Obama was a hand picked confection who checked multiple DNC boxes. He wasn't qualified in the 2008 election or in the 2007/2008 primaries; was hanging with Biden even then at the back of the pack of 8. HRC was the primary frontrunner, so Team Hopey Changey lifted much of her policy platform and planted it on his head, even though Obama had no intention of following through if elected. The DNC didn't want a white woman to the president before a black man.
Obama won with proclamations such as that his first move as president would be to codify Roe. When asked about that 2 two months after his inauguration, Obama sneered that women's reproductive rights weren't his "highest legislative priority", despite that her sat on a sweet 60-seat filibuster proof majority in Congress. Duh. He'd selected as his veep the half-wit deeply disliked and distrusted staunch Roman Catholic Biden, who'd proudly stated he was the most anti-abortion Democrat ever to serve in Congress.
Could a Republican candidate who raised taxes to save Social Security and gave amnesty to immigrants here illegally win a GOP primary? That would be Ronald Reagan. Both parties have moved so far towards the extreme that the center is a vast wasteland.
Reagan in 1986 reluctantly signed that amnesty bill, because Democrats in Congress finally agreed to circle back and fix the more noxious disastrous aspects in LBJ's 1965 rewrite of U.S. immigration law that was designed by Ted Kennedy to import endless streams of uneducated, unskilled, low wage, high breeding 3rd world poverty + chain migration relatives.
The nanosecond the ink was dry on Reagan's amnesty for 3 million mostly Guatemalans, Democrats reneged. Democrats taught Republicans not to trust them on all things immigration. And that's where America has remained on immigration for the past 40 years.
Democrats always lie to get elected. They pretend to be far to the right of how they intend to govern. Many Democrat voters are in on the game; they "vote blue no matter who" because they know they're actually going to get a party that pushes as far left as it can.
This substack is dedicated to pretending to fall for the campaign lies.
I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the LP's continued plausibly-deniable and vaguely stated characterization of radicals as moderates.
Gavin Newsom is not a moderate. Medicaid spending in California has skyrocketed under his leadership, in part due to giving free benefits to people living here illegally. He signed the following into law: SB 107 (makes CA a sanctuary state for gender-affirming care); AB 1955 (allows schools to refuse to notify parents about a child’s self-ID as trans; now quashed); AB 1084 (gender self-ID). California houses violent males in women's prisons. We have an emerging scandal over large-scale fraud in day care and hospices. Newsom used the term "apartheid" to describe Israel. His Bluesky posts are designed to inflame.
Moderates don't espouse any of these actions, much less all of them.
I live in CA and know he's done some good things, but seriously: he's not a moderate. He's just playing one to triangulate his popularity. Spanberger and a long list of others have used that strategy, and we've seen the results.
It's time to stop falling for this routine. I know the LP criticizes the Democrats, but the criticism tends to be of a general type that spares individuals -- especially individuals with a high profile. It's too nice.
If Newsom or Harris gets the nomination, the Republicans will win. Full stop. And maybe that will be a good thing, given the current state of the Democratic party. This idea, I think, needs to be covered better here. We need more condemnation of individuals who deny reality, pander to a radical base, and treat disagreement as a sign of an evil heart.
The Dems have become so consumed by ideology, they're like addicts who have to hit rock bottom before they can finally understand the damage they do to themselves and others.
That won't happen without more losses at the ballot box, more lawsuits forcing consequences of their radical platforms, and more willingness to describe people like Newsom, Harris, Talarico, Spanberger, and Platner as radicals. They don't have the national best interest at heart. Seriously: I don't even believe they have the best interests of their chosen favorites at heart. I tend to see them as weak people who pander to the sociology of whatever group they happen to be addressing.
So they're not leaders. They're followers with ambition.
I too live in CA and you are absolutely correct, Newsom is not in any sense a moderate, though he will make moderate-sounding comments now and then. However he does not follow them up with any policy changes, so he is clearly lying. Between the laws he has signed, and his even more out-there executive orders and agency rule-making, he is the most radical governor we have ever had.
As a follower of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, I believe that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy, and the moral is the distinction between good and evil.
It's curious to me how many of Obama's 2008 positions are moral rather than political.
