There’s nothing quite like contemplating an actual alternative to President Obama to drive up his approval numbers. Ever since people began voting in the primaries, the president’s popularity has been moving steadily up, including in the always hostile Gallup poll.
In Gallup’s most recent weekly average, Obama is at 51-45 — the exact opposite of where he was on Jan. 1 and a 12-point swing since then. He’s been at 50 percent or higher in every week since March 1, save one.
I expected Democrats to begin expressing much higher approval numbers for Obama once they were forced to really think about Clinton or Sanders in the White House, but the trend is even stronger with independents who basically hate their choices in this election cycle:
Democrats have slowly looked at Obama more favorably since the beginning of 2015, but independents have begun to look at Obama much more favorably. After a sharp slide following his reelection, independents turned their opinions of Obama around at the beginning of 2014. Over the past year, that’s escalated. And since ratings from Democrats and Republicans are more stable, that shift by independents moves the needle a lot.
People don’t always realize that Obama’s approval numbers have been held down by the ambivalence of a lot of Democrats. The same is happening now to a much greater degree to Hillary Clinton. She won’t really have to do anything to see her negatives decline once the Democrats unite around her as the only chance of keeping Donald Trump away from the nuclear codes. If independents follow suit, which they will if the campaign is waged competently, she won’t be laboring under historically high negatives by the time people start voting.
That’s not to say that she’s a popular politician. It’s just that no Democrat can carry good approvals if the Republicans are uniformly opposed to them and the Democrats are divided.
People judge favorably during an election year and a lame-duck Congress. Too early to write about Obama’s legacy, but it’s a mixed bag. I consider his second term more favorably than his first, specifically on foreign policy achievement. Call it a difference of night and day on diplomacy … or between 4 years of HRC and diplomat John Kerry.
Diplomacy, sure. You might also see it simply as more tolerance towards two of the USA’s top boogeymen: Cuba and Iran. Hillary Clinton got the SoS job as a compensation prize from Obama and resigned because he told her he’d be calling the shots in his second term. There’s no love lost between them. That’s how I see it, could well be completely wrong. Kerry agreed with Obama (while also getting the job of SoS as a compensation prize for his hideously incompetent presidential campaign in 2003, Swift Boat me if think I might have been for HRC before I was against her).
She resigned to create distance for her presidential run, not because Obama told her he was unhappy with her performance.
Those are your guesses and not facts. Will be a long time, if ever, before the truth on such questions will ever be made public.
Yes, guesses. Evidently that’s my bad. One way or the other can you honestly tell me that you could imagine Hillary Clinton would ever have got deals together on Iran and Cuba the way John Kerry did. Now Obama is very proud of those accomplishments and rues Hillary’s Libya. My first reaction to the news she would be SoS in the second term was that she refused to don a kerchief to go to Tehran. I’m also a closet conspiracy theorist.
Iran, NEVER.
Marie 3, Or were you referring to BooMan’s guesses which are as speculative as mine?
We’re all guessing, but some of us make more of an effort to frame them as guesses, speculations, etc. and make fewer declarative statements based on hot air.
Even better is this one from November 13, 2013, barely 8 1/2 months after her resignation.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/obama-campaign-manager-in-talks-to-head-hillary-clinton-proj?utm
_term=.lqm1mM5p3#.jyNMGkYKX
It’s clear even at this early date that many people were “lined up” behind her. That didn’t happen overnight. So I think it’s pretty clear why she resigned, and had probably planned that, including the timng of it, all along.
My guess: little in HRC’s career, i.e. life, is not planned & constructed in minute detail way far in advance of real time. She’s been “working the line” for the presidency since college, just as Samantha Bee says satirically.
Trouble is her passions aren’t for causes & ideas greater than herself.
BC takes whatever wiggle room he can get.
It would be nice to think that Obama told her he was unhappy with her performance, but to me their demeanor towards each other doen’t remotely suggest that. I think Booman’s probably right about this. She was already campaigning less than year later, and to have taken a year to lay the groundwork fpr that doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Jan. 23, 2014. “The Obama political operation that once buried Hillary Rodham Cliton’s White House ambitions is now rapidly converging around her possible 2016 presidential bid, conferring on Mrs. Clinton enormous early advantages in money, expertise, and voter targeting techniques.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/us/politics/biggest-liberal-super-pac-to-fund-possible-clinton-bid
.html
Now why would that be happening? Or was that the price of her resignation?
No need to guess. This story appeared two days BEFORE Hillary Clinton stepped down as SoS:
‘Ready for Hillary’ filed with the Federal Election Commission on Friday.
Super PAC to back Hillary Clinton
By Katie Glueck
01/29/13 06:11 AM EST
Fans of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have launched a super PAC on her behalf as speculation continues to swirl about her 2016 ambitions.
“Ready for Hillary” on Friday filed with the Federal Election Commission, following on the heels of another group called “HILLARYCLINTONSUPERPAC.”
(PHOTOS: Who’s talking about Hillary, 2016?)
