“It’s not as if we didn’t see some of this coming,” said Barack Obama, a note of bleak humour in his voice. “I will admit it’s worse than even I expected, but I did warn y’all!”
The crowd at a sports arena in Norfolk, Virginia, half-laughed and half-groaned. “I did,” Obama added. “You can run the tape.”
Now Obama is back on the campaign trail, for Democrats running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia. It gives him a platform to deliver an alternative State of the Union address. And the gloves are off.
To hear the expectant buzz of the 7,000-plus crowd in Norfolk as candidate Abigail Spanberger promised that Obama’s entrance was just moments away was to be reminded that Democrats did once have a president who could match Trump’s superstar charisma.
He should run for VP.
I just want to point out here, Obama was a moderate, not progressive. He used a Romney healthcare plan, he put in compromise appointments all over, he didn’t support gay marriage in his first campaign. He had to “evolve” on that, along with public opinion, conveniently.
And this guy won 2 terms.
Before that we had Clinton, who was - surprise - a moderate. He got some things done for Dems but cut the government way back. He was still grappling with Reagan fanatics so he had to appeal to them. This guy put in don’t-ask-don’t-tell, which we look back on as a nightmare, but it was also a foot in the door for queers to serve without being dishonorably discharged.
My point is, in recent memory, and certainly now in the Trump era, voters don’t want to see out-of-touch positions, they want to see someone very calm and charismatic who says they can solve their everyday problems.
Can we learn anything for 2028 from this?
it’s not even about being moderate. i believe the stronger vision wins. it’s more like this:
on some policies (like gender issues) you heavily divide the population because people see it very differently. some people will agree heavily, others will disagree just as strongly, and all you’re doing is to divide the population, which is not what we need. if you focus on economic policies instead, people’s agreement is much more even and you get a lot of support from many people, which carries you and the country forward much more, i believe.
Yeah that’s a good way of putting it. We can split ourselves over many different issues which do and don’t align with people, thus splitting our voter base. Or we can unite behind one standard that everyone desperately wants, and coincidentally we have the track record to win on.
Bill and Hillary Clinton are directly responsible for making the DNC into neoliberal shills.
Run the most conservative candidates possible so the party can surprised Pikachu when Trump accidentally pushes decent policy through shear contrarianism. Got it
Were Clinton and Obama and Biden the “most conservative candidate” in their races?
Obama wasn’t a great president. He was a good source of hope which made his weakness worse.
He pulled the US out of a financial crisis only to to go complwte centrist, folding on healthcare (which might have been the right strategic choice), folding on peace in the middle east, folding on socual support, folding on Russia, folding on the SC.
Obama contributed to Democratic decline in the world (through loss of trust in Democrstic instituions) during his term, and then lead to borh Trump and Biden.
Biden was a better president than Obama, despite being half there, and funneling the States towards Trump 2.0.
My point wasn’t how good each president was, just that they actually won, and social causes advanced under their administrations.
Obama have us Trump because he chose not to hold any bankers during the financial crisis accountable. He bailed on his constituents and bailed out corporations. He also dismantled the organizing that swept him into office. Not to mention the continuation of the illegal bush Era foreign policy. The fact that he also did not hold bush accountable. He folded on a public option. He propped up the worst people in his cabinet. He let Republicans prevent a SCOTUS judge from being confirmed to the bench. Obama let Republicans take the worst of their excesses to a new level with no accountability. We were told that the fever will break and that sanity will return. Despite the fact that the Republican project was decades in the making. Voters didn’t do this. They responded to the disdain their party leaders had for them with the reciprocal disdain for their elected officials.
“I will admit it’s worse than even I expected, but I did warn y’all!” The crowd at a sports arena in Norfolk, Virginia, half-laughed and half-groaned.
Told who exactly? What a wild thing to say in Norfolk—where the surrounding cities (Norfolk included) overwhelmingly voted Harris in 2020.
Voters told YOU (and the DNC) to back someone other than Biden, and YOU didn’t listen until it was way too late. If anyone fumbled the election, it’s the folks who had Biden’s ear and said nothing.