I interpret the notion of the separation of church and state to mean the separation of politics and morality. But what do I know?
Obama would have no problem winning today. He was an empty suit who would say whatever he needed to say to get elected. That has not changed (and he's still a charismatic black man, the democrat gold standard), except for the fact that I believe he would be more aligned with today's democrats than the electorate of 2008.
I read Obama's memoir of his first two years as President, "A Promised Land." I wanted to read his justification for his famous lie, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period. No one can take it away from you." He repeated this promise dozens of times, then he broke it. If it was an honest mistake, how could Obama be so badly mistaken? If it was a deliberate lie, how can he justify it? In the book, he ignores the subject entirely. Not a word about it. All I can figure is that Obama thinks that no broken promise on his part requires any explanation or even any mention. He can sweep it under the rug.
So many plans sucked that the insurers were the ones to cancel the plans. Many existing plans wouldn't cover pre existing or basic prevention, and they didn't want to add it in.
Obamacare certainly isn't my ideal, but it's a million times better than what we had.
So, under the Affordable Care Act, you couldn't keep your health care plan even if you wanted to? In that case, Obama really was lying or else promising what he could not deliver.
Jonathan Gruber was an MIT economist who helped design the ACA. He commented, "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass."
Besides calling the ACA voluntary when in fact it was mandatory, Obama said that it would save the average American family $2,500 a year in medical cost. Gruber: "If any American really believes that Obamacare is going to control costs, I've got some real estate in Whitewater, Arkansas I'd like to sell them."
We saved $1200 a month. You could keep your plan, the insurance company canceling your plan is up to them, not the govt. Invisible hand of the market, blah blah blah. No one needs to sign up for the ACA to this day, never have. There is no federal penalty for not signing up, just like you don't have to collect SS or get medicaid.
"Don't like it, don't get it". You realize, don't you, that you didn't "save" $1200 a month -- someone else paid for you. So of course you think it's great.
The thing with insurance is it spreads out the risk. Well people might pay a little more but they don't lose the insurance when they become sick, and people who are older or have prior injuries don't have to pay thousands per month. Medicare for instance.
Before Obamacare the self employed could get low cost catastrophic care plans. Where you paid for all of your regular healthcare out of pocket but at the lower insurance company negotiated rates. You had coverage that would kick in if you wound up severely injured etc. Those plans were cheaper than anything on the exchanges and worked well for people who were generally healthy and self employed. Obamacare took those options away by outlawing them outright for not meeting its exorbitant coverage requirements, forcing people into more expensive insurance covering things they didn’t need. Hence the very legitimate grievances.
If they were like the plans we got at first they only lasted 6 months, then you had to renew, and they didn't cover pre existing. So if something really expensive happens, they simply didn't renew after 6 months. Pregnancy was pre existing.
Regular insurance that would cover cancer or major accidents cost us more than the mortgage, with ten thousand deductible. When I showed up to canvas for Obama I started recognising every self employed contractor walking in the door who was also volunteering. Many guys were simply uninsurable. Hard work means back problems and often joints. Forty is old in construction. Everyone has pre existing.
If I recall correctly the 6 month plans were an exception the Obama administration added to try and mollify the complaints. The old plans definitely were not time bound. There are 2 very legitimate use cases for preexisting conditions. One one each side of the argument.
1) Person 1 decides to forgo health insurance to save money. Then gets a cancer diagnosis and wants to buy coverage for it.
2) Person 2 has health insurance gets a cancer diagnosis and is subsequently dropped by their insurance company, then needs to buy new coverage.
It seems like we should be able to find a way to get person 2 covered without allowing person 1 to game the system, but the rhetoric always pretends one of the scenarios doesn’t exist.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, which after his second term is admittedly a stretch, he was primarily speaking to people with employer provided health insurance where this was clearly true. Next, he couldn’t fathom that people with their own low cost, low frills, high deductible individual plans might actually like them. It’s the latter group that was totally shafted by Obamacare.
My gestalt is that he was speaking to the former knowing they were large enough to derail the legislation and cynically didn’t care about the latter because they were too small to cause problems.
