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A look back at the official photographs of Obama’s presidency shows his skill at conjuring a sense of pride and possibility – but today his victories seem narrow indeedby More
OpinionClimate changeRemember Obama’s drill, baby, drill days? Democrats aren’t innocent on climateDavid SirotaObama campaigned in climate poetry and then governed in fossil fuel prose. Joe Biden may well follow in his footsteps Tue 10 Aug 2021 06.25 EDTLast modified on Tue 10 Aug 2021 16.29 EDTIf after Monday’s news you didn’t feel a pang of doom, you’re either a zen master, a recluse living in a news vacuum, or a nihilist. The new United Nations report on climate change predicts an actual, bona fide apocalypse unless our civilization discards our fetish for incrementalism, rejects nothing-will-fundamentally-change fatalism and instead finally takes the crisis seriously.The bad news is that we’ve been here before during the last era of Democratic supremacy, and if the Obama era we sleepwalked through now repeats itself, we’re done. It’s that simple.IPCC report shows ‘possible loss of entire countries within the century’Read moreThe glimmer of good news is that we still have time to defuse the worst effects of the climate bomb, and at least one part of the political dynamic may finally be changing.But if we allow corporate media and the political class to erase our memory of how we arrived here, then history will probably recur and we will all burn.The bad news: we’ve been here beforeAt its core, the climate crisis is a product of bipartisan corruption and greed. Politicians bankrolled by oil and gas interests ignored scientists’ warnings, and financed a fossil fuel economy knowing full well it would destroy the ecosystem that supports all life on the planet.Republicans were more explicit about their corruption, actively denying the scientific facts and resurrecting their own version of a Flat Earth Society that reassured voters that nothing has to change and everything will be fine. Democrats settled on a different, but similarly pernicious, form of climate denialism: They acknowledged the science and issued progressive sounding press releases about the environment, and then they continued supporting fossil fuel development.This strategy satiated liberals’ top priority: enjoying erudite speeches from Ivy League politicians that make affluent liberals feel smart, smug and superior, regardless of whether the rhetoric is subsequently betrayed and discarded in the actual legislative process, which Democrats’ MSNBC-addled base doesn’t seem to care about in the red-versus-blue partisan wars.The cynical formula crescendoed in the presidency of Barack Obama, who campaigned in climate poetry and then governed in fossil fuel prose.When Obama won the 2008 election, liberals lauded him for declaring: “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”Little noticed was the concurrent Obama-Biden pledge to “promote the responsible domestic production of oil and natural gas,” “prioritize the construction of the Alaska natural gas pipeline,” and extract “up to 85bn barrels of technically recoverable oil [that] remains stranded in existing fields”.And so four years after that campaign, Obama delivered a speech in Cushing, Oklahoma, which perfectly summarized his actual legacy – and which future post-apocalypse historians (if any survive) will likely see as one of the pivotal moments in the cataclysm:“Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years,” he said in a speech promising to increase pipeline capacity to flood the world with even more fossil fuels.“Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some. So we are drilling all over the place – right now.”You can try to tout Obama’s support for stuff like the Paris accords and electric vehicles, but his own boasts illustrate a record of climate denialism, as did Obama’s 2018 declaration one month after an IPCC sounded an alarm. Amid the worsening emergency, he told a Texas audience that “suddenly America is like, the biggest oil producer. That was me, people … just say, ‘Thank you,’ please.”Obama: “Suddenly America is the largest oil producer, that was me people … say thank you.” pic.twitter.com/VfQfX1SR0x— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 28, 2018
The self-congratulation came only two years after Obama tweeted: “Climate change is happening now. Denial is dangerous.” And in that contrast, we see the fundamental formula at work.Obama, like so many politicians, seems to believe that regardless of what’s happening in the physical world, he and his fellow elites can just tweet, Instagram influence, and speechify their way through it, and nobody will care.But this isn’t merely a sleight of hand. There’s also an ideology here – or, more accurately, a sociopathy. Obama’s presidency was an eight-year quest to secure the vaunted “pragmatic” label from corporate media’s bipartisanship fetishists, no matter the human cost of that pursuit.From the all-too-small stimulus, to the watered-down Wall Street reform bill, to the Heritage Foundation–originated healthcare legislation to the push for social security cuts to the approval of toxic chemicals to the Oklahoma speech’s embrace of drill-baby-drill, most major Obama initiatives represented an attempt to appease the right and punch a left.The Obama administration’s