this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Which part am I wrong about? Obama ran on affordable healthcare, abortion rights, being anti-bailout for too-big-to-fail entities, and being anti-war. He won a supermajority. Then he scaled back his healthcare plan, said abortion rights "aren't a top priority", continued bush's bailouts and added more, and invaded/bombed more countries during his term.
Obama passed the best affordable healthcare plan he could.
On abortion rights, he was no more left than Hillary. On the bailouts, he was openly in support of the Bush bailout plan even before the election. On war, Obama was openly in favor of the continuation of the war in Afghanistan and harder military policy against several countries, some of which even McCain wasn't onboard on.
But hey, whatever helps fuel your delusional "If only candidates were more left, then they would DEFINITELY win in a landslide!" outlook.
The democrats are all moderate republicans, which in itself is an oxymoron. Don't believe me, here is Obama saying just that (about himself); https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJIlZxHfclc Now imagine you somehow get total control of all braches, and to top it off 3 weeks filibuster proof. You can do anything, but you don't really want change. What do you do? Well implement RomneyCare, call it ObamaCare and leave out the public option, which will ensure it be a giveaway to big pharma. Seems good at first glance, but leaving out the public option really killed it, as they intended.
Regarding roe...
The first thing I'll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BdrOrwmk78Y
Im pro choice https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nmzdkAbu8dY
Not my highest priority https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RxiDZejZFjg
parody... No https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1z4uhxpOnN0
Obama had full control of both houses and the White House, they could have passed whatever they wanted.
Instead we still didn’t get single payer healthcare.
Fucking lmao.
Oh I’m sorry, where did the ACA come from?
Three months of Obama's negotiations with a Senate whose supermajority was built on Blue-Dog Democrats from highly conservative areas, and of whom every single one was necessary.
What, do you think Obama comes in like a Roman Emperor, proposes legislation to the Senate, and then has a vote that same day? Do you not know anything about the functioning of the modern US Congress? Jesus Christ.
If Obama couldn’t get his team to fall in line when they had everything going for them, then he did not do his job well enough.
"His team"
The Senate wasn't hand-picked by Obama. Fuck, many of them had been in the Senate longer than Obama had been in politics, repeatedly re-elected by their constituents to represent interests which were not necessarily in-line with Obama's plans. "He should have just done it better!" is a ridiculous position.
His team is the Democratic Party, by his own choice
His team is the Democratic Party because there are two major parties in this country. And one of them spent years calling him racial slurs, so their support was doubtful.
What were Obama's other choices, in this scenario?
We fight according to the situation as it is, not the situation as we want it to be.
Bull moose party managed it
An incredibly popular president returning after having already been elected once split off during a contested convention at the Republican Party, which was initially the venue through which their candidate was going to run and managed to lose the ensuing election, accomplishing nothing except the election of a rival.
And that was the best third-party showing in US presidential history.
Obama was really good at letting people project what they wanted on to him politically, while still broadly holding to the neoliberal agenda, and lots of people were insanely naïve at the time. I mean, you had people who claimed to actually expect the election of Obama to usher in a post-racial epoch in the USA, as though all the racists were going to say, "Aw, shucks, the black guy won? Well, hang it up boys, we have to face reality and accept we've been wrong all along."
He also benefitted from pretty excellent political cover from criticism, where, like many vocal Biden supporters are doing right now, any criticism of him would be associated with outright support of the vilest opinions espoused by the GOP at the time. If you said "You know, this Obama guy isn't as great as he's being made out to be," you'd have people assuming you were some nutjob that thought he was secretly Kenyan, or whatever other crazy conspiracies the Tea Party folks trotted out. I don't think it was purely malicious or cynical attempts to discredit people all the time, but there was a big chunk of people who wanted to believe in their conception of Obama, which couldn't admit that he wasn't the savior sent from on high to resolve all the country's problems in exactly the manner they had hoped he would.