“I told you so” smug assed energy—get the fuck outta here and say that to Michiganders or Pennsylvanians, you tone deaf dickhead.
The way some people throw themselves all over this man…
:/
IKR this fool had a mildly progressive couple of terms (mildly because of you know, the drone strikes), didn’t shore up ANYthing to prevent this, and has the gall to be like ‘told you so’?
Further solidifies my position that anyone who wants to be in charge for any reason is not to be trusted.
Barrack Obama completely dismantled his campaign infrastructure immediately after he was elected, knowing full well that the Republicans and their think tanks were targeting local races and federal judges around the country. Why did he do this? Because the Democrats did not want to engage with populism on a mass level beyond campaign slogans and getting individual establishment-friendly candidates in office.
Neoliberals do not like populism. They’re not fully committed to democracy, either. Or, at least, their support for democracy is conditional. Friedrich Hayek, one of the architects of neoliberalism, once said:
Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.
I think it’s worth noting that this is not unique or exclusive to neoliberals. Really, any ideologue or technocrat will only ever support democracy conditionally.
I really hope Debbie Wasserman Schulz is having many bad days for what she did to the party by denying us Bernie
Trump’s superstar charisma.
I’m so sick of people saying this dipshit with diarrhea of the mouth is charismatic.
It’s fun watching people debate whether the populist dictator that created a cult of personality using words and delivery is charismatic or not 😂
It’s all in how he communicates, not what. He’s an old-school con man, a confidence trickster. That whole style relies on the fact that people are really bad at judging character, and someone who lies with a straight face and never shows an iota of guilt will be believed to be innocent and truthful no matter what evidence is presented against them.
Combine that with a heavy dose of sunk cost fallacy and an increasingly uneducated and desperate electorate, and it’s easy to see why many follow him despite his near complete lack of articulateness.
If we compare Trump to a phishing email, they are remarkably close.
Use of language: Phishing emails usually incorporate misspellings and bad grammar, this is done to prevent people who are too detail oriented from wasting the scammer’s time, if they sort themselves out the scammer can focus on the gullible people who will believe them later in the process. Trump uses child like grammar in the same way, it turns away educated people from his fans, reducing the risk that they will start convincing followers that Trump is bad, which increase the echo chamber effect.
Use of hyperbole: Phishing emails will push hard for fast action, telling you that doing X is extremely important, and needs to be done now. Same with Trump, there is always a big crisis, putting you on edge, stressing you out, this further reduce his follower’s ability to use critical thinking, so they will have an easier time to mindlessly support whatever action they are told will solve the crisis.
There are way more similarities, but I am on mobile, and starting to cramp, so I end this comment here.
TL;DR: Trump is a scam email.
I think he is a cursed chain letter. Everything he touches in the chain turns into shit.
The problem is: he is charismatic to other dipshits with diarrhea of the mouth.
He is charismatic. He does grab people. Hitler was also charismatic, undeniably so, a great orator. Trump is incoherently charismatic in comparison 😆
He’s persuasive to idiots. That’s not the same thing as charismatic
When the number idiots is sizeble percentage of the voting population, sadly it does count.
Do elder statesmen like Obama bother mentoring or training their “replacements”? Seems like we would have more Obama’s in the pipeline if that was the case.
You know how Bernie has spent like 2-3 decades saying “it’s not about me, it’s about a movement”?
Obama fundamentally disagrees…
Not that I have a quote of him explicitly saying that, he never would say it on record.
But as a two term president he could have named a progressive chair to the DNC that entire 8 year period. The immediate benefit of that being 2016 would have been a fair primary…
So while some do, I would be shocked to find out Obama suddenly started to care about what happened after him, the day he left office.
Obama was extremely overrated.
It sucks how the right gets ‘their guy’ and we’re stuck with establishment crap. spits
It’s been shit so long people don’t understand what their literal ancestors had.
Like, Gen Z was born when Clinton was in office, Alpha when Obama was.
They don’t even really remember it because they were kids, just the memory that people said he was either progressive or a commie muslim.
and we’re stuck with establishment crap. spits
But right now we’re not stuck with shit.
