I hope that’s true. It doesn’t seem like that to me, but that might just be a family thing.
I remember this. I actually find his post-presidency actions more infuriating. Generally they involve him intervening whenever something awesome is happening to stop the thing dead in its tracks. I don’t remember him ever showing up to do something anti-Trump/anti-GOP from 2016-2020, by the way. Knowing him, he probably felt it was his duty to respect a sitting President (norms and traditions), not that Trump would have returned the favor. I wish he’d felt it was his duty to stay out of those strikes and the 2020 primaries, though.
(Those primaries are why I have no patience for the argument that we have to pick someone besides Biden. Why wasn’t that done
then? I know we’re not supposed to vote for someone like Sanders, but why not any of the other people running? Everyone kept on insisting on this guy with all these weird lifeguard stories. The only thing I can think of is name recognition. Part of me thinks this desire to replace Biden is actually because Biden has been better on labor rights then expected and did things like pull out of Afghanistan. It just seems funny to me that in 2020 Biden was the perfect candidate to go up against Trump, and now all of a sudden he’s not, just as he turned out to be less terrible than everyone was expecting. Everything they’re saying about Biden now was true in 2020; it seems like bullshit to me.)
As for the matter of labor, I only remember Obama mentioning it once during his presidency. Do you remember TPP and how he kept pushing for that? When it eventually failed, he mentioned something vague about protections that I’ve never heard him mention before. He argued that TPP would happen anyway but without the necessary protections. I haven’t had the time to refresh myself in detail, but from a cursory search, it seems like a lot of congressional Democrats were saying those protections were unenforceable. I also could never figure out why he was so intent on pushing that in an election year when trade deals like that have become pretty unpopular for across the board. Nobody trusts that they won’t result in massive unemployment. It was not smart to brand the Democratic party as the party that is all for that kind of thing; Donald Trump had been campaigning against trade deals like that. 2016 was just full of so many poor decisions; it’s amazing.
What are some things you think he had the power to do, but did not?
I’m inclined to agree with you, and yet, people say that this is not his fault, that he faced a lot of Republican obstruction, and this limited what he could do. Undoubtedly, that’s not wrong, and yet, I’ve felt it’s not wholly accurate. Looking at how he operates when he’s not constrained helps paints a different picture for me.
My impression is that he had a once in a lifetime opportunity, complete with massive approval ratings when entering office, to make a lot of fundamental changes, and he squandered the opportunity. I know he had two years at the very least. That’s not nothing. But I’m serious when I say that he had a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. I doubt I’ll see everything align that perfectly in my lifetime, and that’s the tragedy of this. It’s shocking when I think about that I never really heard him talk about labor during the “Great Recession”, during a period of time when the news reports were talking about a jobless recovery for years and that the expert analysts couldn’t figure out why the profits and benefits from productivity from all the “too big to fail” institutions weren’t trickling down to everyone else. (I'll add that I graduated from college in this environment.)
I’ll add that I did try to give him a chance, at multiple junctures, despite my skepticism. In 2015, for instance, I at least thought his centrism would create some kind of civil peace and heal the intense political divisions within our society, and maybe that would be something, even if we didn’t get actual change in a lot of areas. Status quo with peace might have been acceptable. (I think everyone knows how that turned out).
Also, I was impressed by him at the DNC in 2004 (really the only noteworthy thing about that), like many people, but in the intervening four years my politics changed and I grew even more angry and skeptical of everything.
Fight Reignites Over Fears Obama Presidential Center Will Spark Gentrification
Basically, you have a lot of Black and Brown folks that don’t want to be pushed out of their community because of the Obama Presidential Library.
This is what I was alluding to earlier. This is why I suspect you are right when you say that he could have done more. Who is tying his hands in this scenario? Who is obstructing him? In this scenario, as far as I know, he has a free hand, where he could act as an inspirational leader if he wanted to. Why isn’t he going “sure, I’ll work with you guys on community benefits”? Why is he fighting them so hard? All I’ve come across is him claiming the goals are too vague and that there aren’t enough plans. The goals didn’t seem that vague; the statement reads like someone who really wants to drag their feet on this; it doesn't read like that of a transformational leader.