Allida Black, who is chairing the Ready for Hillary PAC, told the Center for Public Integrity in a piece posted on Monday that the group is “`a small group of skilled and dedicated Hillary supporters and Obama supporters’ who are ready to devote their `organizational expertise and energy to helping Hillary become president.'”
“Our purpose is simple: we are ready to work for Hillary to be president when she is ready to run,” Black, a George Washington University professor and historian, as well as a longtime Clinton backer, said to the Center for Public Integrity in an email. “When our website launches in a few weeks, we plan to reach out to our grassroots networks and contributors to mobilize them to support her.”
The organization’s Twitter account already sports nearly 50,000 followers.
News of the filing comes amid mounting chatter concerning whether Clinton will run for president. On Sunday, she and President Barack Obama appeared together on “60 Minutes” and Clinton dodged a question about her future ambitions.
“I think that, you know, look, obviously the president and I care deeply about what’s going to happen for our country in the future,” Clinton said. “And I don’t think, you know, either he or I can make predictions about what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next year.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/super-pac-to-back-hillary-clinton-086848
That’s non-responsive to the Martin’s statement that HRC resigned as SOS to “create distance between herself and Obama, and not because Obama was unhappy with her performance.”
The only open question about a ’16 HRC run at the end of ’12 and beginning of ’13 was her health. (And it wasn’t just a minor moment of dizziness and fall down. Much physical rehab went into getting her out there in 2014 with a book that only an idiot would view as a prelude to her campaign.) She may have wanted to say on as SOS for a few more months, considering how frequently she invokes Obama’s name, she may not have wanted to create any distance between herself and him, and Obama may not have appreciated her performance.
What I meant was that it certainly didn’t indicate he was unhappy with her performance as SoS. Although it didn’t indicate that he was happy with it either.
With her working on her presidential run, there certainly was an APPEARANCE of more of a distance than if she had remained as SoS. But if you look more closely, the whole Obama campaign organization became a part of the Hillary campaign organization without missing a beat.
It’s really quite extraordinary. I don’t think there’s ever been a transition of that sort, particularly to a non-incumbent. The Obama administration itself was sending out the message that Hillary was inevitable, before his second term had barely begun!
Yes, this was obvious by 2014. The Obama administration was in favor of Clinton succeeding him and was going to make sure she was the nominee. Those with ears heard the message. I heard it.
I wasn’t happy about it, but I heard it.
And then it became a question of whether anyone could step and put a halt to it, and it quickly became clear that the party was united behind the idea and there would be no establishment faction active in funding or recruiting an alternative.
Sanders did really well, largely because people did not want this succession. But he would have needed allies, powerful allies, and he didn’t have them.
It was night and day compared to the last time around when it was clear from early on that Obama had very powerful backers in the donor class and in the highest levels of the Democratic power structure. When he put that together with his organizing skills, he had just enough, barely, to win.
Thinking Sanders could do the same without any of those assets and against the will of a very popular president (within the party), was delusional, and so I refused to encourage anyone in thinking it was a realistic endeavor.
Given the performance of the establishment over the past decade for sure, I think that Sanders not having establishment backers and not needing them was the point. It seems that when Sanders became no longer Bernie Who? and no longer a running joke and no longer intimidated by the what had been hardwired by the establishment to defeat any opposition primary candidate who would not heel, that the Clinton campaign opened whatever attack they thought would deprive him of voters and crush his movement.
If Obama’s establishment support is as you say, the crushing of OFA influence at the DNC was not an accident.
At a moment when the Democratic establishment needs change more than it has since the 1920s, it seems to be absolutely and positively resistant to change.
I saw a point made today that if you wanted to unite a white working class movement with a party establishment largely controlled by blacks and females, one of the first things you have to confront is white racism. The Democratic Party never really has found a way to do that, especially during the last eight years of Obama’s dominance in the media. That is a challenge for both Clinton and Sanders in different ways. Especially that a full-throated bigot is the nominee of the Republican Party after decades of allowing the nationalization of the Confederacy and pretending that looking the other way will make bigotry go away.
Jesse Helms was elected over Democratic candidate Nick Galiafinakis in North Carolina in 1972. Laughing at him never made him go away no more than it made Strom Thurmond go away.
With Trump, the danger for Democrats is being too lake as in the Gandhi saying: First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win. And still establishment Democrats pretend that Trump is not a danger and they do not need to widen their base to the left.
Creating it a delusional endeavor was a self-fulfilling prophecy to the extent that your writing persuaded potential Sanders voters from voting for Sanders in the primaries. Watch what your, “I was right” crowing gets you.
My thinking is that you were and still are lucky. There is much to unwind before (1) the end of the Democratic Convention and (2) the results from Election Day.
And by golly, once again, the Congress and the legislatures are far more important this year, primary balloting is much more chaotic, and the Democratic establishment is too busy trying to put away Sanders to care.
It’s not a question whether it was “realistic”. It was morally necessary and highly courageous, and rather than doingit as some kind of hopeless symbolic “witness” or protest, he put everything he could into it, inspired millions. As a result, though he had practically no backers at the start, he has built a vibrant insurgent movement throughout the nation, especially inspiring youth of all races and ethnicities. Why one would not want to encourage this even if one were convinced that he could not literally win the nomination, is beyond me.