top-line goal was to prove to Washington pundits and corporate donors that the Democratic party will always prioritize compromise – even when it means compromising the lifespans of millions of people.All of this was enabled and fortified by Democrats who enjoyed giant majorities in Congress – and yet did nothing to change the dynamic. On climate in particular, that was most obvious: the Democratic House did pass a cap-and-trade bill, but Obama abandoned it in yet another effort to reach out to Republicans, and therefore it went nowhere in the Democratic Senate.Obama and congressional Democrats then helped the Republican party lift the crude oil export ban, and Democrats’ support for natural gas was so aggressive, one oil and gas law firm said it was a “case of policy continuity from Obama to Trump”.The good news: a line in the sand (maybe)Joe Biden, congressional Democrats and Democratic primary voters were not innocent bystanders in all this. Biden was the vice-president and had his name on the original initiatives to flood the world market with US fossil fuels during the climate crisis. Primary voters rewarded him with the presidential nomination as he was lauded by the fossil fuel industry for campaigning against a fracking ban – just as those same voters continue rejecting progressive climate candidates in favor of corporate-friendly incrementalists.Colorado’s 2020 Senate primary was the iconic example of that trend: a reliably blue state’s Democratic electorate obediently followed orders from party leaders in Washington and gave its US Senate nomination to one of America’s most ardently pro-fossil-fuel politicians – all while the local media and political class scoffed at his progressive primary opponent for airing an ad rightly predicting that climate change would prevent Coloradans from safely going outside.That past was a prelude to the last few months, which have seen Biden begin to pull an Obama.On the stump, he’s offered climate poetry, telling America that climate is the “No 1 issue facing humanity” and done photo-ops driving an electric truck. And like Obama, he’s breaking all sorts of campaign promises and governing in fossil fuel prose, increasing drilling to George W Bush levels, backing Trump-era fossil fuel projects, touting auto-emission rules weaker than Obama’s, deploying his energy secretary to promise a bright future for the fossil fuel industry.Now, Biden is championing a bipartisan infrastructure bill that omits major climate initiatives – and that legislation is moving through a Congress whose most powerful Senate Democrat profits off the coal business, and whose most powerful House Democrat laughed at the “green dream or whatever”. It doesn’t help that the party is run by a gerontocracy that can laugh off the emergency, knowing they won’t be around to suffer through the worst consequences of its climate compromises and capitulations.Clearly, if nothing fundamentally changes in our politics and for the donor class that is disproportionately driving the climate crisis, then everything in our natural world is going to change for the worse, with ecocidal consequences on a scale that our species has never experienced, and might not survive.Thankfully, that reality seems to finally be seeping into the consciousness of at least a handful of lawmakers – and even more thankfully, the narrowly divided congressional chambers mean only a small group of legislators are needed to actually alter the legislative dynamics.In recent weeks, progressive lawmakers from Representative Mondaire Jones, a Democrat from New York, to Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, have promoted a simple mantra: “No Climate, No Deal.” The idea is that they will vote down any bipartisan infrastructure bill until it is coupled with legislation that could be the last chance to mobilize the country for the epic battle against climate change, before Republicans win back Congress.This ultimatum is required in order to prevent Biden, Republicans and corporate Democrats from doing what they clearly want to do: simply pass an infrastructure bill that props up the fossil fuel industry with subsidies and road infrastructure, and then leave for vacation without any new climate initiatives as the world incinerates.Until now, progressive lawmakers have made a lot of noise and a lot of sententious declarations about the need for bold action and fearlessness – and then they’ve refused to follow up that sound with the fury of withheld votes. Most notably, they did not withhold their votes on the Covid relief bill in order to force the inclusion of a $15 minimum wage – and now that much-promised initiative has been surgically erased from the discourse, like the memory of an old flame in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.So, yeah, it’s fair to remain circumspect that these Democratic lawmakers would actually follow through on their new ultimatum, for fear of being labeled seditious traitors to the party – which is now considered the highest form of treason in American politics. Such skepticism is especially warranted since these legislators have not made clear what they consider “climate” and exactly what they are demanding for a deal.Then again, what ultimately constitutes “climate” in any agreement may be somewhat vague, but it’s kind of like the obscenity standard – you know it when you see