Obama: maybe I was "10 or 20 years too early"

[Torie]

I guess I retract parts of my previous post with this post .

Look at Obama's coalition in 2008. Obama did better in wealthy suburbs without big demographical changes than Hillary and unlike Hillary Obama actually won or tied wealthy voters. While Obama won a lot of voters who didn't vote for Hillary, Obama's core support reflected Hillary's support in 2016. For a Democrat Obama had unprecedented support among postgraduates and wealthy voters and he won places that hadn't voted Democratic since 1964. He wasn't going to govern as a left-wing populist, a lot of his voters didn't even want him to do that. Obama 2008 might have been the gateway drug for the upscale Republicans who didn't vote for Trump. I strongly suspect many Romney-Clinton voters voted for Obama in 2008 (and outside of Appalachia where coal played a huge issue many Obama-Trump voters probably voted for Bush). Bush vs Gore in 2000 and Obama vs McCain in 2008 really were the first precursors to what happened in 2016 (wealthier people trending massively D and 'the creative class' being the core Democratic constituency), 2004 and 2012 look like (temporary?) reversions to the mean (with the exception of coal county I suppose) once you ignore demographic changes.

Obama still managed to disappoint Wall Street enough to make sure 85% of Wall Street donations went to Romney btw, so it's not like he governed like a total DLC Democrat.

1. You may have some celebrity readers channeling your metaphors. This one from Sean Trende.



2. That is my sequence of voting: Obama, Romney, Clinton, so if I am real, it is a thing. I also got my parents to vote for Johnson, but I digress.

3. Your post came up when a did a google of "upscale Republican" and "gateway drug," when checking out the provenance of the Trende quote, and I got a kick out of it, so thus I am willing to run the risk of punishment for thread necromancy.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

No you just didn't get rid of Filibuster except for ACA and it cost us big time and we should of had immigration reform and DC Statehood in 2009

We will see what Schumer does with Sinema and Manchin hopefully they get rid of Fillibuster for Voting Rights

[Saint Milei]

He was clearly wrong

[Mr. Smith]

Obama's problem was he wasted his political capital on bipartisanship. The GOP was in a death spiral due to Bush and Obama should of pushed them off a cliff and given them a final death blow. Instead Obama pissed away a year and a half thinking he was getting somewhere with the GOP while they were just trolling him and strategically obstructing his legislation.

Hopefully for once, the Democrats have learned their lesson.

The Democrats are not going to have 60 Seats in 2021 like they did in 2009

Won't matter.  Either the legislative filibuster will be entirely gone by 2021/25, or the parliamentary rules of reconciliation will be blown open wide enough to drive a freight train through. 

...If only...

[lfromnj]

Source

WASHINGTON — Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.

“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.

He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.

 permanent majority syndrome pervades the Democratic party so much.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Is he implying that in a decade murdering Yemeni children in a religious war for Saudi Arabia and wanting to cut Social Security more than the Republicans will be more popular?

[jojoju1998]

One historical theory that has nothing to do with ideology suggests that Barack Obama is ahead of his time due to a temperament related to the time in which he was born. It has little to do with his ideology and far more to do with his personality.

If anything, Barack Obama is a liberal analogue of Dwight Eisenhower, a stickler for precedent and protocol, someone unlikely to jump onto any demagogic bandwagon. Both are known for one huge spending project (the Interstate Highway System, Obamacare) and similar responses to a civil-rights issue of the time (school desegregation, same-sex marriage) -- on those, it was simply "It's the law, folks!" Both were scrupulously honest and had no tolerance for corruption or cronyism. Neither had any flair for drama in politics, Eisenhower ignoring it and Obama thinking it troublesome. zzhBoth were incredibly inept at building support for any sort of machine to outlast their Presidencies.   Ignoring differences of curriculum vitae between the two (it seems to be less important) with Eisenhower as the war hero and Obama being simply 'good officer material'. Both came from generations heavily derided for amorality, money-lust, and lack of intellectual seriousness.  

The difference between them? (No, not ethnicity) is the times in which they were President.  Eisenhower became President after the great Crisis of the Twentieth Century (Great Depression and the Second World War) was over. Obama became President during such a Crisis, as the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 looked after a year and a half that it could be as severe as the economic meltdown beginning in September 1929. America dealt differently with the economic meltdown of 2007-2009, backing the banks about a year after the meltdown began.

Obama seemed like the sort of person to get us out of a Crisis -- until Trump came along. I remember JFK, successor of Eisenhower -- and all that Donald Trump has in common with JFK among the Presidents is a sordid record with women.  We are now in a huge Crisis involving the foundations of political process and social norms about eighty years after the Crisis of 1940 (Great Depression and Second World War) and 160 years after the Crisis of 1860 (potential dissolution of the USA over slavery and potential abolition of slavery).  A prior dangerous time was the American Revolution.

The timing of these cycles reflects the physical reality of the mass-extinction of childhood memories of adults in their eighties, with the last of their age dying, going senile, or going grossly feeble.

Speaking of living in a Crisis......

[NYSforKennedy2024]

What could've been...