And now has the network and authority to fill in some empty challenger spots in the Congress and legislatures with Berniecrats. A number of these were for unopposed Republicans before the Berniecrat stepped forward.
The legislative races are more likely to bear fruit for Berniecrats this year, especially in states in which the Republican Party has failed miserably.
Who and where specifically? This would be good to know. People could contribute or help out.
I tried to make a list of all the Berniecrats running for House and Senate, but I don’t have one for statehouse candidates.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/5/19/17549/0394#108
Great to see this.
Here are some details.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-endorsements_us_570e98d5e4b0ffa5937df6f8
And then of course there’s Tim Canova
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/21/politics/bernie-sanders-debbie-wasserman-schultz/
These are the only ones Bernie has actually endorsed so far. But there are many other candidates for house and senate who have endorsed Bernie:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/5/19/17549/0394#108
There must be a lot of others even further down the ticket.
Suspect you have it a bit backwards as to who was driving the bus. HRC was in a stronger position when she and Obama sat down to make their deal than IMO is generally recognized. Did Obama nix the VP slot for her or did she not want it? As calculating as the Clintons are, on this question, I’d go with Obama nixing it. However, she and Bill had to go along with it; so, that’s where the notion of compensation comes into the picture for me. SOS (which can be as high profile as VP) with maximum deference to her authority, pay off her campaign debts, control of the DNC (what she didn’t have in ’08 and likely blames for her loss), and admin support for a ’16 run. As SOS, HRC would have been in a better position to challenge Obama in ’12 if he became vulnerable than as VP. Doubt she would have asked for or Obama have agreed to more than a four year stint as SOS, and doubt that either wanted to renew it after those four years.
Fascinating that HRC is able to use her horrible record as SOS to advance her claims of being qualified for POTUS.
Why ANY Hispanic would vote for HC after the neocon resumption of South American disruptions from her SOS is a mystery to me. Bush had his hands full in Iraq and gave them a breather.
heh — January 2006 A Case for Staying in Iraq
One of the first moves by Obama/HRC was to put a kibosh on Latin/South American independence from the US. So far, “we” seem to be ahead, but it might be temporary and only until the people in those countries figure out who has been creating their national political problems again and how they expect to profit from them.
You cannot imagine the malign influence of our agri-business in Latin America on indigenous and environment.
A huge number of Hispanics have ancestors in this country since before being absorbed as US states. Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Florida.
They never were connected with Central America and South America. And South America is the ancestral origin of a minority of Hispanics.
Your mystery is hardly one at all.
And Clinton’s experience as Secretary of State is seen by most voters as qualifying her to be President and “able to make the tough decisions” — an important point for the “first female President”.
The ability to fire employees and the ability to order people killed is the sine qua non of “leadership” in most societies.
Are the descendants of Spanish-spekaing people in the lands that later became parts of the US really still Latino’s? How many generations does that go back? Come to think of it, all this identity politics is driving me crazy. Now i’m not even sure what/who a Latino/Hispanic is.
In Texas, been getting more and more dilute for several decades.
A Hispanic refers to someone who comes from a Spanish speaking country. A Latino is someone who’s roots are from Latin America.
So Spain is Hispanic, but Brazil is not. Brazil is Latino, but Spain is not.
If your speaking to an individual that it not from America, I would advise using their country of origin, Mexican, El Salvador, etc.
But really, it rarely comes up.
.
I was talking about the Hispanic/Latino label in US identity politics without reference to country of origin. Of course it’s absolutely not a matter of European Spanish people. I know Hispanics who preferred to be called Latinos. I’ve started to call them Americans to avoid any confusion.
Hispanic in the view of the census are Spanish-speakers. That is typically the point of the right-wingers who demand they speak English. They don’t like people they discriminate against speaking a language they can’t understand. It gives them the jitters, which is where half of the hatred comes from–fear of retaliation for discrimination. They can exactly imagine themselves in the other’s position, and it scares the hell out of them enough to create a big market for the firearms industry.
That it’s their own horror fantasy escapes them.
The category remains bizarre. Maybe they speak fluent English and broken Spanish. What a screwup identity politics is.
This is an unacceptable commentary. An acceptable commentary would affirm the prerogative of the majority population to tell minority populations how they may identify themselves and accordingly align themselves politically.
Meant to include that I can’t understand why when given a choice any AA would vote for her after she trashed Obama in ’08 and the long history of the Clintons throwing AAs (as a group or prominent individuals) under the bus. But religion is a powerful drug.
Curious, do AAs venerate New Deal policies like older WASPs? Have they embraced inclusive class conflict? Was it there, but hidden by a complicit press?
I suspect it is the familiarity of clientelism that holds them to HC in this primary.
The New Deal (during FDR’s tenure) was very different for AAs and white folks. (Not using WASPs because Catholics were part of that white New Deal coalition.) AAs at the time were mostly Republicans and while they may have recognized that FDR wasn’t like racist Democrats, AAs were discriminated against in parts of the New Deal policies and that it was by design because passage of the legislation was dependent on southern Democrats.
