Former president has given series of blistering speeches to help candidates in key races – and deployment has proved a hit with party’s progressive wing That could have been awkward. Barack Obama, campaigning for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, acknowledged that his fellow Democrat has criticised some aspects of the Obama presidency. “Yeah, Abdul didn’t agree with some things we wanted to do – that our administration was doing – when I was president,” he told a rally in Detroit. “You know who e…
He sure did use force against Occupy Wallstreet.
He sure did bail out those banks, giving them money for nothing, and they got to keep the foreclosed properties.
“This election is our last, best chance of at least reining him in, reining in some of the foolishness of this administration,” he said in Georgia. “It’s the circuit-breaker in the system, and we need to flip it.”
Obama has always been super progressive, except for a very specific 8 years of his life when he wasn’t.
But it was only 8 years right so no harm no foul. Right?
In those 8 years he faced a Congress that, for most of his tenure, and especially after 2010, filibustered or refused to move on nearly everything to the left of neoliberal.
Democrats had a filibuster-proof Senate for about seven months, that’s the window the ACA came through, watered down to get the 60th vote they needed for it to pass
When the legislative window closed in 2010 (because in midterms Republicans won more seats), the record shifts to executive actions like; DACA, the Iran deal and the Paris Agreement because that was the lever he had.
Republicans used the filibuster at unprecedented rates to produce the appearance of failure, then campaigned on “he got nothing done.” McConnell was explicit that the goal was a one-term president.
watered down to get the 60th vote they needed for it to pass
Joe fucking Lieberman, Al Gore’s choice for VP.
Yet another reason (that being, getting Joe Lieberman out of the Senate and into a less important position) Bush v. Gore absolutely fucked us.
Strange but true.
He was, perhaps, progressive for the time, but only in certain ways.
Also, 7 years of Republican Congress…
I mean, I was no fan of Obama when he was President of the US serving the interest of said polity. Except… when compared to literally almost everybody else who’ve held that position.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t call him out or criticize him.
Agree that we should criticize him. It’s just important to understand that context so that you can do so accurately. You can’t blame a guy for not passing a public option when his own party’s conservative wing (and Lieberman) refused to vote for it.
“Not passing the public option” probably isn’t even in the top 5 criticisms that I have for Obama. I don’t remember even mentioning it.
My apologies for assuming.
No, of course not.
My favorite US president for my lifetime, but he really wasn’t good for America.
He projected confidence and competence, and was a great leader, so he lulled many Americans, and a lot of people around the world, into complacency. For a bit, it felt like the 90s, we were coming back and all was well.
But we aren’t coming back, those days are gone. We have been decaying for a long time, long before Obama took office, decades before. We are rotten to the core.
Trump is a much better representative of what the USA is, he’s not fooling anybody. Well… I mean he’s fooling fools, but they are always fooled, that can’t be helped. It’s obvious what state we are in with him at the helm. He’s the President we created, he’s the President we deserve, Made in the U.S.A.
He also didn’t use the levers of power he had effectively. He was playing gentleman’s rules whilst the real threat to the country (from within) waited for him to get out of the way.
The Supreme Court nominations is the obvious one, but he should have been reinforcing all the checks and balances in the system, possibly even relinquishing powers away from the Office of the President where they have accumulated over 250 years.
Bin Laden wasn’t the threat. His own position was.
Just look at the fella. Still is lithe and athletic as he ever was. His wife is as lucky as he is. Has there been a president since Lincoln as worthy of being in a wrestling ring as Obama is?
Nice to see Obama and read about his humor. What a great speaker. I have not been in a Cheesecake factory since dear old dad died in the 1990s, so I pulled up some photos of the interior decor. Hoo boy, they even have the Eye of Sauron! Yep, Obama is right once again!
There is a direct line from the policies of the Obama era to Trump. Obama is a feckless war criminal who put us directly on the path to where we are today and the sooner he is destroyed and ripped of his influence the better.
Ffs, this guy’s gonna be the new Hillary, isn’t he?
Oh well, at least he’s much more charismatic and better at pretending not to be a corporate stooge than she ever was 🤷🏻
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Him ignoring the DNC instead of appointing a progressive chair and fixing the party back in 09 is the entire reason the last decade happened…
Don’t treat him like a hero for finally getting off his ass.
A non biased DNC would have seen Bernie easily win the 2016 primary
Shit would have been so much better if he took the five minutes to name any progressive name he could think of as DNC chair. But I’m pretty sure he just went with Bidena recommendation, because he had zero plans for the DNC.
Entire reason? I don’t know about that. Definitely partly responsible, but I feel like I could list many more reasons from just the same time frame, not to mention many others stretching back to the reconstruction.