Ask people what single line they remember about Barack Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, and most will quote his words about unity, about there not being a black, white, Latino, or Asian America, but rather the United States of America.
The TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party's issues were entirely fiscal yet the Democrats, including President Obama, attacked the Tea Party as racist. But, did the Tea Party apply a racial test for membership? No. Did the Tea Party promote racist policies like segregated schools? No. Did they run non-white candidates for office? Yes, they did, and some of them won. Then, why the racism smear? Because many, even most Democrats will believe a racism accusation without question, no evidence required.
In his latest memoir, "A Promised Land", former President Obama called the Tea Party "the descendants of Jim Crow", which makes Reifowitz's portrait of Obama as a healer of racial divisions rather doubtful.
The Democrats’ insistence that all opposition to Obama’s policies from the right were racially motivated. The most ridiculous was that since Obamacare was based on Romneycare the only reason Republicans opposed it was due to race. Never mind that Romney was a Republican governor of a very blue state working with a Democrat controlled legislature. Never mind that it’s entirely ideologically consistent for a Republican to support something at the state level but oppose it at the federal level.
The main differences between the TEA party and Occupy Wall Street were that the TEA party got permits and cleaned up after itself while Occupy Wall Street did neither. And Occupy Wall Street was saying they should have bailed out the little guy not the fat cats, while the TEA party said they shouldn’t have bailed out anyone.
Yes, and this was mostly not Obama's fault either, but he should have done much more to counteract it. I did not support him then, and believe he was a deeply flawed president. Still, President Obama really did try to unify and understand differant perspectives with many of his speaches. I and many others found this comforting. This is something that sadly no US president or even major party US Presidential candidate has even really tried to do since.
Obama's first term and early into his secund, was really the last time we had a common cultural identity in the United States, tense as it often was. He was the last US president to actually ever have a high approval rating! Just think about that one for a minute. The seeds of our collective American breakup were in part long in the making and partly do to the rise of new technolgies and the decline of traditional media. But things finally gave way, and have truly not been the same since!
Yes, unfortunatelly this is true that Obama did at times make these sort of unfounded accusations, and I say this as someone who was never a Tea Party psrson. I can also strongly criticize various foriegn, fiscal and security state policies of Obama, and even some politically motivated weaponization of the IRS that he engaged in. I did not vote for Obama, opting to vote Green instead, despite still being a Democrat who mostly voted for Democrats back then (I am a true independent now). But I still mostly liked Obama as President.
Many of these prolomatic policies under Obama were also not only Obama's doing, but also reflected both lingering neocon influence (in some cases) and also the growing nerrow mindedness of Democrats in general durring that time. And Obama himself for all his many severe flaws, really did try to unify with his public speaches, and had a generally transcsndent quality about him. No US president or major party candidate has really even tried similerly unify the public since then. I think Trump actuallly could have this time, -but he seems to have no desire to. Nope, he is in petty and revenge minded ,warror mode instead.
Obama's first term and maybe early into his secund, was I think the last time we really had a common cultural identity in the United States, tense as it often was. The great rescesion was in many ways unifying but the highly uneven and much delayed recovery that came after it was anything but unifying! During Obama's secund term, this common culture rather quickly began to unravel.
The rise of social media and smartphones and the decline of traditional media had a lot to do with it. So did the fact that an unprecidented number of people finally reached a breaking point with feeling distrustful and betrayed by politicians (or trying to get along with or empathize with those whom they stridently disagreed with), and so just gave up any attempt to compromise or even try to be resonable. The seeds for this break had been there the whole time, and they kept getting watered and not really delt with effectively, -it just took a long time for enough of the weeds to finally sprout and take over the flower bed.
Basically, we reached our cultural high point of post World War 2 liberal society (which was always deeply unsustainable and often in conflict below the surface) just before it all began to fall apart!
Hillary Clinton was probably the most unlikeable candidate that ever ran for president. She fell down every 5 minutes. She wiped her phones and computers. She acted entitled. She called voters "deplorables". She used personal email for security communications, wiped her server and smashed her cell phones.
Can a Liberal write anything without including Trump? My general rule of thumb, when one ideology writes about the opposing ideology, it is never fair, accurate nor worth reading. Try writing without Trump in your posts. After all, using Trump as your standard to compare your own party too, by your own definition, is using the lowest standard there is. If you aspire to be just better than Trump, as an Independent, I have no use for you.
By the way, what does today’s political environment have to do with the environments of the past? Trump was elected to change the whole system. Because the old systems from the past sucked. What was, good or bad, is not what is relevant to today. Mainly because what was, was lies and rhetoric to get elected. Nothing more.