it. Plus, Democratic lawmakers even threatening to act as a climate voting bloc is already providing far more pressure on Biden than Obama ever faced from his own party when he was bragging about his unrelenting support for the fossil fuel industry. And that pressure has at least produced an initial reconciliation proposal that is somewhat serious. So that’s something.As the IPCC report suggests, whether or not these Democrats follow through and force a climate confrontation in Congress – and whether or not their own constituents demand they hold out – could be the difference between a livable planet and a hellscape.It’s the difference between Democrats in 10 years bragging, “That was me, people!” about rescuing the world from disaster, or hunkering down at their Martha’s Vineyard compounds after they’ve laid waste to the planet.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
This piece was originally published in the Daily Poster
TopicsClimate changeOpinionOilDemocratsBarack ObamaJoe BidenUS politicsEnergycommentReuse this content More
OpinionAfghanistanThe Guardian view on Afghanistan withdrawal: a retreat into uncertaintyEditorialJoe Biden’s actions will be felt most keenly in Kabul, but they pose a broader question for an army-dominated Pakistan Mon 5 Jul 2021 14.20 EDTLast modified on Mon 5 Jul 2021 16.10 EDTBy bringing home US troops from Afghanistan, and leading Nato and allied forces out of the country, the US president, Joe Biden, is acting on his campaign trail argument that American “forever wars” distract from more pressing issues at home. While the effect of the withdrawal will be felt most keenly in Afghanistan, where there are justifiable fears that the Taliban are poised to reclaim power, the broader question Mr Biden poses is for neighbouring nuclear-armed Pakistan and the role that it wants to play in the region.Bluntly, there is little trust between Washington and Islamabad despite Pakistan being a frontline state in America’s longest war. Mr Biden served as vice-president to Barack Obama, who in his memoir, A Promised Land, wrote that he had preferred not to involve Pakistan in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011 because it was an “open secret” that elements inside Pakistan’s military, and especially its intelligence services, “maintained links to the Taliban and perhaps even al-Qaida, sometimes using them as strategic assets to ensure that the Afghan government remained weak and unable to align itself with Pakistan’s number one rival, India”.In Pakistan’s defence, it might be said that the past is another country. It says that it no longer provides any haven for terrorists or seeks to radicalise Muslim opinion with which it has influence. Pakistan has undoubtedly been the victim of terror attacks and shelters millions of refugees. Yet there was no disguising the anger of the Biden administration when, after eight days in office, Pakistan’s supreme court ordered the release of the man convicted in 2002 of orchestrating the abduction and killing of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter.Pakistan is an army with a country attached. Imran Khan serves as prime minister. But it is the chief of army staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who calls most of the shots. The general has had a phone call from Mr Biden’s secretary of defence. After it, the army chief pledged to “bury the past” with India. Mr Khan has yet to be rung up by the White House. That may be because Washington had wanted to pressurise Pakistan into granting the CIA a base in the country to launch drone strikes against the Taliban. The US was kicked out of its last Pakistani facility in 2011. Last month, Mr Khan wrote an op-ed quashing the idea that the US could regain a military foothold in the country.The ever-growing risks of a Taliban takeover will shape the region’s dynamics. Not least because decades ago they subjected the country to a reign of pious Sunni terror. Adjoining Iran sponsored an armed resistance. A Taliban regime in Kabul gave Pakistan the idea that it could control Afghanistan and acquire the “strategic depth” needed to challenge India. Since then, China has drawn closer to Islamabad. New Delhi, faced with a hostile Beijing, has attempted to improve relations with Pakistan. Mr Biden knows that Afghanistan is known as a “graveyard of empires” for good reason. He wants his foreign policy to mark a break with the past and face the challenges of the future. But turning points only work out if one knows where to turn.TopicsAfghanistanOpinionJoe BidenAl-QaidaBarack ObamaUS foreign policyNatoPakistaneditorialsReuse this content More
