Seven years and one month into his presidency, Barack Obama is aghast the tone of politics in the United States hasn't gotten better since he took office.
He mentioned it during his State of the Union address last month, and he reiterated it earlier this week in a speech at the Illinois State Assembly, where he was a back bencher from 1997 to 2004.
"[O]ne of my few regrets," Obama said, "is my inability to reduce the polarization and the meanness in our politics."
Yet, the 44th president has been the most divisive chief executive since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took unprecedented radical steps - though with smiling good humor and bonhomie - in an attempt to lift the nation from the Great Depression. The president, on the other hand, has governed against the will of the people, has refused in most places to compromise on legislation and has signed sweeping executive orders on issues in order to get around Congress.
Meanwhile, his rhetoric has pitted culture against culture, religion against religion, race against race, class against class, gender against gender, and sexual orientation against sexual orientation. And even into this year, he has blamed many of the nation's problems on his predecessor.
What kind of a leader who wants to reduce the polarization in politics does those things?
Incredibly, though, in addressing the Illinois body, he cast a vision of himself that most people don't recognize and of a specter haunting the political process that he had nothing to do with creating.
Witness:
* "I've always believed so deeply in a better kind of politics."
* "Rather than reward the most extreme voices or who is best at launching schoolyard taunts, we should insist on a higher form of politics discourse."
* "I still believe in the politics of hope."
* "If we can't compromise, we can't govern ourselves."
* "We can't move forward if all we do is tear each other down."
* "I care about fixing our politics."
* The country is being "threatened by a poisonous political climate that pushes people away from participating in public life. It turns folks off. It discourages them and makes them cynical."
The political polarization that he had nothing to do with has not only permeated the country, Obama said, but it also has spilled over into the 2016 race for president.
Apparently, the nontraditional candidacies of blustering businessman Donald Trump and grouchy socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have nothing to do with him.
No, Obama remembered, the political milieu in the Illinois State Assembly from which he emerged was one of compromise, collegiality and bipartisan poker games, fish fries and golf scrambles.
"We didn't call each other idiots or fascists who are trying to destroy America," he said. Members were "practical when we needed to be. We'd fight like heck on one issue and shake hands on the next."
It's true that Obama said he wanted to change the tone when he was running for president in 2007.
Back then, he spoke against the "smallness of American politics" and the "ease with which we're distracted by the petty and the trivial."
It's how Obama has governed against those words that has been the problem.
Witness:
* "[I]t's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or antipathy to people who aren't like them."
* "I don't believe it is possible to transcend race in this country."
* "Then you've got [Republicans'] plan, which is, let's have dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with less health insurance."
* "I think it's somewhat ironic to see some members of Congress wanting to make common cause with the hard-liners in Iran. It's an unusual coalition."
* "[I]f you've got a business - you didn't build that. Somebody else made it happen."
* "I cannot think of a more potent recruiting tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that's been coming out of [Republicans in Congress over Syrian refugees] during the course of this debate."
Even in measurable if non-scientific terms, Obama's administration is the most divisive one in the last 60-plus years, according to a Gallup study. According to the 2015 study, he had the biggest gap between positive job reviews by Democrats (79 percent) and Republicans (9 percent) than any president since the organization began keeping count in 1953.
In the 11 months remaining in the president's term, he is not going to change his tone. And so next year, when he regains what he said in the Illinois State Assembly speech was "the most important title of all the title of citizen," he'll have a legacy of accomplishments that history will judge. But part of that legacy, despite his rhetoric to the contrary, will be a country in which he sowed further division and polarization.