America was founded on the idea of the freedom to become, to the best of your ability, the best you could be, based on your personal decisions. Rush Limbaugh, the quintessential conservative, always drew the picture of the economic pie as a platform of growth and aiways rejected the zero sum game unequivocally. In his opinion, that was the Left's conception, that whites hoarded the pie, taking ever larger slices and diminishing the remains, leaving crumbs for everyone else. Limbaugh totally dismissed that premise as absurd.
The Left's refusal to honor the individual, its insistence oawesome abilityn labeling groups and then applying policy to them, destroyed the cohesive idea of a nation. It, in fact, denied that America is, or deserves to be, a nation, let alone a proud one. And then, the left blames the right for our divisions. Finally, the sane, sensible, real America is rising up and saying, no more. We are taking back our identities, our dignity, our pride and our awesome ability to project the unique American leadership again.
Imagine the reaction if Melania Trump said the United States is "just downright mean." Or if Hillary Clinton had said that she had never been proud of her country until her husband ran for President. Why did Michelle Obama get a pass for these anti-American remarks? The racial double standard.
While Obama was far wiser on race than the activist left, even he was leaning into what is now the standard progressive take on race in his last couple of years. On incarceration, he blamed the war on drugs even though, as Heather Mac Donald was pointing out at the time, in state and local prisons (which had far more inmates than federal ones), there were far more people in there for violent and property crime than drug crime. And his Education Department assumed racial disparities in school discipline were due to racism, not disparities in who disrupts class (even though ejecting troublemakers helps much larger numbers of kids with the same demographics).
Imagine if Obama using a pseudonym posted his ideas of inclusiveness over on DK where you first posted this article in early July. I've no doubt Obama would be banned very quickly as they only allow a certain type of Democrat over there, therein lies the rub.
A decade ago we could have used this medicine to cure what was ailing us. Now we are losing the multi ethnic multi racial working class to Trump because he speaks in the language of jobs. It turns out that moderate Republicans, and moderate Democrats have a lot in common, and the last thing we worry about is the color of our skin. More people are independents, and those who join a party are joining with the other folks. Integration happened generations ago, and it worked, now we are more class based.
The Democratic Party needs to explain how they will boost wages tomorrow, not some year down the road by giving chip makers money or money to teachers at community colleges. Wages, immediately such that a person can rent an apartment. Claiming "we are going to try real hard for increasing the min wage" to some impossibly low number anyway won't cut it anymore.
Economists today discussing Trump and rate cuts at the NYT said Trump is liable to blow up the place, many of us say that could be a good thing.
Reparations for slavery is an unpopular idea. Few Americans want to pay for the injustices other people committed 160 years ago. The AP-NORC poll reports that Americans oppose it by 2-1. Yet, here is a quote from the official Democratic platform of 2024: "To determine how best to right historical wrongs, Democrats support Congress executing a study of reparations and the continuing impacts of slavery." Wouldn't the Democrats do better politically by taking the popular side of issues instead of the unpopular one?
Obama’s vision left people wanting. His policies aimed to make us equal.
We each started in a different place; birth order, cohesion of our family, values imparted to us, etc, Through life we are free to make choices; who to live with, life work or join the growing labor non-participants, where to live, to attend church, to save or spend, etc. Decisions have consequences.
My priority is that everyone in my family has the basics they need. That’s what family does. Why would anyone think we are or should be equal? We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Some are a lot taller than others.
They “lost Obama’s vision” because Obama didn’t mean it, and once he was in office his true colors came out. “Wokeness” is Obama’s life’s work, and legacy. Anybody who believed anything else was a sucker.
Being an unaffiliated voter, I voted for Obama because he talked about uniting all Americans by discounting racism, but he gradually showed his true "color" as he became more divisive along racial lines. He talked unity in order to get elected, then, once in power, showed his true self regarding racism. More recently, Biden talked unity in order to get elected, and then turned hard left with DEI. So-o-o, I can't trust Democrats.
I was never a fan of Obama, I felt like he was the beginning of the era of condescending elites. However, what he said as referenced in the article are good things.
Absolutely, Biden/Harris governed way to the left of Obama. Trump will never be a Uniter… he was elected to be a correction to the craziness of the far left policies of Biden and he is unafraid to call it out.
Maybe someone will come along who can unite the center middle left and right. The extremist on either side don’t want to compromise
Outstanding. This piece should only make it to the NYT op Ed page, where other outlets might pick it up. Good luck with that.