Barack Obama said on Monday that his successor in office, Donald Trump, violated a “core tenet” of democracy when he made up a “bunch of hooey” about last year’s election and refused to concede he lost.Speaking at his first virtual fundraiser since the 2020 election, the former Democratic president said former Republican president’s claims undermined the legitimacy of US elections and helped lead to other anti-democratic measures such as efforts to suppress the vote.“What we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that you count the votes and then declare a winner – and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey,” Obama said.Trump has continued to falsely claim that his defeat was the result of widespread fraud, which has been rejected by multiple courts, state election officials and members of his own administration.In a rare bipartisan chime, Obama’s assertion followed an article in the Atlantic on Sunday noting that Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr – expressing himself less politely – said his Republican former boss’s claims were always “bullshit”.The Republican senator Mitt Romney on Sunday likened Trump’s claims of a stolen election to television wrestling – entertaining but “not real”.Meanwhile, Obama added: “What’s been called ‘the big lie’ suddenly gains momentum,” which in turn has fueled moves by Republican-controlled legislatures to reduce access to voting and gain more control over voting operations.“Here’s the bottom line. If we don’t stop these kinds of efforts now, what we are going to see is more and more contested elections … We are going to see a further de-legitimizing of our democracy,” he said, as well as “a breakdown of the basic agreement that has held this magnificent democratic experiment together all these years”.Republican governors of Georgia, Arizona, Florida and Iowa have signed new voting restrictions into law this year, and state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Texas are trying to advance similar measures.These states will be battlegrounds in the 2022 midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.The US justice department on Friday sued to block the Georgia law, which tightened absentee ballot identification requirements, restricted the use of ballot drop-boxes, and allowed a Republican-controlled state agency to run local voting operations.Obama said he believed the US Senate would hold a new vote on a Democratic voting rights bill that Republicans blocked last week.Just before the bill before the Senate collapsed, Obama backed a compromise proposal from the conservative West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin.The former first lady Michelle Obama, weighed in, too, decrying Republican efforts in many statehouses across the country to bring in new laws that restrict voting, and urging Congress to pass federal legislation “before it’s too late”.The fundraising call was for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee as the United States heads into the once-a-decade redrawing of congressional districts that will play a critical role in determining whether Democrats keep control of the House of Representatives next year. History and redistricting suggests they are likely to fail. More
Barack Obama has backed conservative West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin’s voting rights proposal, calling it a “product of compromise” as the landmark legislation struggles towards a crucial vote in the US Senate on Tuesday.The former US president weighed in, as did his wife and former first lady, Michelle Obama, decrying Republican efforts in many statehouses across the country to bring in new laws that restrict voting, and urging Congress to pass federal legislation “before it’s too late”.Barack Obama said the future of the country was at stake.“I have tried to make it a policy not to weigh in on the day-to-day scrum in Washington, but what is happening this week is more than just a particular bill coming up or not coming up to a vote,” he said in an interview with Yahoo News.He added: “I do want folks who may not be paying close attention to what’s happening … to understand the stakes involved here, and why this debate is so vitally important to the future of our country,” Obama said.And the White House said on Monday it views the Senate’s work on an elections bill overhaul and changes being offered by Manchin as a “step forward”, even though the Democrats’ priority legislation is expected to be blocked by a Republican filibuster.White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the revisions proposed by Manchin are a compromise, another step as Democrats work to shore up voting access and what Joe Biden sees as “a fight of his presidency”.“The president’s effort to continue that fight doesn’t stop tomorrow at all,” Psaki said.The Senate is preparing for a showdown Tuesday, a test vote of the For the People Act, a sweeping elections bill that would be the largest overhaul of US voting procedures in a generation.A top priority for Democrats seeking to ensure access to the polls and mail-in ballots made popular during the pandemic, it is opposed by Republicans as a federal overreach into state systems.Manchin has been a vocal Democratic Party holdout on Capitol Hill, opposing the For the People Act and insisting on gleaning bipartisan support for such legislation.But last week he introduced a list of compromises he would support, including 15 days of early voting and automatic voter registration. His compromise would also ban partisan gerrymandering and requiring voter ID.Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, said he opposed the compromise, and hopes are fading in many Democratic quarters that a vote on Tuesday in the Senate will take the legislation to the debate stage, thus leaving it stalled.In his latest interview, Obama said Democrats and Republicans have abused the redistricting process, but shared concerns about efforts in Republican-controlled states to limit access to voting.