January 21, 2017

Obama, the ignorable placeholder president

With that guy now officially being the ex-President, I'll re-post a one cheer for Obama take from about a week before the election. Perhaps it'll generate more discussion now that he's formally out, and Trump formally in.

tl;dr -- The Republicans were going to lose in 2008, so the real choice among possible worlds was President Barack Obama or President Hillary Clinton. Obama is a narcissist, but Hillary is a sociopath. And Obama had no larger crony network, unlike Clintonworld.

If the GOP wasn't going to give us a Trump candidate back then, at least we wound up with the lesser of two evils from the neoliberal side.

I don't remember writing about Obama ever before the past election season, and a search of posting history here confirms that. The few times I did, it was about Obama as one of many presidents -- like generational patterns among presidents. Never really about his policies, or effects on the country or world.

In fact, the one time I did back in '08, it was to condemn both him and Bush for trying to sell "the uninsured" as poor citizens, when it included illegals as well.

There are going to be lots of "see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya" remarks as Obama gets lost, but I wouldn't personalize it that much. The problems of his years were far more general and driven by grassroots changes, making Obama mostly a reflection rather than powerful cause of what we don't like about the past eight years.

And it would have been worse under Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

At any rate, the Trump victory is not just going to undo the past eight years, but the past 30 or 40. It's a once-a-generation re-alignment, and our desire to kick someone's ass on the way out the door should be directed at the entire neoliberal and neoconservative practices of the past couple generations.

If it were to be personalized, remember that our main enemies over those many decades have been the Bush dynasty and the Clinton dynasty, both of which have now been thoroughly eliminated from future participation.

After them, Obama has mostly been an ignorable placeholder of a president. Most Trump voters have already forgotten all about Obama, because there was never anything there to remember in the first place.

I wonder if that will anger Obama's groupies even more? -- that we aren't going to elevate him to arch-nemesis status against Trump. At worst, he's just going to be some annoying talking head who occasionally pops up on cable news, and we keep asking when is he going to go away?

Only the bitter hardcore True Conservative types will keep thinking and seething about him, but this group has already shrunken so fast in relevance. Nobody wants to keep hearing about how Obama did this or that -- we want to focus on whose Establishment ass Trump is kicking today, and which industry is re-locating back to American shores this week. Much more uplifting than worrying about some meaningless presidency.

18 comments:

  1. People easily forget that if Obama didn't bring in ACA as Obamacare, Romney would have done the same as Romneycare. CIA boogeyman Osama Bin Laden was supposedly snuffed out on Obama's watch. Oh, and Obama was mostly known for making the white house, the rainbow faggot bath house.

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  2. And Obama was the Black Lives Matter president having saint Trayvon Martin and saint Michael Brown as his sons.

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  3. And we must also remember Obama was the Climate Change Carbon Tax president.

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  4. This era does deserve to(and may will) be remembered for Obama doing more to damage race relations than any other post-1900 major politician. In fact, a pre-Clinton era government/law enforcement may well have attempted to subvert BLM (Hoover's FBI certainly would've been sounding the alarm about this dangerous commie outfit).

    Obama is both a product and creator of cultural Marxism. I agree that his foreign policy isn't as batshit crazy as his contemporaries. Just the same, I know (we know, right?) that Romney, McCain et al would never have gashed open the scarred tissue of centuries of animosity between paranoid loser blacks and whites who are mostly well-meaning but frustrated by lame blacks.

    And merely electing a black president made liberals and blacks feel even more entitled and obnoxious. We'll see how they keep it up. After all, many are still refusing to even accept Trump as legitimate. I suppose Truther conservatives could also be accused of not accepting Obama, but in their defense they correctly sensed that Obama didn't have his heart with Middle America.

    We can only hope that Trump and his bosses punish the most glaring examples of civil discord to send a message that there are going to be consequences for being out of line. At least his Justice Department is going to hemorrhage civil rights agitators (I'm certain that Obama's JD has pushed more discrimination law suits than any prior JD).