Yes, small business owners and the self-employed were really damaged by the ACA, and it continues to this day. Such people, and I was one of them, were quite willing to pay for the smaller expenditures out of pocket and save insurance for what it was really intended, to cover rare large events that can't be foreseen. On that basis, catastrophic insurance with a high deductible was affordable and made a lot of sense. The ACA outlawed that entirely and forced us all into plans that were far more expensive and covered a lot of services that we were paying for ourselves, spending much less than the additional premium. I hated it then and still do although I am now on Medicare. Obama had no right to take away my choice of an actual insurance plan, forcing me to buy prepaid medical services plan I did not want. But the insurance companies were all on board for the extra customers and federal subsidies.
"We consider figures like Obama to be liberal patriots..."
Obama is certainly not a liberal by the original, classical definition, nor is he a leader. Representatives definitely should reflect the will of the people they represent, but the Commander-in-Chief we elect should be the moral and ideological leader of our nation and not someone who adapts according to which way the wind is blowing. Obama was and is a feckless poser.
Perhaps you're being a tad too hard on him, but then, I still remember how let down I felt when his campaign won two marketing awards in 2009. It was then that I realized, "Oh, that's all it was, then."
And too many of today's Dem leaders seem to be followers with ambition rather than actual leaders.
Nothing matters materially for the country’s future nearly to the extent that the federal deficit and national debt do. They drive continued deindustrialization and asset inflation simultaneously. Neither party has produced a figure who sees and communicates the urgency of the situation, which gets worse every day. The “social issues” are all secondary, distractions from this mechanism which redistributes to the wealthy from the working classes, and the party since at least Obama and really Dukakis has been complicit. Please use your platform to try to understand what will actually help the working people and young of this country instead of getting bogged down in the weeds. This blog starts from wanting to help the right people, which is better than most, but doesn’t think clearly about what that would take.
The biggest advantage of paying for the deficit and the debt by printing money is that it can be done gradually. The biggest disadvantage is that it rewards some groups at the expense of others, automatically generating social and political tension. Since the group which gets the rewards decides how much money to print, the limit to the money-printing is how willing the out-groups are to riot.
The article isn’t totally wrong, but it’s definitely doing that thing where it picks a few convenient facts, lines them up just right, and then acts like it proved something huge. Yeah, Obama in 2008 held some positions that sound more “moderate” today—he publicly opposed gay marriage at the time (while supporting civil unions), supported the death penalty in certain cases, talked about personal responsibility in Black communities, and gave the usual pro-Israel rhetoric at AIPAC like basically every major politician back then. On abortion, he was always pro-choice, even if he used softer language about reducing it. On immigration, he criticized weak enforcement but also supported reform and a path to citizenship. So sure, some of that list is technically accurate—but it’s very obviously curated to make him sound more conservative than he actually was.
Because what they conveniently leave out is everything that doesn’t fit that narrative. Obama was also pushing for Obamacare, stronger financial regulations, progressive taxes, climate policy, and a bigger federal role in the economy. You know… actual Democratic policy. If you include all of that, suddenly he doesn’t look like some undercover Republican—he looks like exactly what he was: a mainstream Democrat with a slightly more moderate tone on a few cultural issues. Funny how that works.
The claim that Democrats have shifted left since 2008 is mostly true. More Democrats identify as liberal now, and the party has leaned more into college-educated voters. That part’s real. But the leap from “the party moved left” to “moderates can’t win anymore” is where it starts getting shaky. Joe Biden literally just won a primary and the presidency running as a moderate. Gavin Newsom is out here taking some positions that annoy progressives and he’s still near the top of the field. So the idea that you’d get, what, 1% in a primary for not being perfectly aligned is… a little dramatic.
Then there’s the whole “America is a center-right country” line, which gets thrown around like it’s some undeniable truth. It’s not. The country leans right on some things, left on others, and completely contradicts itself half the time. People want lower taxes and also want Social Security untouched. They want less government and also want the government to fix everything. It’s not a clean label—it’s a mess, which is why both parties can win.
The Seth Moulton example is another stretch. Yeah, he got backlash. Welcome to politics. That doesn’t suddenly mean the entire Democratic Party has zero tolerance for disagreement. Parties argue with themselves constantly—that’s not new, and it’s not unique.