“Around the world we’ve seen once-vibrant democracies go in reverse,” Obama said. “It is happening in other places around the world and these impulses have crept into the United States … we are not immune from some of these efforts to weaken our democracy.”“If we have the same kinds of shenanigans that brought about January 6, you know – if we have that for a couple more election cycles we’re going to have real problems in terms of our democracy long term.”In a post on Instagram, Michelle Obama talked of the Biden legislation fighting voter suppression and strengthening democracy.“Over the past few months, there’s been a movement in state legislatures all across the country to pass laws that make it harder for people to cast a ballot. That means we’ve got to pass the For the People Act before it’s too late. This bill is one of our best chances…to ensure all of us have a say in our future – whether that’s issues like pandemic relief, criminal justice, immigration, healthcare, education, or anything else,” she wrote.Manchin had been the sole holdout. His proposed changes to the bill are being well received by some in his party, and any nod from the White House lends them credibility.He has suggested adding a national voter ID requirement, which has been popular among Republicans, and dropping other measures from the bill like its proposed public financing of campaigns.Among voting rights advocates, one key voice, Georgia-based Democrat and activist Stacey Abrams, has said she could support Manchin’s proposal.Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, it is clear Democrats in the split 50-50 Senate will be unable to open debate, blocked by a filibuster by Republicans.In the Senate, it takes 60 votes to overcome the filibuster, and without any Republican support, the Democrats cannot move forward.“Will the Republicans let us debate it?” said Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer as he opened the chamber on Monday afternoon. “We’re about to find out.” More
Barack Obama’s CNN interview with Anderson Cooper on Monday night covered a range of topics one could consider wide if they weren’t so predictable.The storming of the Capitol, race, Trump, political division, Black Lives Matter. At this point in his post-office years, Obama seems to pop up in more or less casual fashion as a kind of guiding moral compass during particularly harrowing national moments. Obama, trading in the suit for the still very-calculated understatement of a button-up with rolled sleeves, elicits an almost Pavlovian reaction. We miss you. Come back. This worked to more dramatic effect when Trump was still in office and Obama’s opinion, given far from the White House, seemed to come down from a heaven that was distinctly out of reach. But that allure is fading.Obama criticized the “Republican establishment” for their lack of action on Russian meddling during the 2016 election, and on Charlottesville. Political division might be one of Trump’s lasting legacies and Obama’s outrage that “nobody stood up” isn’t wrong, per se. But lukewarm critiques like these are low-hanging fruit – the kind we expect from liberal pundits on MSNBC. One would hope for more from a former president whose very existence threatened the right so dramatically.When race is mentioned, he talks about “terrible things” that happened in America’s history, but doesn’t mention slavery or Jim Crow by name. He speaks about the need for local media, but doesn’t take Google and Facebook to task for decimating newsrooms. He spends a lot of time talking about the need for better narratives, and better conversations, which can sound lofty and vague. We don’t hear much about more tangible, thorny questions, like the need to support unions, or the threat posed by the growing power of corporations.Obama spent much of the interview pontificating about unity, which is par for the course for him, whose optimism about America and its narrative as a place of goodness and opportunity is often couched by his own confusion at the country’s troubled state of affairs. “How do we start once again being able to tell a common story about where this country goes?” Obama asked, loftily. At one point, Cooper quotes a passage from Obama’s memoir A Promised Land: “We need to explain to each other who we are and where we are going.” Cooper asks: “I mean, as somebody who has dedicated myself to storytelling, that really resonates with me. But I wonder, are we as a country still willing to listen to each other’s stories?”That question alone is specious, as if every issue across the country could be distilled down to the essential quandary of “listening”. But this is CNN’s version of a big interview, a glorified press conference for Obama. His response, on the other hand, goes where one would expect. “I think that this is the biggest challenge we have. We don’t have the kinds of shared stories that we used to.”These shared stories are, of course, myths. Freedom, patriotism, grit and glory, these are staples of a utopian vision of America that nearly every president has tried to sell to the public. On that front, Obama isn’t special. What should separate him, even if it is no longer the galvanizing anecdote it once was, is his status as the first black person to hold the nation’s highest office. As history is continually rewritten, whether expanding to include the erased stories of indigenous genocide or the destruction of black communities, or