Still during those years, AAs (outside the south where they could vote) were moving towards supporting Democrats. Truman pushed that along by ordering the integration of the military. LBJ was in the giant among Dem Presidents in this area. (Which is why the historically inaccurate presentation in “Selma” (which is otherwise an okay movie) is harmful.)
I suspect that ultimately what gets venerated has a lot to do with who gets venerated. And the who tends to be identity driven.
by the later part of FDR’s time blacks were definitely part of the urban Democratic machines. It’s generally reported that this was influential in the selection of the less known Truman as VP in 1944 instead of a southerner (James Byrnes is usually mentioned).
Whatever the New Deal was in FDR’s time, it continued to evolve. There was JFK, there was Johnson.
Yes — but that wasn’t the question and in the minds of ordinary Americans the New Deal = FDR. The most significant expansions of the New Deal were those pushed through during LBJ’s term in office.
The question was whether AAs venerate new deal policies, and I understood that to refer to new deal policies, in the broad sense, as we knew them in their Johnsonian form before the last few decades of onslaught. Because nobody need go back to the 1930s for that. And I believe the Great Society poverty and low-income programs have been more attacked than the New Deal programs like Social Security.
Note, Glass-Steagall wasn’t repealed until 1999.
What percentage of the population would you say that identifies the New Deal with legislation from the early 1930s through the late 1960s compared with the percentage that identifies the New Deal with FDR?
I’d say that you and I are in a small minority that would be in the former, and therefore I interpreted the question to mean the New Deal legislation as enacted during FDR’s tenure, and from that guessed that the New Deal wasn’t as venerated among AAs as it is among white Democrats/liberals.
This 2012 PPP poll suggests that my guess is correct. The crosstabs are decent, but not detailed enough to draw any firm conclusions. What can be seen is:
FDR — D (Democrats) and AA (African Americans)
Favorable – 79% (D); 63% (AA)
Unfavorable – 8% (D); 18% (AA)
Don’t know – 13% (D); 19% (AA)
The number for white Democrats if it were broken out would be higher than the 79% aggregate. (It may be worth noting that the 18% unfavorable for FDR is the same as that for WJC.) Then there’s this:
LBJ —
Favorable – 56% (D); 62% (AA)
Unfavorable – 27% (D); 16% (AA)
Don’t know – 18% (D); 22% (AA)
In this poll, AAs generally were less generous to Democratic presidents than Democrats as a whole were. One exception is LBJ and the other exception seems not to have a racial bias which is heartening:
BHO —
Favorable – 80% (D); 82% (AA)
Unfavorable – 16% (D); 17% (AA)
Don’t know – 5% (D); 1% (AA)
Activists in the labor movement must recognize that the question of which must take priority, anti-racist or labor struggle, is a false one. The two are inextricably intertwined and mutually dependent. The labor movement will never succeed without fighting and eradicating racism. Likewise, we cannot eliminate racism without eliminating the material inequality upon which it feeds.
The history of racism’s development in the United States, starting from the very beginning, helps illustrate its importance to workers and unions. Colonial elites implemented racist laws largely in response to unified worker resistance. In 1676, a united front of white indentured servants and African slaves rebelled against Virginia’s ruling class. For wealthy colonists, Bacon’s Rebellion was one of several white-and-black colonial uprisings whose solidarity sent shivers down elites’ spines.
Only after these rebellions did the colonial ruling elite implement the racist and caste-hardening Slave Codes, codifying American racism by prohibiting whites to be employed by Blacks, criminalizing the touching of whites by Blacks, establishing separate judicial courts and more. In the face of labor solidarity, early wealthy Americans laid the foundation for centuries of institutionalized racism to divide and conquer discontented American laborers. Multi-colored labor solidarity was to be destroyed at all costs.
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/19038/unions-labor-black-lives-matter-anti-racist-racial-justi
ce
Again and again, class struggle has been sidelined by race. In the present era, very influential police and prison guard unions are huge impediments to finding common cause with minorities. The Prison-Industrial Complex is probably the major source of growing union membership. What does THAT say? Could a better wall have been constructed between haves and have littles?
It might be a false one, but it is the easiest for employers to sell. Of course hiring desperately unemployed people as scabs contributes to the notion, especially when the employers makes sure that the usual numbers are reversed.
The invention of the frontier in the 1680s was all about sidelining the class struggle by race. That event in Virginia and South Carolina defined “Indian”, “Negro”, and “white” (notice the conventional capital letters; white is the default.
Sidelining is not a bug; it is a feature of American politics, baked in from the beginning.
But religion is a powerful drug.
Maybe you can find a snarkier way to infantilize African American voters.
Not my intended meaning — underwriting continues to vex me. Shame on me for not including in that comment that I don’t understand “faith based” voters — regardless of whether they approach politics as a belief in one political party or their religious affiliation defines their political affiliation.
If you weren’t always prepped to view anything I write in the harshest and most negative light, perhaps you would have asked for clarification.