So the real question—could Obama win a Democratic primary today? Yeah. Pretty easily. He lines up with the party on the vast majority of issues, he knows how to build a coalition, and like every successful politician, he evolved with the party over time. The idea that he’d show up today and get shut down because of a few 2008-era positions is just not grounded in reality.
At the end of the day, this whole argument boils down to taking a selectively edited version of Obama, freezing him in 2008, ignoring everything else about his platform, and then pretending that version wouldn’t survive today. It’s a nice narrative. It’s just not how politics actually works.
Your definition of ‘zero tolerance’ is… people disagreeing with them? That’s literally what tolerance looks like. Manchin and Fetterman are still Democrats and voting freely, and Sinema left on her own. That’s not ‘zero tolerance’—that’s messy democracy. Wild how ‘zero tolerance’ somehow still includes holding office, voting however you want, and going on TV to say it.
Manchin and Sinema left on their own, and Fetterman’s still a Democrat. If that’s ‘forced out,’ it’s the most polite purge in human history. Meanwhile Republicans actually did push people out... ask Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger how that went. See the difference?
The discussion is on democrats, so not sure why you are suddenly "what about...." If you think Manchin and Sinema weren't driven out, and that Fetterman won't be primaried by the loonies, then I have a bridge to sell you.
There is a difference between Republicans voting to remove someone from leadership or formally censuring party members and Democrats choosing not to run again. If you can't see that, keep your bridge... you're gonna need it.
Obama was a hand picked confection who checked multiple DNC boxes. He wasn't qualified in the 2008 election or in the 2007/2008 primaries; was hanging with Biden even then at the back of the pack of 8. HRC was the primary frontrunner, so Team Hopey Changey lifted much of her policy platform and planted it on his head, even though Obama had no intention of following through if elected. The DNC didn't want a white woman to the president before a black man.
Obama won with proclamations such as that his first move as president would be to codify Roe. When asked about that 2 two months after his inauguration, Obama sneered that women's reproductive rights weren't his "highest legislative priority", despite that her sat on a sweet 60-seat filibuster proof majority in Congress. Duh. He'd selected as his veep the half-wit deeply disliked and distrusted staunch Roman Catholic Biden, who'd proudly stated he was the most anti-abortion Democrat ever to serve in Congress.
Could a Republican candidate who raised taxes to save Social Security and gave amnesty to immigrants here illegally win a GOP primary? That would be Ronald Reagan. Both parties have moved so far towards the extreme that the center is a vast wasteland.
Reagan in 1986 reluctantly signed that amnesty bill, because Democrats in Congress finally agreed to circle back and fix the more noxious disastrous aspects in LBJ's 1965 rewrite of U.S. immigration law that was designed by Ted Kennedy to import endless streams of uneducated, unskilled, low wage, high breeding 3rd world poverty + chain migration relatives.
The nanosecond the ink was dry on Reagan's amnesty for 3 million mostly Guatemalans, Democrats reneged. Democrats taught Republicans not to trust them on all things immigration. And that's where America has remained on immigration for the past 40 years.
Democrats always lie to get elected. They pretend to be far to the right of how they intend to govern. Many Democrat voters are in on the game; they "vote blue no matter who" because they know they're actually going to get a party that pushes as far left as it can.
This substack is dedicated to pretending to fall for the campaign lies.
Obama lied to get elected. So what? They all do.
He did none of those things in practice.
Instead he incited a race war for no reason and destroyed any market feedback mechanisms to control healthcare costs.
The notion that Obama and Newsom are not ideologues is pretty bizarre.
I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the LP's continued plausibly-deniable and vaguely stated characterization of radicals as moderates.
Gavin Newsom is not a moderate. Medicaid spending in California has skyrocketed under his leadership, in part due to giving free benefits to people living here illegally. He signed the following into law: SB 107 (makes CA a sanctuary state for gender-affirming care); AB 1955 (allows schools to refuse to notify parents about a child’s self-ID as trans; now quashed); AB 1084 (gender self-ID). California houses violent males in women's prisons. We have an emerging scandal over large-scale fraud in day care and hospices. Newsom used the term "apartheid" to describe Israel. His Bluesky posts are designed to inflame.