contracting to focus on the achievements of a select few white men whose vision for America never included minorities to begin with, one would assume Obama’s heritage offers him a uniquely frank perspective. This also fails to be true.On the issue of racism, Obama offered this weak assessment: “It’s hard for the majority in this country of white Americans to recognize that, look, you can be proud of this country and its traditions and its history and our forefathers. And yet, it’s also true that this terrible stuff happened. And that, you know, the vestiges of that linger and continue.”Obama seems to be settling into the role of political commentator, except without any controversial opinionsIt may be asking too much of Obama to hope for anything more than left-of-center opinions. After all, one of the hallmarks of his two terms was the disappointing, but unsurprising, revelation that his radical outspoken proclamations were often transformed into watered-down, bureaucratic non-starters. Still, it’s frustrating to think that, even in the aftermath of Trump’s presidency, Obama hasn’t changed all that much.The nightmare that came after Obama’s last term exacerbated the stark difference between the two men, turning Obama into even more of a heroic figure than before. Where before the future was his campaign’s bread and butter, nostalgia became a crucial asset. Now, in the midst of his former vice-president’s term, Obama seems to be settling into the role of political commentator, except without any controversial opinions.On the topic of what lies ahead, Obama turned to the potential of his daughters’ generation: “They’re not just interested in making noise, they’re interested in what works.” Somehow cancel culture, one of the most loaded, overused, yet wildly imprecise terms floating around, used to describe everything from firing CEOs for discrimination to the vague destruction of American values, crept into the conversation. To Obama, this amounts to “condemning people all the time”, though he doesn’t get any more specific than that. What matters is that his daughters rise above it. “They’ll acknowledge that sometimes…”The expectation has never been perfection. It’s knowing that someone can and should be doing more. More
Americans should be worried that the Republican party “is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognisable and unacceptable even five years ago”, Barack Obama said on Monday.The former president warned Americans “to recognise that the path towards an undemocratic America is not gonna happen in just one bang” but will instead come “in a series of steps”, as seen under authoritarian leaders in Hungary and Poland.Obama was speaking to CNN the night before two Senate committees released a report on the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.Five people died after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the building in service of Trump’s lie that his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden in the electoral college and the popular vote was caused by electoral fraud.Trump was impeached a second time, with support from 10 House Republicans. But Republicans in the Senate acquitted him of inciting an insurrection. He remains free to run for office and has returned to public speaking and hinted about plans for running for the White House again in 2024.Last month, Republicans blocked the formation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack. The Senate report released on Tuesday did not address political questions.Away from Washington, in states including Texas, Florida and Georgia, Republicans are pursuing laws to restrict ballot access in constituencies likely to vote Democratic, and to make it easier to overturn election results.In Washington, opposition from centrist Democrats such as the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is blocking federal voting rights protections.Obama told CNN “large portions of an elected Congress [are] going along with the falsehood that there were problems with the election”.Some Republicans did speak up against Trump’s lie after 6 January, Obama said, praising officials like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Georgia secretary of state who resisted pressure to overturn Biden’s win there, as “very brave”.But then, Obama said, “poof, suddenly everybody was back in line. Now, the reason for that is because the base believed it and the base believed it because this had been told to them not just by the president, but by the media that they watch.“My hope is that the tides will turn. But that does require each of us to understand that this experiment in democracy is not self-executing. It doesn’t happen just automatically.”Obama, the first black president, has considered his impact on the American right at length, particularly in his memoir, A Promised Land, which was published after the 2020 election.He told CNN the rightwing media, most prominently Fox News, was a particular driver of deepening division. Republicans and Democrats, he said, “occupy different worlds. And it becomes that much more difficult for us to hear each other, see each other.“We have more economic stratification and segregation. You combine that with racial stratification and the siloing of the media, so you don’t have just Walter Cronkite delivering the news, but you have 1,000 different venues. All that has contributed to that sense that we don’t have anything in common.”Asking “how do we start once again being able to tell a common story about where this country goes?”, Obama said Americans on either side of the divide needed to meet and talk more often.“The question now becomes how do we create … meeting places,” he said. “Because right now, we don’t have them and we’re seeing the consequences of that.” More