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  5. During election season, I remember I told a "true con," mockingly of course "muh free markets, muh constitution. Such concerns are beneath the dignity of the God Emperor."Best humor is to include truth. He failed to understand in his sperg out about abstractions, the practical matters of actual governance. Humor was a truly potent weapon to pipe that cuck down.

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  6. There wasn't much there to hold on to enough to hate. Most of my vitriol over the last 8 years was reserved for fellow Whites who kept voting the guy in.

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  7. Albionic American1/21/17, 2:42 PM

    I favor erasing Obama's Presidency from history. In a few centuries, historians will notice an eight-year gap in the chronology of the early 21st Century, and the era's conspiracy theorists will imagine what had happened to try to fill that mysterious void in time.

    In any event, if we've learned our lesson, we'll build an invisible firewall to keep another black person from becoming President in our lifetimes.

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  8. It's possible that race relations would've been worse under Hillary, the only alternative to Obama.

    He's a narcissist and used current events to draw attention to his identity and himself ("If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon").

    Hillary is a sociopath and would've stoked racial anger much more forcefully without regard to the consequences. Look at how she vs. Obama campaigned on race issues during the past election season.

    She'll do anything she believes will get her more power, even if her assessment is wrong -- like antagonizing white people, working up black/brown anger, or whatever else.

    And her Clintonworld network could have spread the damage much farther around -- political, economic, cultural (media, schools), both overt and covert operations. Obama had no such network, and would've been too attention-whoring to farm any of the work out to them anyway.

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    1. Such good points and I concur.

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  9. Mccain Had a high chance of Winning the 2008 election before he nominated Palin. Also Had Hillary won the 2008 Democratic Primary, we definitely would have had a President John Mccain.

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  10. Wrong. Aside from nobody caring about VP, historical models predicted Dem win in '08 long before the election.

    There were too many blights against Bush -- Iraq War, Housing bubble, response to recession being the main ones. Movement conservatism was dead and irrelevant in the 2000s -- like Jimmy Carter trying to revive the New Deal, while also kicking off the deregulation craze, Bush promoted a "compassionate conservatism" that tried to revive Reagan-era politics for the Clinton era.

    Like Carter, Bush 2 was destined to trigger a landslide for the other party.

    And by the most extensive Florida recounts in 2000, Bush 2 was supposed to be a one-term blip in a long run for the other party.

    Three consecutive terms for a single party is hard to pull off -- only Reagan was able to do it, propelling Bush 1 to victory. Bush 2 couldn't have propelled Abraham Lincoln to victory in '08. And McCain was just another worthless compassionate cuckservative.

    Hillary did marginally better than Obama in the primaries, so she would've done better in the general too. Higher non-white turnout didn't steal away states for Obama, so Hillary not turning to many out wouldn't have mattered.

    If anything, she would have gotten the reliable non-white vote, and would have been an easier choice for white moderates to swallow.

    She would've done at least as well as Obama in the EC, though not in the popular vote (which was run up by non-whites turning out in droves, in safe blue or safe red states that don't matter).

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  11. Mccain would have won because a large chunk of the Black vote would have defected to the GOP has hillary won in 08. It was not like in 16 where trump won by gaining high white turnout and had only limited inroads (while much better than romney in 12'). Hillary would have lost even more severely in 08' than she did in 16'. Mccain would have had the Military vote, Sizable chunks of the Minority vote and the traditional GOP Rural and Middle class constituencies. He would have won. Hillary would have adopted an antiwar left stance (even if she had no intention of implementing it) that would have made her unpopular with huge chunks of the electorate. All McCain had to do was say that he would have committed more troops to Iraq than bush did (the lack of forces committed was the real reason Iraq turned into a quagmire) and vow that 9/11 would be properly avenged and he would have won by a landslide.