Moderates don't espouse any of these actions, much less all of them.
I live in CA and know he's done some good things, but seriously: he's not a moderate. He's just playing one to triangulate his popularity. Spanberger and a long list of others have used that strategy, and we've seen the results.
It's time to stop falling for this routine. I know the LP criticizes the Democrats, but the criticism tends to be of a general type that spares individuals -- especially individuals with a high profile. It's too nice.
If Newsom or Harris gets the nomination, the Republicans will win. Full stop. And maybe that will be a good thing, given the current state of the Democratic party. This idea, I think, needs to be covered better here. We need more condemnation of individuals who deny reality, pander to a radical base, and treat disagreement as a sign of an evil heart.
The Dems have become so consumed by ideology, they're like addicts who have to hit rock bottom before they can finally understand the damage they do to themselves and others.
That won't happen without more losses at the ballot box, more lawsuits forcing consequences of their radical platforms, and more willingness to describe people like Newsom, Harris, Talarico, Spanberger, and Platner as radicals. They don't have the national best interest at heart. Seriously: I don't even believe they have the best interests of their chosen favorites at heart. I tend to see them as weak people who pander to the sociology of whatever group they happen to be addressing.
So they're not leaders. They're followers with ambition.
I too live in CA and you are absolutely correct, Newsom is not in any sense a moderate, though he will make moderate-sounding comments now and then. However he does not follow them up with any policy changes, so he is clearly lying. Between the laws he has signed, and his even more out-there executive orders and agency rule-making, he is the most radical governor we have ever had.
Yes, I would vote for Obama again. It would be nice if he could run for office again.
As a follower of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, I believe that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy, and the moral is the distinction between good and evil.
It's curious to me how many of Obama's 2008 positions are moral rather than political.
I interpret the notion of the separation of church and state to mean the separation of politics and morality. But what do I know?
Progressives would rather lose with a candidate they love than win with a candidate they tolerate.
This entire analysis has a Spanberger bait and switch hole in it.
Obama would have no problem winning today. He was an empty suit who would say whatever he needed to say to get elected. That has not changed (and he's still a charismatic black man, the democrat gold standard), except for the fact that I believe he would be more aligned with today's democrats than the electorate of 2008.
I read Obama's memoir of his first two years as President, "A Promised Land." I wanted to read his justification for his famous lie, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period. No one can take it away from you." He repeated this promise dozens of times, then he broke it. If it was an honest mistake, how could Obama be so badly mistaken? If it was a deliberate lie, how can he justify it? In the book, he ignores the subject entirely. Not a word about it. All I can figure is that Obama thinks that no broken promise on his part requires any explanation or even any mention. He can sweep it under the rug.
So many plans sucked that the insurers were the ones to cancel the plans. Many existing plans wouldn't cover pre existing or basic prevention, and they didn't want to add it in.
Obamacare certainly isn't my ideal, but it's a million times better than what we had.
So, under the Affordable Care Act, you couldn't keep your health care plan even if you wanted to? In that case, Obama really was lying or else promising what he could not deliver.
Jonathan Gruber was an MIT economist who helped design the ACA. He commented, "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass."
Besides calling the ACA voluntary when in fact it was mandatory, Obama said that it would save the average American family $2,500 a year in medical cost. Gruber: "If any American really believes that Obamacare is going to control costs, I've got some real estate in Whitewater, Arkansas I'd like to sell them."
We saved $1200 a month. You could keep your plan, the insurance company canceling your plan is up to them, not the govt. Invisible hand of the market, blah blah blah. No one needs to sign up for the ACA to this day, never have. There is no federal penalty for not signing up, just like you don't have to collect SS or get medicaid.
I don't understand all the crying.
Don't like it, don't get it.
"Don't like it, don't get it". You realize, don't you, that you didn't "save" $1200 a month -- someone else paid for you. So of course you think it's great.
The thing with insurance is it spreads out the risk. Well people might pay a little more but they don't lose the insurance when they become sick, and people who are older or have prior injuries don't have to pay thousands per month. Medicare for instance.
But 'someone' else is paying the bill. So the $1200 you 'saved' came from somewhere, right?