Liberals are lost, drifting, with nothing to offer but Trump-is-evil helpless ranting. They still don’t know where they went wrong. Analysis like this article might educate them and correct some misguided thinking, however well intentioned.
Malaria did not exist in the new world before the arrival of Europeans. The disease existed, in low levels in warmer, swampier parts of England, and the Jamestown settlers brought it with them, whereupon the parasite found a warmer climate and the right kind of mosquitoes (Anopheles quadrimaculatus) to transmit it, and it was off to the races.
The English settlers at Jamestown searched originally for gold, but wound up discovering that tobacco was the key to financial survival. And workers, in the form of indentured servants, could be had for around ten pounds for a twenty year hitch, whereas a slave cost around 25 pounds. The problem was, that incoming Europeans tended to be laid low by malaria within weeks of their arrival and, if they survived at all, didn't develop any resistance for a year or two. West Africans, however came from stock who had coevolved with the disease, and so tended to have substantial resistance.
This, when a ship arrived with a cargo of slaves stolen from a Spanish ship bound for Mexico, the slaves were bought, were found to be superior workers...and the rest is history.
Reifowitz concludes "To reorient themselves, Democrats must make some choices and offer newer, more inspiring alternatives than they have in recent years." May I ask commenters here, what new alternatives would be more inspiring?
He says billion because all of his followers are the children of the well to do. A little over a hundred billionaires or something, maybe 7 million millionaires not including real estate.
The TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party's issues were entirely fiscal yet the Democrats, including President Obama, attacked the Tea Party as racist. But, did the Tea Party apply a racial test for membership? No. Did the Tea Party promote racist policies like segregated schools? No. Did they run non-white candidates for office? Yes, they did, and some of them won. Then, why the racism smear? Because many, even most Democrats will believe a racism accusation without question, no evidence required.
In his latest memoir, "A Promised Land", former President Obama called the Tea Party "the descendants of Jim Crow", which makes Reifowitz's portrait of Obama as a healer of racial divisions rather doubtful.
The Democrats’ insistence that all opposition to Obama’s policies from the right were racially motivated. The most ridiculous was that since Obamacare was based on Romneycare the only reason Republicans opposed it was due to race. Never mind that Romney was a Republican governor of a very blue state working with a Democrat controlled legislature. Never mind that it’s entirely ideologically consistent for a Republican to support something at the state level but oppose it at the federal level.
The main differences between the TEA party and Occupy Wall Street were that the TEA party got permits and cleaned up after itself while Occupy Wall Street did neither. And Occupy Wall Street was saying they should have bailed out the little guy not the fat cats, while the TEA party said they shouldn’t have bailed out anyone.
Yes, and this was mostly not Obama's fault either, but he should have done much more to counteract it. I did not support him then, and believe he was a deeply flawed president. Still, President Obama really did try to unify and understand differant perspectives with many of his speaches. I and many others found this comforting. This is something that sadly no US president or even major party US Presidential candidate has even really tried to do since.
Obama's first term and early into his secund, was really the last time we had a common cultural identity in the United States, tense as it often was. He was the last US president to actually ever have a high approval rating! Just think about that one for a minute. The seeds of our collective American breakup were in part long in the making and partly do to the rise of new technolgies and the decline of traditional media. But things finally gave way, and have truly not been the same since!
Nominating Romney in 2012 was such a massive error for the Republicans that it looks like they were actively trying to lose.
Yes, unfortunatelly this is true that Obama did at times make these sort of unfounded accusations, and I say this as someone who was never a Tea Party psrson. I can also strongly criticize various foriegn, fiscal and security state policies of Obama, and even some politically motivated weaponization of the IRS that he engaged in. I did not vote for Obama, opting to vote Green instead, despite still being a Democrat who mostly voted for Democrats back then (I am a true independent now). But I still mostly liked Obama as President.
Many of these prolomatic policies under Obama were also not only Obama's doing, but also reflected both lingering neocon influence (in some cases) and also the growing nerrow mindedness of Democrats in general durring that time. And Obama himself for all his many severe flaws, really did try to unify with his public speaches, and had a generally transcsndent quality about him. No US president or major party candidate has really even tried similerly unify the public since then. I think Trump actuallly could have this time, -but he seems to have no desire to. Nope, he is in petty and revenge minded ,warror mode instead.