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  12. Random Dude on the Internet1/21/17, 11:45 PM

    In 2008, it made natural sense to me to be for Obama, much like it made natural sense to me to be for Trump in 2016. I couldn't stand either Obama or Romney in 2012 so I didn't bother voting. 2012 was a pretty awful time in politics as it felt like there was nothing that represented me. If it was Jeb or Marco vs. Hillary in 2016, I probably would have just washed my hands of politics then and there.

    To me, Obama seemed custom designed for the late 00s era of politics and he became a worse and worse fit as we moved away from that time period. If there was even a remotely competent Republican for 2012, Obama probably would have lost. Heck, when setting up arrangements for the 2012 run, they assumed he would be defeated. Fortunately for Obama he was up against Mitt Romney, who was tone deaf and the accusations of him being an out of touch elitist fit well. You could tell he wasn't going to lift a finger for the average person but he would do everything he could to help out the <1%. Very tone deaf after OWS and the tea party.

    This probably explains why the second term of Obama's was so tumultuous as it was the process of pounding a square peg in a round hole. He seemed to be outwitted at every turn by Vladimir Putin and the recovery was largely imaginary. So he turned his focus to social justice, an area that he assumed he would be skilled at. Well, now black people are killing other black people in record numbers. Steve Sailer has stated in the past that he believes that Obama likely felt bad about lighting up the racial tinderbox but it was his supposed bailiwick and he couldn't even do that right.

    That is my high level interpretation: Obama was only meant to be a one term guy and due to GOP incompetence, got a second term. Trump is also a zeitgeist of the feelings of America. The left continues to throw tantrums which will continue to alienate the middle from the Democrats who explicitly or implicitly support it. The left will continue to spin further and further out of control and after suffering humiliating losses in 2018 and 2020, the Democrats may begin seeing the light that identity politics is coming to a close. Speculation on my part but I'm going to be optimistic that the left will continue to fall flat, Trump will succeed, and he will continue to peel away more support from the Democrats who currently prefer to double down.

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  13. Not sure if Anon is a troll or truly retarded Jack Kemp cuckservative.

    Either way, not entertaining. Don't comment anymore.

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  14. If I can find something good to say about Obama (which is difficult for me) I would say I appreciate that he didn't take us into a full blown War in Syria to replace Assad. Both Hillary and McCain would have done so.

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  15. Speaking of McCain, I was reading Jonathan Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind", and one fact he mentions is that McCain's 2008 campaign slogan was "Country First". Weird, right? I don't even remember that. It's kind of a cucky version of Trump's "America First" - as if he was afraid of SPLC denouncing "America First" as rayciss, or maybe he wanted to leave which country unspecified because he really meant Israel First.

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  16. Arkanslaw Toothpick1/23/17, 12:39 PM

    Agreed. Most of the worst part of his Presidency consisted of stupid symbolic gestures, using his office as a bully pulpit for idiocy, but not a lot of meaningful legal or political change. With same-sex marriage, he was just jumping on a liberal bandwagon that was moving long before he came along. Obamacare was a disaster, but the GOP would likely have done something similar. Most of his big foreign policy debacles were Secretary Clinton's fault (esp. Libya), and his native caution overruled lots of dumber ideas in the international arena. People criticize the way he pulled out of Iraq, but none of them have evidence that continued occupation could have improved anything. On balance, President Bush the Younger was worse, if only because his bad decisions hurt disproportionately hurt his own political base. (What percentage of Iraq war casualties and their families do you think voted for Dubya?) John McCain was apparently hell-bent on starting World War III, so we could have done a lot worse over the past eight years. I can't think of many good things to say about President Obama's governance, but I don't hate the man personally- if he lived in my neighborhood, I'd be cordial.

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  17. Rich Whiteman1/24/17, 10:04 AM

    Well done. I feel that this time in history will be forgotten and little-remarked upon in the years to come. I also believe the good things coming will wash away the divide - gradually - and we may get back on solid footing again.

    Thank God he took Hill's turn. It would've been a disaster.

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