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The influence that Barack Obama has left on the table during the coronavirus pandemic and economic apocalypse has been staggering, frustrating, and inexplicable. --- Obama can do far more than tweet, and he hasn’t. This is by design. While our collective house burns to the ground, Obama has chosen to pull a Phil Jackson: eschewing a timeout and remaining firmly on the bench, trusting us to figure it all out for ourselves. Up until his imminent endorsement of Joe Biden, which itself is not a terribly productive action, he deliberately made a point of not getting in the way, which is delightful because Democrats still working in government have taken his lead and ALSO decided to not get in the way of Republicans, nor of our impending doom. The influence that Obama has left on the table has been so staggering as to be obscene. What’s even worse is that his void has been filled by a bunch of his former operatives who have used the Obama brand name to burnish their own halos while they do and say patently awful shit. […] I’m sick of Barack Obama staying above the fray while that fray is swallowing us whole. It’s infuriating. My anger at Trump is a given, but I hold a special anger in my heart for Democrats who were meant to supply vehement opposition but have instead given us nothing but a handful of wet shit. If Obama had any real plan to use his lingering popularity constructively, he would have used it by now. Instead, he insists he cannot be a white knight, and we have to sort this all out on our own. I’m sure every Republican he ever caved to is nodding in vigorous approval at the notion. […] It would be nice, for a change, if Barack Obama could emerge from his cave and offer — no wait, DEMAND — a way forward. It would be nice if he went Full Chicago and fucking fought for answers. But he hasn’t, and he won’t. THIS is what his legacy should be now. In office, Obama did very little to significantly alter a status quo designed to protect itself. Now, out of power but certainly not out of political capital, our brightest star remains in the shadows. Meanwhile, the current president would like virus death to become an accepted and perpetual fact of life here so that his favorite teevee show — AMERICA: IT’S GREAT!— can return from hiatus. […] Know who else is comfortable right now? Barack Obama. The man is all hope and no change. And the longer he refuses to take any public action, the more I’ll remember him as a man who said all the right things while, in his cherished long run, not having much to show for it. Wake the fuck up, Mr. President. The arc of the moral universe is no longer long. It is terrifyingly short, and guess which way it’s bending?

The writer's critics call him a cynic. But as a new anthology shows, his thinking has matured in subtle ways over the years. --- The word most frequently attached to Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably pessimistic. His critics charge him with focusing on American racism’s intransigence, and overstating the power that white supremacy exerts on black life. […] The racial backlash that Obama engendered testifies to the fact that any attempt by black people to liberate themselves fundamentally threatens the American order. This is part of the glory of Barack Obama’s presidency, that black people possess the potential to recreate America as a true democracy. But the events that have followed the Obama presidency tell us that democracy’s advent will perhaps remain more of a potentiality than a reality, a protracted struggle that the nation will not resolve without enormous strength of political will. Eight Years in Power asks us to linger in that tension instead of dismissing it. Coates’s gradual drift away from post-racial hopes towards hard-nosed realism shows us that he has been in motion this whole time, not denying America’s capacity to change, but realizing how monumental the task before us is.

A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next.

The president is correct that there is a long history of black leaders addressing "personal responsibility." But as a diagnosis for what has historically gone wrong in black communities, the tradition is erroneous.

Which is all to say that, yes, this election matters more than most. It matters more politically because the party in power will likely see their agenda affirmed by a cyclical recovery. But it matters more to actual people because the Affordable Care Act is poised to reshape American health care in two years. A vote for Obama is a vote for the law to take effect and for 30 million Americans to get health insurance they won’t get otherwise. A vote for Romney is a vote for the law — and its spending and its taxes — to be repealed. There are few elections in which the stakes are so clear.

With last night's results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.

I don’t agree with this completely, but it’s a solid argument. More broadly, the political problem of the Democrats is that they’re a party of capital that has to pretend for electoral reasons sometimes that it’s not. All the complaints that liberals have about them—their weakness, tendency to compromise, the constantly lamented lack of a spine—emerge from this central contradiction. The Republicans have a coherent philosophy and use it to fire up a rabid base. The Dems are afraid of their base because it might cause them trouble with their funders. Romney believes in money. Obama believes in nothing. Most liberals want to write off Obama’s bad performance as a bad night. It’s not just that. It’s a structural problem.

2,546 votes and 863 comments so far on Reddit

‘…in two years Obama has done more to enact a liberal agenda than George Bush did for the conservative agenda in eight. That's not bad, folks. All things considered, I'd say Obama is the most effective politician of the Obama era. And the Bush era too.’

A skewering of the non-politics of those members of Generations X and Y who would likely attend John Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, based around a paragraph-by-paragraph deconstruction of a viral ‘Breakup Letter to The Left’.

“Almost overnight, Barack Obama overhauled his White House and rewrote much of the script. Now all he needs is a happy ending.” On the self-examination and cabinet shuffling over the last two months, and what it could mean for the next two years. If anything it’s incredibly promising that Obama is willing and able to rethink everything and actually take the hard steps to implement a change of operations.

A good interview, and explains Obama's long-game strategy explicitly. His indignation at progressives and Democrats complaining about the state of things when much has actually been accomplished is reasonable, but his final statement bothers me. "We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard — that's what I said during the campaign. It has been hard, and we've got some lumps to show for it. But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place." OK, but what does that mean? What's going to make a difference with ten-to-one odds and enormous corporations and special-interest groups lined up on the other side? Your base gave you a lot of money to help you get elected, but is that what you're asking them to do again, deep in a recession? They need direction, advice, some instruction or insight. What exactly do you want us to 'try harder' at?

"A day in the life of the President." "Durable achievement demands a long time horizon—something that the country as a whole seems to have lost. We can’t wait for the carrots to grow—we keep pulling them up to see how they’re doing. Thus, deeply complex problems, from illegal immigration to the BP oil spill—problems that by definition have no quick or easy solution, despite their obvious urgency—become easy emblems of presumptive failure, whatever the president may actually be doing to address them."

"These are the folks whose policies helped devastate our middle class. They drove our economy into a ditch. And we got in there and put on our boots and we pushed and we shoved and we were sweating and these guys were standing, watching us, sipping on a Slurpee."

"That's some serious neanderthal action going on."

Obama's always been silent about copyright and bootlegging, but Biden's been, apparently, quite the industry advocate and technology ignoramus.

Stylistic changes in the Obama White House. "I've got to do something about these plates. I'm not really a plates kind of guy."

If you reverse 73, which is Obama's rating for today, you get 37, which was Bush's rating for much of last year. And that's disgusting.

Merlin thinks Barack has the cojones to tell us all to grow up, and I think he's right. "Thing is, I’m supporting an honest, level-headed man who seems to care about doing a good job and telling people the truth. But, I’m not supporting a poster. It’s posters we need a shit-ton less of right about now."

"America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world." A cautious but firm and thoughtful endorsement from an excellent publication.

"Grab Change by the Stem!"

"Barack Obama held onto your Nintendo collection while you were in France."

"...would he be instituting the most open and participatory executive branch our nation has seen, directly following the most closed and secretive? ... Oh, the answers are: yes, sure, and of course."