Obama's first term and maybe early into his secund, was I think the last time we really had a common cultural identity in the United States, tense as it often was. The great rescesion was in many ways unifying but the highly uneven and much delayed recovery that came after it was anything but unifying! During Obama's secund term, this common culture rather quickly began to unravel.
The rise of social media and smartphones and the decline of traditional media had a lot to do with it. So did the fact that an unprecidented number of people finally reached a breaking point with feeling distrustful and betrayed by politicians (or trying to get along with or empathize with those whom they stridently disagreed with), and so just gave up any attempt to compromise or even try to be resonable. The seeds for this break had been there the whole time, and they kept getting watered and not really delt with effectively, -it just took a long time for enough of the weeds to finally sprout and take over the flower bed.
Basically, we reached our cultural high point of post World War 2 liberal society (which was always deeply unsustainable and often in conflict below the surface) just before it all began to fall apart!
What you see is Obama's vision. Democrats problem is they lost Bill Clinton's vision.
If Hillary had run for Bill’s third term instead of Barack’s she would have won easily.
Hillary Clinton was probably the most unlikeable candidate that ever ran for president. She fell down every 5 minutes. She wiped her phones and computers. She acted entitled. She called voters "deplorables". She used personal email for security communications, wiped her server and smashed her cell phones.
Mitt Romney has entered the chat.
LOL. I hope you run her again.
Reaction to him was much more positive than her. Plus when she ran against Trump she made a bunch of mistakes. Bill warned her but she blew him off.
I really doubt it, -she did just that the first time she ran and lost to Obama in the primary.
Can a Liberal write anything without including Trump? My general rule of thumb, when one ideology writes about the opposing ideology, it is never fair, accurate nor worth reading. Try writing without Trump in your posts. After all, using Trump as your standard to compare your own party too, by your own definition, is using the lowest standard there is. If you aspire to be just better than Trump, as an Independent, I have no use for you.
By the way, what does today’s political environment have to do with the environments of the past? Trump was elected to change the whole system. Because the old systems from the past sucked. What was, good or bad, is not what is relevant to today. Mainly because what was, was lies and rhetoric to get elected. Nothing more.
Triple like this post.
America was founded on the idea of the freedom to become, to the best of your ability, the best you could be, based on your personal decisions. Rush Limbaugh, the quintessential conservative, always drew the picture of the economic pie as a platform of growth and aiways rejected the zero sum game unequivocally. In his opinion, that was the Left's conception, that whites hoarded the pie, taking ever larger slices and diminishing the remains, leaving crumbs for everyone else. Limbaugh totally dismissed that premise as absurd.
The Left's refusal to honor the individual, its insistence oawesome abilityn labeling groups and then applying policy to them, destroyed the cohesive idea of a nation. It, in fact, denied that America is, or deserves to be, a nation, let alone a proud one. And then, the left blames the right for our divisions. Finally, the sane, sensible, real America is rising up and saying, no more. We are taking back our identities, our dignity, our pride and our awesome ability to project the unique American leadership again.
Imagine the reaction if Melania Trump said the United States is "just downright mean." Or if Hillary Clinton had said that she had never been proud of her country until her husband ran for President. Why did Michelle Obama get a pass for these anti-American remarks? The racial double standard.
While Obama was far wiser on race than the activist left, even he was leaning into what is now the standard progressive take on race in his last couple of years. On incarceration, he blamed the war on drugs even though, as Heather Mac Donald was pointing out at the time, in state and local prisons (which had far more inmates than federal ones), there were far more people in there for violent and property crime than drug crime. And his Education Department assumed racial disparities in school discipline were due to racism, not disparities in who disrupts class (even though ejecting troublemakers helps much larger numbers of kids with the same demographics).
Imagine if Obama using a pseudonym posted his ideas of inclusiveness over on DK where you first posted this article in early July. I've no doubt Obama would be banned very quickly as they only allow a certain type of Democrat over there, therein lies the rub.
A decade ago we could have used this medicine to cure what was ailing us. Now we are losing the multi ethnic multi racial working class to Trump because he speaks in the language of jobs. It turns out that moderate Republicans, and moderate Democrats have a lot in common, and the last thing we worry about is the color of our skin. More people are independents, and those who join a party are joining with the other folks. Integration happened generations ago, and it worked, now we are more class based.
The Democratic Party needs to explain how they will boost wages tomorrow, not some year down the road by giving chip makers money or money to teachers at community colleges. Wages, immediately such that a person can rent an apartment. Claiming "we are going to try real hard for increasing the min wage" to some impossibly low number anyway won't cut it anymore.
