Barack Obama’s Obungling of a Historic Opportunity Is Responsible for Trump Too

There is a lot that everyone can learn from this election. My fellow lefties need to accept how our rhetorical framing alienates our ostensible allies. Republicans, who have ridden Trump’s coattails back to relevancy, also must understand that their political platform has no real constituency outside of an elitist and out of touch Democratic Party who is obsessed with wrongheaded cable news narratives and virtue signaling to everyone how supposedly smart and reasonable they are by adopting conservative positions. Every single major political persuasion in America has been rebuked by Trumpism since 2016. If you are not doing some introspection right now, you are part of the problem that helped lead to two-time President Trump.

And if you think the correct response is just to denigrate Americans who somehow were unrepentant racists in 2016 and 2024 but not in 2008 or 2012, then you must really love losing elections to Donald Trump. The left needs a wholesale rethink, from liberals to lefties, and in my opinion, one of the biggest obstacles to overcoming the past dragging the Democrats down is the full-blown dishonesty with which we view Barack Obama’s presidency, and the unimpeachable facts introduced by the existence of the Obama-Obama-Trump voter.

His 2008 campaign was the first real proof of the 21st century’s defining populist strain and the massive opportunity that liberal politics has to tap into it. Barack Obama galvanized entire swaths of the country who do not vote or vote Republican into believing in a new politics of change, winning states like Indiana and North Carolina. He promised everyone that the neoliberal failures of the past that helped hollow out this country would be tossed aside for a new populist governing strategy in the 21st century centered around investing in Main Street, not Wall Street.

And then the man who successfully ran against the Clinton dynasty and the default stance of the neoliberal Democratic Party hired a bunch of Clinton advisors when he came into office. Larry Summers, who is one of the policymakers most responsible for hollowing out America in the 1990s and selling it to multinational corporations, was hired as the head of Obama’s National Economic Council, proving that his belief in a new kind of politics was more rhetoric than substance. Barack Obama’s 2008 populist campaign and subsequent neoliberal agenda is a perfect example of the mass disconnect between who the Democrats believe themselves to be and who they have proven themselves to be through their elitist governance that primarily serves their well-off aging and white suburban base. In so many ways, Democrats have become the Republicans of old, becoming the defenders of institutions while aspiring to return to the politics of a previous era.

Non-partisans simply don’t like or trust the Democrats, in large part because the best Democrat the party has to offer spent eight years in power and didn’t do a whole lot to ameliorate the fundamental problems that helped sweep him into office in the first place, and by the end of it, was an avatar of the neoliberal establishment immiserating the country.

Working people didn’t abandon the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party abandoned them. Barack Obama was swept into office with a historic mandate during an unprecedented housing crisis, and he o-bungled it so badly that a study found his horrible housing policies led to a decline in Black wealth. Ryan Cooper, one of the report’s authors, told The Intercept that “What it shows is we bailed out Wall Street — that wasn’t entirely Obama’s doing at all, that was Bush and the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and so forth — but housing was almost entirely under his control. Homeowners were not bailed out.”

The 2008 financial crisis remade America in so many different ways, and Obama campaigned against the forces that created it and then allied with them upon entering office. This is how folks like me who drove from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to knock on doors for him every weekend in 2008 wound up leaving the party four years later.

Partisans like to talk about how conservative the Democratic Senate was in 2009, and it was, but only a loser party filled with losers who are defined by losing can look at the most popular candidate since LBJ and say, “well there’s nothing he really could have done to push Joe Lieberman left.” This is how people who aren’t interested in building political power think. It’s called a bully pulpit for a reason, and Obama was simply bad at the basic governance aspects of the job, and he allowed Congress to steamroll his agenda. Obama was similar to Trump in his desire to sit in the Oval Office and try to rule by fiat and let others do the dirty work for him, and his clashes with Biden who has a much more hands-on approach led to them becoming frenemies. The myth of Obama and Biden being besties is yet another product of Democrats’ cloistered cable news diet telling its voters fairy tales about American governance instead of what is actually happening.

Obama’s signature policy achievement was written by the Heritage Foundation and put into action by Republican Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. He campaigned on being the candidate for Main Street then let Wall Street return to the status quo that helped create the widespread fraud which led to the 2008 financial crisis. Democrats like to think that the Obama presidency was one big success that is not connected to the failures of the present-day party, but they fail to remember that in his very first State of the Union, he basically apologized for failing to deliver on his campaign promises.

If there is one policy he won the 2008 election on, it was his vote against the Iraq War, as he campaigned heavily both against the Democrats and the Republicans for supporting America’s imperial conquest that killed over a million people. When Obama left office, his defining foreign policy legacy was expanding George W. Bush’s drone war across the world, as we were at war in more countries when Obama left than when he entered. Almost every major thing he promised to do in 2008, he failed to do, and in some instances like with foreign policy, did the opposite. As Vox noted in 2017, “Using drones to kill American citizens without trial, collecting the email and phone records of millions of Americans on a daily basis, and grabbing militants off of the streets of foreign cities and imprisoning them indefinitely — these are all powers that Obama has bequeathed to his successor.”

Barack Obama even allied himself with his successor’s priority of attacking the press, as the Freedom of the Press Foundation notes that “Obama used the Espionage Act to put a record number of reporters’ sources in jail.”

The Obama Administration is an avatar for elitist Democratic hypocrisy and the vast disconnect between the wrongheaded way the party views itself and the way the rest of the country sees it. Obama had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the status quo and become a literal Mount Rushmore-level president, instead he explicitly allied with the status quo, betraying the broad-based coalition who sent him to Washington to change it. America has experienced change elections in 2008, 2016, 2020 and now 2024 (which strongly suggests the Obungler would have been a one-term president had the GOP nominated a populist in 2012 instead of the face of Wall Street). Had the man who campaigned on hope and change actually delivered on it instead of governing in a way that reinforced everyone’s most cynical beliefs about politics, there is a very good chance that President Donald Trump never would have existed.