I was pleased and proud to have this man as my president. Pleased and proud to have his family as our First Family. I was proud to vote for him for senator once and for president twice. I was proud to have been one of the panelists who vetted him when he was still a relatively obscure state senator during his ultimately failed primary bid for the U.S. House of Representatives against incumbent Bobby Rush. In fact, I still have my ticket stub from his "Barack the Vote" fundraiser.
However, as pleased and proud as I was to have Barack Obama as my president, it is also worth remembering the environment in which Obama governed, including taking a moment to remember much furious shit we Obama supporters took from our "allies" on the left. In case you'd forgotten, here's a sample from a now-deadlinked post on Common Dreams from May, 2013. I have an archive full of this stuff:
When Obama finally declares martial law and announces the new Fascist States of American, O-bots like Maddow will eagerly put on their Nazi armbands -- cute little pastel hope & change swastikas, of course -- and join the goose-stepping parade. She's nothing but a propagandist and has absolutely no scruples whatsoever, just like the corporation that pays her, just like the "commander-in-chief" she props up with her lies and half-truths...
That kind of rhetoric was not unusual at the time: over-the-top rage from the whole Conservative media machine and from the dirtbag Left. And in that environment, the Obama administration constituted a grand social experiment in offering the Republican party base -- which had been trained by Republican leadership and Conservative media to automatically loathe Democrats with an almost unhinged ferocity -- a different option. Offering them compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect, as well as policies that materially benefited them.
And that grand social experiment failed spectacularly. Which is why it is worth our time and attention to diagnose why that experiment failed. But to do that we'd have to journey into the past further back than 2016, which is something that pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" almost all categorically refuse to do.
That is because to examine the state of our union prior to 2016 makes the pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" either look like arrogant idiots whose opinions should never be trusted again...or ambitious fools who were complicit in creating the ideal conditions for a monster like Trump to emerge...or both. And since pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" now dominate any media conversation about politics, that once again leaves it to dirty, disreputable outsiders like us to do the work of explaining why everything went to hell.
To start with, President Barack Obama might as well have been built in a Centrist/Moderate/Both Siderist lab by the New York Times editorial board. He was everything the pundits and the consultant class said would be the "solve" for what was dividing America.
This is from me 16 years ago, in 2010:
For his entire adult life, Barack Obama has succeeded by offering himself as the perfect midpoint between others. As a mathematical function, not a leader. As an averaging equation, not a true believer.
Since he showed up on the political radar, he has marketed himself relentlessly as
Half black and half white...
Half American urbanite, half world-citizen...
Half wonk, half preacher...
Half Harvard Yard, half Back o' the Yards...
Half red and half blue...And this bone-deep reflex -- plus his formidable intellect and ability to rise to the rhetorical occasion -- would have prepared him perfectly for the Presidency...if this were 1960.
But it is not 1960 -- nor is he dealing with Harvard Conservatives pals or Springfield Republican pols -- and being a results-agnostic "process guy" when the process is utterly broken no longer works.
Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two opposing positions and who will, therefore, find a compromise between opposites even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can cede half the playing field.
In order to avoid wasting his presidency, squandering the opportunity we have given him, and letting the country spiral into a permanent corporate feudal pest-hole, Barack Obama must do the hardest thing of all: he must exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern house divided against itself cannot stand.
That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.
That we will become all one thing, or all the other.
And that this is your fight, President Obama.
This burden has fallen to you: it cannot be shirked and cannot be delegated.
If you take up this challenge, millions of us will have your back, Mr. President.
But if you cannot summon the inner strength to evolve past your reflexive need to compromise with people who want to destroy you, then we are all well and truly fucked.
Because in 2008, Democrats took a chance on an outsider conjured out of their best hopes, but by 2010 it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that the Republican party and Conservative media were too far gone to be saved. That by now there was too much power and too much profit trafficking in racism and conspiracy mongering and hatred for them to change. That they viewed compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect as weakness, and Obama as a patsy for continuing to offer calm, civility and concessions over and over again.
That what the nation needed in that moment was a president who took to the bully pulpit every day to beat the shit out of GOP in the Truman style:
“I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”
And to go after the working men and women who voted against their own interests in the same manner:
But that never happened. And the reaction from Republicans to this decent, honorable, thoughtful man who begged them to work with him solve our common problems was an eight-year-long, racist primal scream and the to nominate and elect the personification of their most dangerously ignorant, racist fears.
The King of the Birthers.
Then they renominated him again in 2020.
Then, when he lost, they attempted a coup to overthrow the government, and spent the next four years screaming that the election had been stolen.
Then they renominated him yet again in 2024, re-elected him, and here we are. And by now it should be plain enough for even the punditocracy to see that the problem was never Trump. The problem has always been the bigots and imbeciles of the Republican base who manifested Trump, and the Conservative media which continues to belt-feed the most lurid red-meat lies to that base, which eagerly gobbles it up and asks for seconds.
So, to quote another president from Illinois whose presidential library and museum are also here,
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it...
And to repeat what I shamelessly stole from Lincoln 16 years ago and modified to fit our times:
That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.
That we will become all one thing, or all the other.
1 comment:
Outstanding post, and congratulations to you and Blue Gal for 1,000. This piece reminded me of a moment in time I want to share with you.
My closest friends and I are left-leaning Democrats in our early fifties and, while we were more aware than most folks about national politics in the year 2000, it wasn't until Dubya and Cheney started swinging their wrecking ball that we became radicalized and inspired to think and talk more about the state of the nation than baseball, which we discussed incessantly.
Early on in 2008, we all fully expected Hillary to get the nomination, and we were fine with that. The way we saw it, any vote for a Democrat was a repudiation of the war, the tax cuts, the PATRIOT Act, and everything else that the last eight years brought. So we were very excited when Obama's more progressive campaign gained traction, both because of his ability to contrast his opposition to the Congressional authorization to the war but also for his eloquence, his ability to inspire, and what nominating an African-American community organizer might do to activate and engage largely underrepresented swaths of citizens. When Obama's nomination was imminent and I spoke with my friends who believed--and hoped--he would be radical, I disagreed and argued with a parallel with baseball: Jackie Robinson. The way the story goes, it wasn't that Robinson was the most gifted athlete to break the color barrier, rather he was the right person with the right temperament for the moment. Despite the slurs, threats, on-field aggression and open racism from all directions, Robinson was able to "turn the other cheek" and take all that shit without retaliating. Conventional wisdom was that if he stood up for himself and fought back, the public and the press would be less likely to support him and integration, so the Dodgers' GM, Branch Rickey, convinced Robinson to stay this course for three years. These were, as you described of Obama, his "design specifications." I argued that if Obama was lucky enough to get elected, he would follow Robinson's path and govern from a forward thinking but relatively centrist position with bipartisanship a core pillar. And I think he did. And like you, to a fault.
The way the Robinson history is told, after those three years he began to fight back. And while there was the expected racist backlash from a faction of the press and the public, Robinson preserved and is now regarded as one of the very most important and influential figures of not just the sport but the 20th century.
Like you, I'm deeply proud of my support and votes for Obama, but I wish he'd followed that second act of Robinson's career, especially after the knee-jerk opposition was too clear to miss and details of the 2009 Caucus Room meeting became public. I think he'd be revered even more.
Keep up the great work and again, congratulations on 1,000.
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