Economists today discussing Trump and rate cuts at the NYT said Trump is liable to blow up the place, many of us say that could be a good thing.
Reparations for slavery is an unpopular idea. Few Americans want to pay for the injustices other people committed 160 years ago. The AP-NORC poll reports that Americans oppose it by 2-1. Yet, here is a quote from the official Democratic platform of 2024: "To determine how best to right historical wrongs, Democrats support Congress executing a study of reparations and the continuing impacts of slavery." Wouldn't the Democrats do better politically by taking the popular side of issues instead of the unpopular one?
Obama’s vision left people wanting. His policies aimed to make us equal.
We each started in a different place; birth order, cohesion of our family, values imparted to us, etc, Through life we are free to make choices; who to live with, life work or join the growing labor non-participants, where to live, to attend church, to save or spend, etc. Decisions have consequences.
My priority is that everyone in my family has the basics they need. That’s what family does. Why would anyone think we are or should be equal? We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Some are a lot taller than others.
They “lost Obama’s vision” because Obama didn’t mean it, and once he was in office his true colors came out. “Wokeness” is Obama’s life’s work, and legacy. Anybody who believed anything else was a sucker.
Being an unaffiliated voter, I voted for Obama because he talked about uniting all Americans by discounting racism, but he gradually showed his true "color" as he became more divisive along racial lines. He talked unity in order to get elected, then, once in power, showed his true self regarding racism. More recently, Biden talked unity in order to get elected, and then turned hard left with DEI. So-o-o, I can't trust Democrats.
I was never a fan of Obama, I felt like he was the beginning of the era of condescending elites. However, what he said as referenced in the article are good things.
Absolutely, Biden/Harris governed way to the left of Obama. Trump will never be a Uniter… he was elected to be a correction to the craziness of the far left policies of Biden and he is unafraid to call it out.
Maybe someone will come along who can unite the center middle left and right. The extremist on either side don’t want to compromise
Outstanding. This piece should only make it to the NYT op Ed page, where other outlets might pick it up. Good luck with that.
Liberals are lost, drifting, with nothing to offer but Trump-is-evil helpless ranting. They still don’t know where they went wrong. Analysis like this article might educate them and correct some misguided thinking, however well intentioned.
People forget WHY we had slaves: malaria.
Malaria did not exist in the new world before the arrival of Europeans. The disease existed, in low levels in warmer, swampier parts of England, and the Jamestown settlers brought it with them, whereupon the parasite found a warmer climate and the right kind of mosquitoes (Anopheles quadrimaculatus) to transmit it, and it was off to the races.
The English settlers at Jamestown searched originally for gold, but wound up discovering that tobacco was the key to financial survival. And workers, in the form of indentured servants, could be had for around ten pounds for a twenty year hitch, whereas a slave cost around 25 pounds. The problem was, that incoming Europeans tended to be laid low by malaria within weeks of their arrival and, if they survived at all, didn't develop any resistance for a year or two. West Africans, however came from stock who had coevolved with the disease, and so tended to have substantial resistance.
This, when a ship arrived with a cargo of slaves stolen from a Spanish ship bound for Mexico, the slaves were bought, were found to be superior workers...and the rest is history.
Reifowitz concludes "To reorient themselves, Democrats must make some choices and offer newer, more inspiring alternatives than they have in recent years." May I ask commenters here, what new alternatives would be more inspiring?
End the legalisation of illegal immigration.
Support tariffs with the goal of making US manufacturing cheaper than importing
A universal low level of health care no one can fall below offered at county hospitals.
universal housing with buy in similar to Singapore at the lowest level of public housing
End foreign ownership of land or buildings or mining
No taxes of any kind below $200K, do it via capital gains corporate and VAT
Automatic tax rates based on paying off debt set every year based on previous year's debt and revenue
merit based hiring and college entry
retire at 65 again with a pension big enough to live on
mandatory overtime for Sundays, nights, holidays.
Non physical work for seniors and disabled
Product designs for repairability
Tax private jets, heavy
Tax second flight per year and increase it every flight thereafter
Tax second homes heavily.
Tax inheritance over a million per inheritor.
Tax acreage that isn't truly ag, hobby ranches gotta go
Public access via most direct route for all public land
I could probably list 50 more but need to go dig a hole before wife gets home from work.
Why don't don't you go the Bernie Sanders route and just confiscate everyone's money over $1M.
He says billion because all of his followers are the children of the well to do. A little over a hundred billionaires or something, maybe 7 million millionaires not including real estate.
Bernie is a complete cuckoo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYVzme2fybU