Before Obamacare the self employed could get low cost catastrophic care plans. Where you paid for all of your regular healthcare out of pocket but at the lower insurance company negotiated rates. You had coverage that would kick in if you wound up severely injured etc. Those plans were cheaper than anything on the exchanges and worked well for people who were generally healthy and self employed. Obamacare took those options away by outlawing them outright for not meeting its exorbitant coverage requirements, forcing people into more expensive insurance covering things they didn’t need. Hence the very legitimate grievances.
If they were like the plans we got at first they only lasted 6 months, then you had to renew, and they didn't cover pre existing. So if something really expensive happens, they simply didn't renew after 6 months. Pregnancy was pre existing.
Regular insurance that would cover cancer or major accidents cost us more than the mortgage, with ten thousand deductible. When I showed up to canvas for Obama I started recognising every self employed contractor walking in the door who was also volunteering. Many guys were simply uninsurable. Hard work means back problems and often joints. Forty is old in construction. Everyone has pre existing.
If I recall correctly the 6 month plans were an exception the Obama administration added to try and mollify the complaints. The old plans definitely were not time bound. There are 2 very legitimate use cases for preexisting conditions. One one each side of the argument.
1) Person 1 decides to forgo health insurance to save money. Then gets a cancer diagnosis and wants to buy coverage for it.
2) Person 2 has health insurance gets a cancer diagnosis and is subsequently dropped by their insurance company, then needs to buy new coverage.
It seems like we should be able to find a way to get person 2 covered without allowing person 1 to game the system, but the rhetoric always pretends one of the scenarios doesn’t exist.
There was a penalty written into the law, it was just never enforced. Too much political blowback.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, which after his second term is admittedly a stretch, he was primarily speaking to people with employer provided health insurance where this was clearly true. Next, he couldn’t fathom that people with their own low cost, low frills, high deductible individual plans might actually like them. It’s the latter group that was totally shafted by Obamacare.
My gestalt is that he was speaking to the former knowing they were large enough to derail the legislation and cynically didn’t care about the latter because they were too small to cause problems.
The tide turned against Obama by the 2010 midterms, not even 2 years after his inauguration.
Yes, small business owners and the self-employed were really damaged by the ACA, and it continues to this day. Such people, and I was one of them, were quite willing to pay for the smaller expenditures out of pocket and save insurance for what it was really intended, to cover rare large events that can't be foreseen. On that basis, catastrophic insurance with a high deductible was affordable and made a lot of sense. The ACA outlawed that entirely and forced us all into plans that were far more expensive and covered a lot of services that we were paying for ourselves, spending much less than the additional premium. I hated it then and still do although I am now on Medicare. Obama had no right to take away my choice of an actual insurance plan, forcing me to buy prepaid medical services plan I did not want. But the insurance companies were all on board for the extra customers and federal subsidies.
"We consider figures like Obama to be liberal patriots..."
Obama is certainly not a liberal by the original, classical definition, nor is he a leader. Representatives definitely should reflect the will of the people they represent, but the Commander-in-Chief we elect should be the moral and ideological leader of our nation and not someone who adapts according to which way the wind is blowing. Obama was and is a feckless poser.
Perhaps you're being a tad too hard on him, but then, I still remember how let down I felt when his campaign won two marketing awards in 2009. It was then that I realized, "Oh, that's all it was, then."
And too many of today's Dem leaders seem to be followers with ambition rather than actual leaders.
Nothing matters materially for the country’s future nearly to the extent that the federal deficit and national debt do. They drive continued deindustrialization and asset inflation simultaneously. Neither party has produced a figure who sees and communicates the urgency of the situation, which gets worse every day. The “social issues” are all secondary, distractions from this mechanism which redistributes to the wealthy from the working classes, and the party since at least Obama and really Dukakis has been complicit. Please use your platform to try to understand what will actually help the working people and young of this country instead of getting bogged down in the weeds. This blog starts from wanting to help the right people, which is better than most, but doesn’t think clearly about what that would take.
Unfortunately, I don't think Ray Dalio could win a primary, nor do I think he has any interest in running.
The biggest advantage of paying for the deficit and the debt by printing money is that it can be done gradually. The biggest disadvantage is that it rewards some groups at the expense of others, automatically generating social and political tension. Since the group which gets the rewards decides how much money to print, the limit to the money-printing is how willing the out-groups are to riot.