They aligned early on with African-American networks of support and nurtured those networks of leadership over 20 years. That’s a basis of friendship type relationships with influential African-Americans like Vernon Jordan and most African-American Democratic politicians, whom they have stepped up to support with their campaign appearances. Those long-term personal relationships don’t disappear with an election year misstep. And some of those leaders have beefited by those policies that you say threw African-Americans under the bus. And all of them have influence in various localities that enable them to nonetheless turn out the votes for Democratic candidates who work to seek their support.
Those are not national relationships that are built overnight, as nalbar rightly pointed out in another post.
That’s how it happens in most localities of the US as well.
It’s truly amazing to see how her massive free-fall in favorability started THE MOMENT she inaugurated her campaign (i.e. exactly when she stepped down as SoS):
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinton-favorable-rating
For those who missed it:
https://mic.com/articles/24381/hillary-clinton-2016-super-pac-is-ready-for-hillary#.EzhwNHZcf
And the SoS was a convenient tool for the Clinton Family Foundation which serves as their financial & lifestyle base.
And I miss you when you’re around…
Projection becomes hard to sustain, no?
The worst loneliness can be experienced in a close, approving relationship.
In terms of personal quality, he was a gift.
But who will keep Hillary away from the nuclear codes?
Don’t worry Voice. As long as Hillary Clinton has lots of wealth and property, a family with grandchildren (one on the way), she’ll will protect her personal interests which, incidentally, might also correspond with yours. Triangular heart, she has. Donald Trump’s heart is more rectangular. Bernie Sander’s nearly circular.
Trump is a sociopath. Discussions of his heart are absurd.
So is Hillary.
Are approval numbers like a popularity contest, the most congenial kid on the block? What good does it do anyone if Obama’s approval numbers go up (except Obama personally of course, ‘Oh gosh, they do like me after all.’). The big question is will Hillary Clinton be a different quantity when her approval numbers go up (If they ever do)? Or would the change be due to her total ideological transformation? We are now witnessing her mommy-knows-best moment: ‘Bernie, boy, get out of the way’. Not even please!
They have some correlation with electoral outcomes but really they’re not worth a whole lot. Basically, incumbent approval is relevant as a predictor in an incumbent election before heavy polling gets underway.
In other words, these approval polls don’t add any information that we weren’t getting from the current slate of polling.
That second “if” is a tad worrisome given the history of Clinton campaigns.
Ouch….https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-election-2016-shapes-up-as-a-contest-of-negativ
es/2016/05/21/8d4ccfd6-1ed3-11e6-b6e0-c53b7ef63b45_story.html
Unlike any previous election? The 1804 election comes readily to mind. The 1964 “Commie” vs. the “Psycho” campaign as well. Come to think of it, the 1964 has framed most recent election narratives and stereotyped opponents’ views of the opposing party to the point that they’ve lost any persuasive power.
One of the first things Obama did as President was to strip lobbyists from financial access to the DNC. That is now gone just in time for an election.
Or more accurately, the more blatant forms of lobbyist action were eliminated.
You really don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, as Joni Mitchell wrote about other things long ago.
There has been no restoration and increasingly likely to be. Both the New Deal and the progress of the civil rights era seem spent. The antiwar sentiment is long gone. Cynicism has conquered naivete an crushed it in the ground. Half steps forward and full steps backward have become the fashionable norm.
And the wisdom of the blogs is that California Democrats should not choose in the California primary but realize that its over and fall in behind Hillary Clinton and whatever policies her campaign desires. And if one doesn’t, one obviously are all sorts of crypto-Trumpist bad things. The Democratic Party is no longer the grassroots or even the delegates, it is a public relations instrument of the candidate and the lobbyists who support them.
None dare call that dangerous arrogance without extraordinary efforts to silence them.
The world my parents and their parents made is definitely gone. The Boomers take the rap but it was the Gen X’ers in their youth who responded to Ronald Reagan the way the Millennials are responding to Bernie Sanders. There was a saying in the early 1970s that if you couldn’t talk to your parents generation (the Cold War generation) about war, you could at least get understanding from your grandparents’ generation (the World War I generation). Bernie is just older enough to have been that part of the Silent Generation that fueled the civil rights movement before 1964 (the benchmark for Boomers).
Obama stands at a similar part of the Boomer generation, just at the point that youth were dissatisfied with the personal, familial, and political chaos of the 1970s. Unfamiliar with a lobotomized left that by the end of the Vietnam war had totally disappeared from view into the post-Watergate consensus. Unfamiliar with a Republican Party that had once had both Everett Dirksen and Charles Percy as leaders from Illinois. And saw Charles Lindsay as a reformist mayor of New York City. A Chicago without Richard J. Daley but with his old machine intact an increasingly a vehicle for minority ambitions (and equal opportunity corruption). And a generation who came early to the cognitive dissonance between the legislatively-mandated public (and private) school civics courses and the cynicism of practical politics and academic political science. The transition of focus from “citizenship” to “power” that does not even keep up the mask of constitutionality as it once was so careful to do.
Now toward the end of the Obama administration we can tote up what “Yes we can” do as a government and society. And how mighty the backlash is for a black President just being a reality in America.