The DNC is throwing Biden/Kamal’s whole war hest back to state parties for use in midterms, and that will generate more candidates in primaries because more generals are winnable.
And competitive primaries help Dem turnout in the general, coupled with republicans shitting the bed and we’re likely to see a progressive, not just blue, wave in midterms. Then another along with a progressive presidential.
It doesn’t happen often, not in most of our lifetimes really, but now we actually do need to build party unity.
Billionaires and their remaining puppets are going to put a lot of time and money into depressing interest until after primaries.
sadly its mostly PELOSi, or schumer who do the replacement for DNC. i dont think former presidents can do it, since they dont have political power anymore. all they can do is endorse and promote them.
Just what we need, more people drone striking weddings schools and hospitals. I think Putin and netanyahu are doing a fine job carrying on Obama’s legacy.
And this is honestly one of the biggest struggles I’ve always had with him. I genuinely want to like him, but I can’t forget the 26,000+ bombs dropped in seven countries in just 2016 alone. Effing hell.
Just goes to prove of you’re charismatic enough it doesn’t matter how you act.
The only difference here is Obama did that to other countries while Trump does it to everybody
Not at all justifying what Obama did, and I think for the progressive party to win, we need truly progressive candidates.
feel like alot of people are falling for right wing propaganda against obama , thats where the hate is coming from. no word on what trump is doing at all? why is that, he isnt black thats why. even if it is criticism, its extremely mild.
feel like alot of people are falling for right wing propaganda against obama
Obama killed 12,000 civilians and bombed a doctors without borders hospital. That’s not propaganda it’s verifiable fact.
no word on what trump is doing at all
This isn’t a thread about trump. Are you saying nobody can criticize any president without giving trump a shout-out?
why is that, he isnt black thats why
Oh fuck you
I was only a kid when Obama was in office, honestly one of my better memories as a kid was Michelle Obama’s “worldwide day of play” on Nickelodeon and the increased “Green” education.
I don’t know a lot of his international affairs but maybe that’s something I’ll read about. However from first glance’s it does look like he was more destructive overseas than I personally prefer. I don’t think it’s “right wing” propaganda at all to think critically about who we idolize as our progressive candidate, even more so considering current affairs.
Those have increased since he left office. You think he’s out there pushing those buttons or something?
No, he just kept approving them.
They increased because Obama legalized and normalized the worst excesses of the Bush admin and gave those powers to subsequent presidencies. But sure let’s stand up more for the guy who said “we need to look forward, not backward” when it came to prosecuting the Bush admin for war crimes, and then wondering why no one would stop Trump from criming all his presidency when we couldn’t even lift a finger for war crimes.
I’m not saying Obama is a villain, but he fucked up in some very major ways on those issues.
If you kick me in the balls 40 times I’m not going to celebrate you even if the next guy kicks me in the balls 50 times. Obama was a piece of shit and it’s way past time to look past the charisma and accept that.
Username checks out…?
Man, the Russian disinfo hubs really want to shutdown anything Obama has to say don’t they… Anyone without a vast deficit of logic should be able to spot the contradictions though. How anyone with a brain can look at the wholesale greed led destruction of America that Trump is doing and then say that Obama is the real problem is just bonkers. I suppose it just shows how threatened they are by him.
Ah, yes, everyone who disagrees with you is a filthy foreigner.
not just any foreigner, a russian. that’s … that’s communism (/s)
It’s neat how people who shit on Obama and Democrats in general have zero policy stances. They almost never cite any event or impact a politician has. It’s just labels and namecalling.
I don’t understand this claim. Almost all of the criticism of Obama that I see is about his drone strike policies, and a significant majority of the positive things I read about Obama these days are that he was so well spoken and don’t you just miss it. I know that’s anecdotal, but I’m curious how your experience has specifically differed.
Drone strike isn’t a policy it’s a technology. The Bush Admin didn’t have as much Drone Strike capability and the Trump Admin signed off on the CIA performing drone strikes without needing approval, increasing the frequency of drone strikes at an accelerated rate.
isn’t a policy
Admin signed off on
Trump Admin signed off on
…a policy
Correct