Worried if the author thinks Obamas positions were anything other than election camouflage.
Disappointed if this guy thinks we were silly enough to take Oshows bait.
Clearly the “policy” is to SAY what it takes and then DO what you’re told to do. This is why a less than optimal Trump makes them gibber.
The article isn’t totally wrong, but it’s definitely doing that thing where it picks a few convenient facts, lines them up just right, and then acts like it proved something huge. Yeah, Obama in 2008 held some positions that sound more “moderate” today—he publicly opposed gay marriage at the time (while supporting civil unions), supported the death penalty in certain cases, talked about personal responsibility in Black communities, and gave the usual pro-Israel rhetoric at AIPAC like basically every major politician back then. On abortion, he was always pro-choice, even if he used softer language about reducing it. On immigration, he criticized weak enforcement but also supported reform and a path to citizenship. So sure, some of that list is technically accurate—but it’s very obviously curated to make him sound more conservative than he actually was.
Because what they conveniently leave out is everything that doesn’t fit that narrative. Obama was also pushing for Obamacare, stronger financial regulations, progressive taxes, climate policy, and a bigger federal role in the economy. You know… actual Democratic policy. If you include all of that, suddenly he doesn’t look like some undercover Republican—he looks like exactly what he was: a mainstream Democrat with a slightly more moderate tone on a few cultural issues. Funny how that works.
The claim that Democrats have shifted left since 2008 is mostly true. More Democrats identify as liberal now, and the party has leaned more into college-educated voters. That part’s real. But the leap from “the party moved left” to “moderates can’t win anymore” is where it starts getting shaky. Joe Biden literally just won a primary and the presidency running as a moderate. Gavin Newsom is out here taking some positions that annoy progressives and he’s still near the top of the field. So the idea that you’d get, what, 1% in a primary for not being perfectly aligned is… a little dramatic.
Then there’s the whole “America is a center-right country” line, which gets thrown around like it’s some undeniable truth. It’s not. The country leans right on some things, left on others, and completely contradicts itself half the time. People want lower taxes and also want Social Security untouched. They want less government and also want the government to fix everything. It’s not a clean label—it’s a mess, which is why both parties can win.
The Seth Moulton example is another stretch. Yeah, he got backlash. Welcome to politics. That doesn’t suddenly mean the entire Democratic Party has zero tolerance for disagreement. Parties argue with themselves constantly—that’s not new, and it’s not unique.
So the real question—could Obama win a Democratic primary today? Yeah. Pretty easily. He lines up with the party on the vast majority of issues, he knows how to build a coalition, and like every successful politician, he evolved with the party over time. The idea that he’d show up today and get shut down because of a few 2008-era positions is just not grounded in reality.
At the end of the day, this whole argument boils down to taking a selectively edited version of Obama, freezing him in 2008, ignoring everything else about his platform, and then pretending that version wouldn’t survive today. It’s a nice narrative. It’s just not how politics actually works.
"That doesn’t suddenly mean the entire Democratic Party has zero tolerance for disagreement." -- Three words for you: Manchin, Sinema, Fetterman
Your definition of ‘zero tolerance’ is… people disagreeing with them? That’s literally what tolerance looks like. Manchin and Fetterman are still Democrats and voting freely, and Sinema left on her own. That’s not ‘zero tolerance’—that’s messy democracy. Wild how ‘zero tolerance’ somehow still includes holding office, voting however you want, and going on TV to say it.
Manchin and Simema were forced out - and Fetterman will be next. Zero tolerance....
Manchin and Sinema left on their own, and Fetterman’s still a Democrat. If that’s ‘forced out,’ it’s the most polite purge in human history. Meanwhile Republicans actually did push people out... ask Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger how that went. See the difference?
The discussion is on democrats, so not sure why you are suddenly "what about...." If you think Manchin and Sinema weren't driven out, and that Fetterman won't be primaried by the loonies, then I have a bridge to sell you.
There is a difference between Republicans voting to remove someone from leadership or formally censuring party members and Democrats choosing not to run again. If you can't see that, keep your bridge... you're gonna need it.