I have said before and say again that 2015 and 2016 resemble nothing so much as 1875 and 1876.
Nothing in that is as concerning as a Clinton win turning into the Pyrrhic victory of the Hayes victory. And nothing is as frightening as the Republican Party in 2016 rolling out the Mississippi Plan that the Democrats rolled out in 1875, but this time with the legitimate authority of the nation’s law enforcement doing the suppression of voters.
And not just in the former Confederacy. Michigan, Wisconsin, possibly Illinois, Arizona, Missouri, and Kansas are states most likely to join the Confederacy states in voter suppression.
Equivocating about #blacklivesmatter and failure to deliver strong accountability for wayward police departments quickly has increased the risk. And of course, the Trump campaign likely will push the situation to turn out white voters.
Meanwhile the progressive circular firing squad continues because it is so much easier than thinking about policies and actual electoral tactics for uniting the Democratic Party with both wings and a broad constituency. But that wouldn’t suit either the lobbyist superdelegates or the professional political class who make their big money every election.
At least in this election we have something of an idea of who’s buying whom.
Let’s get a little specific here about which Democrats (or former ones).
Early on there were Joe Lieberman (recently independent) and Zell Miller. Most of them lost, but not all.Then there were a bunch of Blue Dogs in 2010 who would not claim Obama as President, some of whom were coy about birtherism. Most of them lost, but not all. Larry Kissell waffled. So did Mike McIntyre. And Heath Shuler. Then there was recently elected Joe Machin, Heidi Heitkamp. The Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill flipped. And Gov. Jay Nixon showed his true segregationist colors.
Let’s be clear once again where the ambivalence is mostly coming from among the Democrats.
Where the argument at the moment is how many independents will be welcomed into the Democratic Party and from which policy and ideolgical positions.
The current argument also has to do with the role of well-heeled lobbyists and established paid political classes in the Democratic Party and whether exclusion is a proper tactic for a general election.
It still is, as was the case with Obama’s negotiation with the Clinton campaign, the job of the winner to create party unity even among the ambivalent.
The never-failing equation of those two lousy candidates, Clinton and Sanders, is very helpful in interpreting the current political scene. Especially in comparison with someone who is completely out of the running.
He’s just working on constructing monuments to Obama. Before history weighs in and says, not among the greats.
Perhaps. But my intention there was not to express any opinion about Obama. I just don’t see the sense of equating Sanders and Clinton.
Granted Sanders is not going to be the nominee, nevertheless if there’s any hope for improvement in the Democratic Party, it will be almost entirely due to the tremendous work Sanders has done, and he needs to continue doing it.
The other pearl of wisdom I’ve been hearing is that Sanders “was not the man to do it.” Well, then, who the hell was?
No one. Fact is Sanders was the only one who had little to lose confronting the DNC and the Clinton coronation. Heard it directly from a Dem senator. Watch the DNC distribution of funds for the general election. Watch the retribution fall on his supporters in Congress in January.
OK – who would rate above Obama? Jefferson, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts, yes. But after that – who? Washington and Madison were very accomplished as Founders, but their presidencies weren’t remarkable. Wilson and LBJ were more accomplished, but their accomplishments come with some very nasty policies that did a lot of harm. Truman is perhaps comparable.
He might not be one of the greats, but if not he’s just outside the ranks, one of the – or maybe the – best of the rest. He’s certainly the best of my lifetime (so far).
JFK.
Speaking as a historian, I wouldn’t even rate Obama while he’s still in the White House. We need to see more of the consequences, and a lot of things that happened that we don’t know or know very imperfectly.
The presidencies of Lincoln, FDR, and JFK were so dramatic that they are exceptions to that rule. But usually it’s better to wait.
JFK is a special case, since the CIA has been working non-stop for the last 50 years to destroy his reputation.
JFK also was in office for less than three years.
Yes. And Lincoln’s second term lasted less than six weeks. Funny about that.
But if Lincoln had been limited to 1,036 days in office, his legacy would have been different. Perhaps far different considering everything that happened during his 1,037th to 1,503rd days in office, including passage of the 13th Amendment and the surrender of Lee. History could have been very different if A. Johnson had been President during those last 467 days of Lincoln’s time in office.
True, but when I refer to the JFK presidency, I mean whatever it was, that’s what it was. And had he not been assassinated, he would have been reelected and served two terms.
Lincoln’s vice president in his first term was Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, a Republican like Lincoln, not Andrew Johnson, a southerner and “War Democrat” who had rejected secession.
If LBJ had not had Vietnam, where would you rank him?
That question reminds me a bit of, “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?”
I am not one of those that believe Johnson was involved in the plot to kill JFK, but as soon as he became president he certainly reversed Kennedy’s plan to wind down the war. Not that it was his idea, but he was fine with it. So it’s literally impossible for me to dissociate Johnson from the war.
I actually listened to his speech over the radio,in real time, when he announced he would not run for reelection. No one knew he was going to say that. It was such a shock I almost fell off my chair. Of course, I considered it great news, but terrible things followed, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the treachery of Nixon (which we didn’t know about), the bloody Chicago convention, and continuation of the war for many more years.
