-2018-
Obama — Just Too Good for Us
As president, Obama always found us wanting. We were constantly disappointing him. He would tell us the right thing to do and then sigh and purse his lips when his instructions were not followed.
“Maybe we pushed too far,” the president continued. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
So really, he’s not acknowledging any flaws but simply wondering if we were even more benighted than he thought. He’s saying that, sadly, we were not enlightened enough for the momentous changes wrought by the smartest people in the world — or even evolved enough for the first African-American president.
“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” Obama mused to aides.
We just weren’t ready for his amazing awesomeness.
It is stunning to me, having been on the road with Barack Obama in the giddy, evanescent days of 2008, that he does not understand his own historic rise to power, how he defied impossible odds and gracefully leapt over obstacles.
He did it by sparking hope in many Americans — after all the deceptions and squandered blood and money of the Bush-Cheney era — that he was going to give people a better future, something honest and cool and modern.
But by the end of his second term, he had lost the narrative about lifting up people, about buoying them on economic issues and soothing their jitters about globalization. They needed to know, what’s in it for them?
I do think Obama just said "fuck it" in his second term.
He pushed aside his loyal vice president, who was considered an unguided missile, and backed a woman who had no economic message and who almost used the slogan, “Because It’s Her Turn.”
Oh my God, I didn't know that. Talk about tone deaf. HILLARY! Okay, so he "pushed aside his loyal vice president" peeves her.
Then he put his own reputation for rectitude at risk by pre-emptively exonerating Hillary Clinton on the email issue, infuriating federal agents who were still investigating the case.
The hunger for revolutionary change, the fear that some people were being left behind in America and that no one in Washington cared, was an animating force at the boisterous rallies for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Yet Obama, who had surfed a boisterous wave into the Oval, ignored the restiveness — here and around the world. He threw his weight behind the most status quo, elitist candidate.
He did...he was inattentive to the restiveness in America. "Around the world"? He sided with the "street" in Egypt!
...
...Obama did not like persuading people to do what they didn’t want to do. And that is the definition of politics. He wanted them simply to do what he had ascertained to be right.
I think the first is right, I think the second is half-right. It was do the right thing, not do the thing that I determine to be right. Boy, she really has a bug up her ass for Obama.
...
Rhodes says that weeks after the election, he warned Obama that a narrative was developing that they didn’t do enough about the Russians and fake news.
“And do you think,” Obama replied, “that the type of people reading that stuff were going to listen to me?”
He didn't do enough, that's for dang sure. He let Russia steal the election for Puppet Trump.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, “To be Irish is to know that, in the end, the world will break your heart.”
Joe Biden has had his heart broken again and again and again.
Dowd is Irish, no?
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At an Iowa caucus event in 2008, the Biden booth was so lonely, the campaign literature so untouched, I actually picked up a Biden bumper sticker just out of pity. It’s still in my office.
So there was some Irish underdog fondness (I hope she's Irish) for Biden going back to 2008 when Joe was running against Obama and Hillary. Twelve years later, she still had that Biden bumper sticker in her office!
...
Through all of his travails and disappointments — as he went from being a cocky 29-year-old senator-elect to a chastened 72-year-old vice president pushed aside for Hillary Clinton — he never lost his passion for the American ideal that anything is possible if you work hard enough and dream big enough.
She resents that.
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The Obamas’ speeches at the [2020] convention were real “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS” moments.
“I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously,” the former president said, “that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care. But he never did.”
And, as Michelle Obama said, “Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are.” Trump, she added, is “clearly in over his head.”
...
It was gratifying to hear the Obamas finally say, with such icy contempt, what we knew they were thinking about Donald Trump. And Biden finally got Obama to hand over the electoral Excalibur.
It was too little, too late on Trump and Russia in 2016. Her second "finally" is on Obama passing the torch to Biden. The "pushed aside" grievance still irked, and look, Obama did consciously favor Hillary over Biden and did consciously but gently push Biden aside for her. So there's a fondness for underdog Irish Joe going back to 2008, when Joe was running against Obama and Hillary
...
In one of the most moving convention scenes ever, Brayden, a 13-year-old from New Hampshire, courageously and charmingly talked about how Joe Biden, who has had a lifelong struggle with stuttering, tried to help him with his own stutter. (As opposed to Trump’s denigration of the disabled.)
It was. Brayden and Joe were underdogs. Was Barack Hussein Obama not in her thinking? Was black man Barack Obama just another entitled elite in Dowd's mind, like the Kennedy's, like Hillary? It's as if the slogan Obama almost chose was "Because It's His Turn."
Mister Rogers, he of the neighborhood, always said that the worst type of human beings were the ones who made you feel “less than.” That is Donald Trump’s M.O. Brayden made the case for Biden being the opposite, someone who tries to make you feel “more than.”
Oh, here's something from
2007!
Most recently [Maureen] Dowd's peevishness has been directed toward Barack Obama. She finds the candidate "testy," "irritated," "hung-up," "conflicted" and "self-consciously pristine." Dowd took it personally when he gave a Labor Day speech in New Hampshire taking on business-as-usual Beltway politics. Dowd mocked Obama's "ranting about Washington pundits" by pointing out that he frequently graces the covers of magazines. This is quite a trick when you think about it. The media elite put Obama on magazine covers, and then the same media elite insist he is inauthentic for having appeared on magazine covers.
Dowd also accuses Obama of preening like a "46-year-old virgin," demonstrating "loose" body language and being "hung up on being seen as thoughtful," while secretly fearing "being seen as 'a dumb blond.'"
Those are just so insulting, demeaning, catty, so personal. Dowd did not like Obama at least from as far back as 2007.
So that's that. Barack Obama Thinks He's Too Good For The Rest Of Us™. I guess we can look forward to seeing this meme spread far and wide. I can't wait.
That was TRADEMARKED?!
