Crystal Bridges’ new series, Building Bridges, is off and running. The inaugural guest yesterday: President Barack Obama.
“Well, I love you back. It’s good to see you. But you didn’t tell me it gets this cold in Arkansas.”
President Obama came onto the stage to a standing ovation. The 70-minute conversation, moderated by Olivia Walton, chair of the Crystal Bridges Board, took place inside the new Whole Health Institute on the Crystal Bridges campus. The discussion covered democracy, President Obama’s time in the White House, and his thoughts about the future.
Walton asked the president about a passage in his first memoir — he’s currently working on his second volume — describing his unshakeable pride in being American. She asked how he felt about those words now, when the concept of patriotism can seem politicized. The former president credits much of his deep respect for the country’s ideals back to the times he spent living abroad as a child.
“What I always understood was that for all our flaws, the idea of America was powerful. And it was the reason why it was a magnet for people from other parts of the world to come here. And I think that the reason patriotism got politicized is that both the left and the right sometimes got confused in thinking that it was not possible to take an honest look at America’s flaws and be critical of it and still love it. And that’s a mistake, right.
“But it is a great expression of love for this country to say that we have not always been perfect, and the reason we have kept getting better is because we had a bunch of people who said, this isn’t as good as we can be, but the ideals were there. That was the North Star that pointed us in that direction. And that’s the exceptionalism of America.
“There have been empires of every sort on every continent that have had the biggest armies or had the most money or built the biggest monuments, and it’s bounced around from Egypt to Greece to China. That’s not unique to America. Empires have risen and fallen. What’s been pretty unique is this idea that you get a bunch of people from every corner of the planet who don’t look alike, don’t worship exactly the same way to their God, and don’t eat the same foods, don’t have the same last names, but somehow they’re all working together and they can figure out how to make this place their own and live together and create something that hasn’t been there before.”
When asked if in 2025 he thinks current national division presents a more divided-than-ever nation, and whether a wide separation could be a serious challenge to achieving the American ideals he discussed — or if even a widely divided population could be a challenge for democracy:
“I think it is true that we are more divided and that our democracy is more unstable than any time in my lifetime, not in American history. I mean, you know, we did have, like, a Civil War and stuff. I mean, there have been some pretty big breakdowns in the process.
“But I would say that the order, the system, the sets of institutions that were built after World War Two and then refined over the course of subsequent generations, I think those are unstable in ways I would not have expected.
“I would not have expected the legitimacy of an election and the peaceful transfer of power to have been challenged. I thought that was not something that would happen today. I would not expect the politicization of the Justice Department or our military. And I don’t think that’s happened — I think there’s been resistance, particularly in the military, to that — but the degree to which that has been encouraged, you know, that used to be something that I would lecture other countries not to do. You don’t have your military involved in partisan politics. Its loyalty is to the Constitution. Its loyalty is not to any party, and it is not to any president.
“When I came into office, my working assumption was that I did not win the Pentagon vote. I’m running against John McCain, a war hero and POW, and I am a 47-year-old African American from Chicago who had never served. And when I was sworn into office and I boarded Marine One or Air Force One, they saluted. And if I said, this is what we need to do, they said, yes, sir. And when I’m sitting with my Joint Chiefs of Staff, they are giving me their best, unvarnished advice.
“And over time, I didn’t just win them following orders. They would say — because they’ve written about it — they won their respect because they never saw me make a decision about national security that in any way was affected by me worrying about my politics, because they also understood we were in the middle of two wars, and the most sacred duty I had was if I was going to send some 22-year-old kid on the other side of the world who potentially would die, I could not look myself in the mirror if I was making those decisions based on politics.”
Monday’s conversation was balanced between past, present and future. President Obama says his life at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue could be amazing — when musical acts rehearsed for a next-day White House performance — but could also be confining and tiring. He says a particularly poignant memory, a goosebumps moment, is the night the Affordable Care Act passed.
“Yeah, the votes got tallied. It had been this incredible process. And it looked like we had fallen short probably five or six different times. It had been declared dead. And finally we were all in the Cabinet Room watching the votes go up. And when that last vote comes, everybody who had worked on it clapped and hugged. And it turned out Michelle and the girls were out somewhere. They were traveling, so I had the house to myself.
“So typical bachelor type — 'hey, everybody, why don’t you come on up to our place?"
"In the White House?"
"Up to the residence. And so you’ve got all these young people. And the thing I think people don’t fully appreciate is you have the Cabinet — and typically folks in there are between 40 and 65 — but you have all these 25- and 35-year-olds who are just grinding. I mean, they’re not getting paid any money, and they are just working tirelessly and brilliantly and navigating all the details of the process and answering questions for folks. And so they’re putting all their hearts into it.
“And I said to them, and I meant this: this moment right here is more satisfying, it means more to me, than the day I got elected, because the point of getting elected was to do this.”
To close the conversation, Olivia Walton asked the former president about a word often attributed to his campaign, his two terms in Washington and his life after the White House: hope. She asked what informs his hope for the future now.
“Young people I meet give me hope. The energy they’ve got, the insights, the sophistication, their natural instincts toward including people and being interested in people even if they’re not exactly like them. I think they’re less parochial than we were.
“And the thing I try to communicate to them is they too should be hopeful, because the only thing I worry about with this upcoming generation is partly because of their phones. They are bombarded with a lot of bad news all the time. There’s a sensory overload coming at them in ways we just didn’t experience, and it starts at an early age.
“And part of what I try to emphasize to them is: yes, there are a lot of big problems today, but there really have always been a lot of big problems. In fact, I mentioned it earlier — if you looked at the course of human history and you asked yourself, you didn’t know who you were ahead of time, you didn’t know whether you were an Obama or a Walton or a Rodriguez or a Chen, what country you were living in — if you just said behind the veil, when would you want to exist as a human, not knowing what station you occupy? You’d choose right now.
“With all the problems, the odds would be more likely that you had enough to eat, that you could read, that if you got pneumonia you wouldn’t die, that you’d have a roof over your head and you could raise a family and support them and live a long, healthy life. The odds are higher today than ever.
“So yeah, we’ve got some issues, but we’ve always had issues. And this goes back to the patriotism thing. There are times where I hear people say things like, you know, race relations are worse than they’ve ever been. Well, that can’t be true. That can’t be true. That’s not right. That’s not true.
“You know, there’s this, you know, we’re going back to, you know, it’s like Handmaid’s Tale. Well, no, it’s not bad. Men can still be sometimes stupid, but they love their daughters. And I think we’re past the point where systematically we’re going to deprive women of their rights.
“So I am hopeful, as long as young people don’t succumb to cynicism or despair.”
President Barack Obama, Monday, Dec. 1 in Bentonville, speaking with Olivia Walton, the board chair of Crystal Bridges, as the first guest in the museum’s Building Bridges series.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