Of course Johnson’s “Great Society” and “War on Poverty” were major extensions of FDR’s New Deal and Kennedy’s New Frontier. In retrospect I can appreciate this, but at the time, when we would watch or listen to the war news and “body counts” every single day, still mourning the Kennedys, it was impossible to have any lieing for him.
In retrospect I consider him a tragic figure.
Wait a second. I thought it was The Evil Clintons who assassinated JFK. That famous photo of Bill Clinton shaking JFK’s hand is as fake as Barack Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate.
Did anybody ever tell you you had a great sense of humor?
No, I didn’t think so.
Prefer to allow a proper amount of time to elapse and historians not so blinded by partisanship to weigh in before engaging in ranking assessments. In 1988 Republicans were 100% confident that Reagan was one of the greats (and belonged on Mt. Rushmore), and in 2000 Democrats believed Clinton was one of the greatest.
Generally it takes a decade or more for the full impact of the legislation and related executive actions of a president to be realized. (The S&L deregulation matured more quickly than that but Reagan was out of office when the general public managed to see that rotting carcass.)
It’s interesting on a post that’s ostensibly about how popular the President is, that it turns into how awful the President and Democratic nominee is thread.
I guess that’s where we are now.
It’s a chorus of Eeyores, innit?
Watching them question the voting preferences of POC is always worth the price of admission.
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Funny, I question the voting preferences of all who don’t vote the way I would wish them to vote. I don’t care if they’re white, brown, green, or purple.
Questioning is different than dismissing. I’d say that attributing the voting preferences of black voters, as Marie3 did, to being drugged by religion, is not questioning, not critiquing, but just plain old nastiness.
Eh, I did not read that as meaning getting their voting instructions from the pew or the clouds. Maybe her snark misfired? Or she should have put it in quotes?
There is a LOT of similarity between “faith” behavior and your “political” alignment on issues. Just look at the damn economists! Or female Catholics!
If it was an out layer, maybe. But it’s a continuation of a weeks long theme.
Generally speaking, if you are in a group and to your left is an out right cracker, to your right is a southern belle yearning to rebuild Tara, behind you are two people bragging how they will vote the racist candidate, and in front is a libertarian conman who prefers Rand and Ron Paul, and all of you are watching the speech of a person whom has never hired a POC in thirty years………
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If that is your true characterization of Sanders supporters, I think you have some work to do, too.
No doubt.
Constantly and throughly. Self-doubt and self assessment. All of which require self-awareness.
But I’m not the one missing the obvious dog whistles surrounding me.
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Drugged by religion.
That strikes me as hard to misinterpret.
If the point of reference had been evangelical supporting a wingnut, I think you would have read it literally and would indeed have thought of instructions from the “pew” (You may have meant “pulpit”.)
And BTW “faith” needn’t mean blind obedience. For many a religious faith, spiritual practice, etc is more of a guide to ethical choices.
Faith, impervious to data…”One of the more interesting moments in the history of science and scholarship was actually in 2008. For–as you know, for decades, economists had been claiming, with extreme arrogance, that they completely understood how to control and manage an economy. There were fundamental principles, like the efficient market hypothesis, rational expectations. And anyone who didn’t accept this was dismissed as a kind of a–some strange kind of moron. The whole system collapsed. The whole intellectual edifice collapsed in a most amazing fashion, and had no effect on the profession. ” (Noam Chomsky)
I will refrain from commenting on Hillary’s promise to put our economy in Bill’s hands again.
“Haters gotta hate”
(slaves)
Indeed, I did mean pulpit.
Sorry, I would probably have read it the same way if it were spoken of a wingnut. Not necessarily as being literal.
Faith colors agency in many different areas. Faith in things quite separate from your relationship with sky people.
“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
John Stuart Mills
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People determined to find offense can usually manage it.
Well, at least you have found your role in the group….the apologist.
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A polite term for enabler? LOL
You are pretty judgy, aren’t you. Guess you never misconstrue.
I don’t think I’m all that judgy. I let most pass by, not really caring. And I refuse to engage certain types here, it’s a waste of time. I won’t respond to them at all.
But God the bullshit around here these days!
Look at the start of this…all I did was make a simply observation…..to put it courser than I did originally, that having obvious crackers discuss POC voting patterns was amusing. It IS amusing. Of course you want to look at this one single post by this particular poster, but this is at least the fourth time the whole ‘black people only do what their ministers say’ theme has been posted by this person. Not to mention another group member (the one to your left) post blatant racist shit. You claim to have missed all of them. OK, then, I’m judgmental.
But you have spent an inordinate amount of time excusing away something that others beyond me found pretty egregious. That makes you an apologist, or enabler if you prefer.
And when it comes to racist shit, I think I want to be on the judgemental side, rather than the apologist side.
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Do you ascribe the same inability to understand when POC discuss WASP voting patterns? Or men discuss women’s voting patterns? Or Boomers discuss the under 35s? Find it equally risible? I suspect you think you have them all sorted from your postings.
