group or idea that was threat­en­ing Amer­i­ca under con­trol.”  They urge us “to fall back into tribes, to scape­goat fel­low cit­i­zens who don’t look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background.”

The Pres­i­dent, by con­trast, embraces the future and cel­e­brates change.  For him, all change is good (except cli­mate change).  Change is History’s invis­i­ble hand, nudg­ing human­i­ty along the gild­ed path of progress.  He knows how to make “change work for us,” see­ing “oppor­tu­ni­ty” where oth­ers see only “per­il.”

What the Pres­i­dent doesn’t see – what he is inca­pable of see­ing – is that his harsh mis­char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of those with whom he dis­agrees is a major rea­son he is leav­ing the coun­try more divid­ed than he found it.  His assump­tion that he is smarter and more right­eous than his oppo­nents is so embed­ded in his con­scious­ness that he is com­plete­ly unaware of it.

Even in his rare moments of humil­i­ty, he finds it impos­si­ble to assume a share of the blame for the divi­sive­ness he con­demns.  He said that “ran­cor and sus­pi­cion between the par­ties has got­ten worse instead of bet­ter” dur­ing his tenure, as though he were an observ­er of the divi­sive­ness and not a par­tic­i­pant in it.

He said that “a pres­i­dent with the gifts of Lin­coln or Roo­sevelt might have bet­ter bridged the divide.”  But the President’s fail­ure isn’t due to a lack of gifts.  He is a man of extra­or­di­nary abil­i­ty and achieve­ment. His sym­bol­ic sig­nif­i­cance as the first African-Amer­i­can Pres­i­dent unique­ly posi­tioned him to be a uni­fy­ing fig­ure.  Instead, he chose – and choos­es to the last — to breed divi­sion by dis­miss­ing his crit­ics as pho­bic, fool­ish and malev­o­lent.  It’s not that he is inca­pable of unit­ing the coun­try, it’s that he delights in exploit­ing its divisions.

Lin­coln presided over a coun­try that was lit­er­al­ly divid­ed, riv­en by a con­fed­er­a­cy that denied his legit­i­ma­cy and took up arms against the Union.  He could have used the occa­sion of his sec­ond inau­gur­al address to ver­bal­ly thrash his ene­mies, whose mil­i­tary defeat was imminent.

Instead, he tem­pered his judg­ment against the con­fed­er­ates, even those who had held slaves.  “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assis­tance in wring­ing their bread from the sweat of oth­er men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”  He called his coun­try­men to exhib­it “mal­ice toward none” and “char­i­ty for all,” and “to care for him who shall have borne the bat­tle,” regard­less of which side of the bat­tle they had joined.

Such char­i­ty and restraint were miss­ing from the President’s address, as from much of our polit­i­cal dis­course.  That is trag­ic, but we can draw com­fort from the fact that last night’s state of the union address was his last.

Here’s hop­ing that next year’s speech is Lincolnesque.