olive consumer: This rules and it will always annoy me this wasn't on the list of things Obama did on his way out of the White House. www.axios.com/2024/06/26/b...

This rules and it will always annoy me this wasn't on the list of things Obama did on his way out of the White House. www.axios.com/2024/06/26/b...

Biden pardons veterans convicted under military's ban on gay sexwww.axios.com The action will apply to thousands of former military service members.

I've always found the contrast between Obama and Biden fascinating. Biden has a fraught political history that's more or less just a reflection of the zeitgeist of his era and is, occasionally, a real Progressive in some very meaningful ways. Obama talked about Progressivism, but did very little.

A forgotten beneficiary of Donald Trump is Barack Obama and his legacy as President. I don't think history will look kindly on the Obama Presidency, but I doubt he will suffer the same scrutiny he would have were Trump not his immediate successor.

i think a lot of obamas poor policies can be chalked up to the party being much worse under him than biden but like issuing these pardons on the way out was a freebie and with donald trump winning you weren't risking any kind of political backlash

Some of the staffing choices (e.g. Larry Summers) I'm 50-50 how much influence Obama had relative to the party machine, but no matter how you slice it they were a disaster.

yeah the difference between great recession stimulus vs covid stimulus is just mind boggling

I think part of the difference there is that Biden learned from Obama's mistakes. Obama was too willing to water shit down to appease a GOP that would never, ever, ever be appeased. Biden learned that you make a big show of bipartianship for the cameras, and then do the thing you wanted.

And somehow the Obama recession recovery was substantially better than a lot of the rest of the world.

In 2009 he had reason to make that kind of compromise. After the 2016 election? No way

It’s important to keep in mind that prior to 2010 midterms Dem congressional caucus was 1/4-1/5 rural/conservative. After it was a minority. Took Obama a while to figure out how to work around that, something Biden picked up & perfected. But yeah, those pardons & others like it woulda been freebies.

Kinda crazy to remember that the 111st Congress had Dem Senators from Alaska, South Dakota, North Carolina, Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas (TWO!). Continued sorting and nationalization of all politics slowly weeded out rural/conservative Senate Dems.

111th United States Congress - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Nature of House combined with 2010 shellacking & subsequent redistricting wiped out rural House Dems much faster. Shame ‘20 wasn’t enough of a counterwave down ballot to undo most of the gerrymandering. Will be interesting to see what happens in ‘30. Do Dems keep new high propensity voter coalition?

im optomistic well have nc again this cycle

some of it is due to the fact that he could not both "be Black" and "do thing" without insane reactionary backlash, I think

That one meme thats something like average purple state dem under obama: we told that Muslim socialist if he wants our support show us that birth certificate Average purple state dem under biden: today our glorious leader…

I think Obama did about as well as could be expected on many things, given the Congress and Party he had to work with... ...but his tendency to appoint 'good' Republicans to positions (like, say, COMEY) was an own goal that annihilated a good chunk of his legacy (like the Iran Deal, say).

Obama didn't do very much to influence the party, though. He handed the DNC off to DWS as a fief, and tried to stand above a lot of internal party operations. As such, he accepted a lot of their policy and staff without input. That was, if not a failure exactly, a lost opportunity.

While there’s plenty to criticize regarding the Obama presidency, it’s not even on the same planet with the Trump presidency. Idt you’re informed enough, luckily for your stomach. It is true however that Nixon did get a second look and compared to Trump he’s practically a choir boy.

this is my point thanks

biden has always had the vibe to me of someone descended from the Progressive Era, for all of the good and bad things that come with that

I think a lot of the complaints about Biden stem from the conflation of Progressivism and Populism because he's certainly the former while pretty arguably not the latter.

This was my biggest point of post-Bernie disillusionment. I became interested in political economy and material critique, and I assumed that everyone else was having a similar awakening. But nope! The movement was 90% populism the whole time (not necessarily a reflection on Bernie himself).

Unfortunately, there's no gain in being a Populist in the vaguely Leninist, "the peasantry has to learn how to read" way. Consistently a dead end, it seems!

HL Menken-ass post

I think because the peasantry in 21 century USA has a pretty high literacy rate?

This is how I feel. Honestly, it was and is depressing to realize just how deep "politics as consumerism" goes, even with those who proclaim themselves against conspicuous consumerism.

Yeah

tbqh, I do also think there could've been an interesting aspect as well if Obama just well... wasn't so new to federal politics (in terms of just like the two years before campaigning), and had had something like a full term in the Senate before campaigning

The fact they immediately voted for Trump puts the lie to it, of course, but the common Conservative criticism of Obama that it's stupid to have someone so inexperienced as President was correct, actually.

I still sincerely think he leaked the policy about gay marriage through an intentional gaff then went back to Obama and said see it will be well received, now get to it. Or Obama put him up to it. There were a number of policies leaked this way.

Both suggest a level of shrewdness we weren't giving him credit for at the time. Certainly they can pull bad quotes from past Biden, but he is also allowed to change his opinions about things.

I like to think that deep down Obama was much more progressive in ideology but in practice he was so encumbered by the racial politics surrounding his blackness it made him conspicuously kowtow to capital and establishment

Never forget that it was Biden going off the reservation and mouthing off that actually started the Obama administration supporting gay marriage. I think he did it on Ash Wednesday I want to say?

No it was May 6th turns out. I remember that in the days after that the Obama administration had to rush out and pretend like it had always supported gay marriage and all of a sudden there was political momentum behind it. www.washingtonblade.com/2019/05/08/b...

Biden's early support for same-sex marriage still remembered for impactwww.washingtonblade.com Seven years ago this week, former Vice President Joseph Biden gave an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that fundamentally altered the course for marriage-equality movement.

After all that's happened since 2016 I can't help but think that if Obama had even hinted at doing half of what Biden has done in his term he most likely would have been assassinated.

Biden hung around as senator from mbna. turns out he inherited a little from his Humphrey /Mondale peers which was out of fashion and ignored. Obama I think is more temperamentally conservative (for at least one glaringly obvious reason) , rocketed to the presidency with little admin experience.

I think this caused some personal traction issues and one reason he replied on people like summers and rahm to give him a shield.

Senile or not, he’s such a mensch.

I'm listening to a podcast with psychologists and they're saying that Biden is showing evidence of aging but very little dementia. Trump is exactly the opposite with lots of signs of dementia, but little signs of aging in his speech patterns.

I just don’t know. I just find myself thinking about random men and women who could’ve been credible candidates and wondering how in the world we ended up here.

so many things like this i am just not aware of. makes me wonder what other small things that impact 1,000s of people we never hear about.

Biden is such a fascinating character in modern politics. He's like a relic of the era of Real Politicians, both in a good and bad way. I don't think he was anywhere near the best pick but I think it makes sense that people went with him over another decade of populist nonsense

Huge fucking same

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