A lot of your comments do seem to be more focused on the worthiness of the speaker, rather than countering the content, imo.
Neoliberal “market theology” is my bete noire, if you have not noticed. I can believe that neolibs are capable of having good intentions, and also believe they ignore or rationalize poor results and perverse incentives.
I advocate for labor.
Responded above. If I had said that I don’t understand why working class white males that have seen their incomes decline continue to listen to Rush and vote GOP, and followed that sentence with
Would you have been outraged?
Note there is a difference between what I said and your paraphrase of it as to be drugged by religion.
Have you never noticed that once faith (in almost anything or anyone by any individual or group) enters the picture that understanding the opinions and behaviors don’t make much sense to outsiders viewing it from a purely cognitive level? As questions about those opinions and behaviors will never lead to satisfactory rational explanations for the questioner, accepting it as a faith thing seems preferable to me to getting stuck questioning. If you view my acceptance as dismissal, that’s not my problem.
By the way, if we’re going to talk about how lousy a candidate Hillary Clinton is, and how great Obama is (has been, was), let’s open up the topic of why exactly Obama anointed Clinton his successor.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/super-pac-to-back-hillary-clinton-086848
I’d entertain the possibility that he had little choice in the matter, but if we’re talking about his legacy, clearly it’s an important question.
Here’s another piece of the puzzle:
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/jim-messina-john-podesta-priorities-usa-099849
This is mighty interesting too:
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/joe-biden-barack-obama-hillary-clinton-2016-presidential-elect
ion-097857
Doubt he had any choice. Also guess that in accepting the VP nom, Biden also accepted that it wouldn’t be a stepping stone to the POTUS nomination if HRC chose to run.
OTOH, not in the camp that sees a lovey-dovey relationship between the Clintons and the Obamas and Bidens. The Democratic party has been decimated during Obama’s tenure; so, it’s not as if he’s in a strong position to have much say about his successors.
I agree that Obama looks good compared to Hillary and Trump, but that’s a pretty low bar…
I wonder just what kinds of ex-president he is going to be. How he conducts himself once out of office will probably have some bearing on how his presidency is viewed by history. Will he take the Carter path, and build homes for the homeless and otherwise devote himself to continued public service? or will he go down the Bill Clinton path, and seek to stuff his pockets with as much money as possible? I hope for the former, but unfortunately I suspect the later is more likely.
I know what I’ve got. And, I already miss him. I miss him and FLOTUS. Makes me sad to even think about the day that they leave.
When it’s all said and done, Barack Obama will be placed in the Hall for Greatest American Presidents. I’m so glad that I’ll be able to tell future generations that I lived during his time.
I trust him.
Presidents have to make a lot of shit decisions, many of which the public never knows the true choices, which can be between bad and horrible.
I just trust him to make those terrible, soul crushing decisions.
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Not to get sentimental,
For all the crap he has taken, for all the shit Michelle has had to listen to, for all the horrible things his daughters have had to tolerate, for all the times he has had to side in rooms with racist fucks and not kick them out…
I wish nothing but happiness to this family. I hope he finds a second career that gives him fulfillment, and his family peace and satisfaction. They earned it three times over. If he wants to go for the money, I’m fine with that, he earned.
They define grace and dignity.
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The reality of public and personal abuse the Obama Presidency and family has endured is being actively discounted by protestations that Hillary withstood even more damaging personal attacks with stalwart grace. It is disgusting. Too many “Liberal” Dems has swerved away from issues of racism because Hillary’s politics can be discussed calmly in the living rooms of our segregated society.
Seriously, can’t you give it a rest for even five fucking minutes?
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Didn’t read all the comments, so pardon me if this is redundant, but I don’t really buy the idea that if she simply runs a ‘competent’ campaign that this is her election. IMHO, she’s going to have to contend with a united democratic party staying home election day.
Her real strength (legislative experience) is negated by the obvious continuation of Congressional gridlock (I wonder if even LBJ could get anything done from the WH in these conditions), her tenure as SoS has proven difficult to sift through for any glimmers of greatness, DWS and the party machine have cemented her insider status to the point of ridicule and she is at best flat as a campaigner from the point of view of Charisma (perhaps purely in contrast with O). Her wall street ties (what made her a good Senator for NY) are a liability this election and place her where Trump’s message hits home: Politicians are corrupted by moneyed influence and reform cannot come from someone inside the beltway. I’m worried that many Democrats will look at her, agree and stay home rather that vote for Trump.
Trump might only have the ear of 25-30% of the electorate, but might that not do if no one else shows (like 1996)?
“… (what made her a good Senator for NY)… “
Trust me, she wasn’t a good senator, and I take only a slight liberty with the language when I say that she wasn’t from New York, either. She moved to NY in 1999 for the sole purpose of running for Moynihan’s seat in 2000.
One other reason for Hillary carpetbagging to NY: the concentration of rich and famous circle of 1%ers.
For sure.
So Booman, what name should we give the “law” stating that all discussion threads here invariably lead to HILLARY bashing?
I we understand “New Deal” as strictly FDR’s new deal, then yeah, that’s valid and interesting. Good detective work to have found that.