Joe Biden is “finishing the job” begun by Barack Obama, the former president told the New York Times in an interview released on Tuesday.“I think that what we’re seeing now, is Joe and the administration are essentially finishing the job,” Obama said. “And I think it’ll be an interesting test.“Ninety per cent of the folks who were there in my administration, they are continuing and building on the policies we talked about, whether it’s the Affordable Care Act or our climate change agenda and the Paris [climate deal], and figuring out how do we improve the ladders to mobility through things like community colleges.”Obama also considered why in 2016, after his eight years in power, so many voters plumped for a hard-right successor in Donald Trump.“It’s hard to just underscore how much the bank bailouts just angered everyone, including me,” Obama said, of the remedy for the 2008 financial crisis he helped lead.“And then you have this long, slow recovery. Although the economy recovers technically quickly, it’s another five years before we’re really back to people feeling like, ‘OK, the economy is moving and working for me.’“… Let’s say a Democrat, a Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton had immediately succeeded me, and the economy suddenly has 3% unemployment, I think we would have consolidated the sense that, ‘Oh, actually these policies that Obama put in place worked.’“The fact that Trump interrupts essentially the continuation of our policies, but still benefits from the economic stability and growth that we had initiated, means people aren’t sure. Well, gosh, unemployment’s 3.5% under Donald Trump.”Obama also mused about Biden’s much-discussed ability to reach voters, particularly in post-industrial midwestern states, who voted Obama then switched to Trump.“By virtue of biography and generationally,” Obama said, his vice-president, who is 78 and was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, “can still reach some of those folks”.“People knew I was left on issues like race, or gender equality, and LGBTQ issues and so forth,” Obama said. “But I think maybe the reason I was successful campaigning in downstate Illinois, or Iowa, or places like that is they never felt as if I was condemning them for not having gotten to the politically correct answer quick enough, or that somehow they were morally suspect because they had grown up with and believed more traditional values.”In fact Obama famously stirred controversy in 2008 when he said such voters “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”.The New York Times interviewer Ezra Klein did not raise those remarks.Obama continued: “I could go to the fish fry, or the [Veterans of Foreign Wars] hall, or all these other venues, and just talk to people. And they didn’t have any preconceptions about what I believed. They could just take me at face value.”The former president noted the drastic effects on such states of the collapse of local newspapers and the proliferation of misinformation via rightwing and social media.“If I went into those same places now,” Obama said, “or if any Democrat who’s campaigning goes in those places now, almost all news is from either Fox News, Sinclair news stations, talk radio, or some Facebook page. And trying to penetrate that is really difficult.“It’s not that the people in these communities have changed. It’s that if that’s what you are being fed, day in and day out, then you’re going to come to every conversation with a certain set of predispositions that are really hard to break through. And that is one of the biggest challenges I think we face.”According to recent polling, 53% of Republicans – and 25% of Americans – accept Trump’s lie that his defeat by Biden was the result of electoral fraud, while 15% of Americans believe the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that a cabal of child-murdering cannibals controls the US government.“If you have a conversation with folks,” Obama said, “you can usually assuage those fears. But they have to be able to hear you. You have to be able to get into the room. And I still could do that back in 2007, 2008. I think Joe, by virtue of biography and generationally, I think he can still reach some of those folks. But it starts getting harder, particularly for newcomers who are coming up.”Obama also said a successful Biden administration “will have an impact” on a deeply polarised political landscape in which Republican states are restricting voting among communities of color and making it easier to overturn results, while Republicans in Congress block a bipartisan commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters.“Does [success for Biden] override that sort of identity politics that has come to dominate Twitter, and the media, and that has seeped into how people think about politics?” Obama asked. “Probably not completely. But at the margins, if you’re changing 5% of the electorate, that makes a difference.” More
