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Obama Was Left Awe-Struck Following Trump's 2016 Win: 'What If We Were Wrong'?
Townhall.com ^ | May 31, 2018 | Matt Vespa

Posted on 05/31/2018 3:45:29 PM PDT by Kaslin

President Obama was probably very, very confident Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election. Nevertheless, he took unprecedented steps to stump for his former secretary of state. In the end, he couldn’t drag her over the finish line. She went down in defeat. It was one of the biggest political upsets in American history. It was a punch to the mouth of liberal America. The rural voter had his/her revenge. The urban elites were silenced. The irony is this tribalism, this electorate, was not the one Obama was trying to nurture or preserve; he wanted to change our politics, remember? Did he go too far? That’s what he was left grappling with when it was clear that Hillary Clinton would never become president. Obama urged Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to be more vocal about defending their shared values, Angela Merkel told the soon-to-be-ex-president that she felt obligated to run for another term in Germany due to Trump’s win. 

“She’s all alone,” Obama remarked in his final meeting with her. Yet, the former president also wondered if he pushed too far, reinforcing the old divisions of Left and Right. Well, when you push anti-gun policies, like about health care reform, and dither on Syria and Crimea—yeah, you are going to legitimize what people have been saying about the Democratic Party: they’re left wing policies are ruinously expensive, they’re weak abroad, and attack the cultural core of rural voters. In this case, it was gun ownership. 

Obama’s former foreign policy guru, Ben Rhodes, has his book coming out, where he also says he can’t shake the notion that he didn’t see Trump’s victory coming. Yeah, a little Monday morning quarterback here, but he admits that at its core, Trump ran on the same message they did in 2008 that slayed Clinton: she’s part of the swamp and can’t be trusted to bring change. As Obama was left devastated by Trump’s win, his aides assured him that he would have won a third term if the Constitution permitted it, and that Millennials are more aligned with his agenda (via NYT):

Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.

“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.

He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.

[…]

Set to be published next week by Random House, Mr. Rhodes’s memoir, “The World as It Is,” offers a peek into Mr. Obama’s tightly sealed inner sanctum from the perspective of one of the few people who saw him up close through all eight years of his presidency. Few moments shook Mr. Obama more than the decision by voters to replace him with a candidate who had questioned his very birth.

[…]

Mr. Obama and his team were confident that Mrs. Clinton would win and, like much of the country, were shocked when she did not. “I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have seen it coming,” Mr. Rhodes writes. “Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to bring change.”

Yet, Rhodes and Obama were left stunned by the 2016 results. It’s a prime window into the insight of the Left’s elite members, stunned that their condescending attitude, the lecturing, and the pervasive apathy towards those who don’t live in cities somehow came back to bite them in the ass. I think what’s more stinging is that millions of Obama voters flipped for Trump. Hope and change was shot up like Swiss cheese. Make America Great Again had overtaken it. Yeah, I guess for a man who had built a virtually unbeatable voter coalition would be left adrift by these results, but because of that—let us give thanks that we have term limits. Today, the Left still hasn’t learned. Simple outreach to white working class voters on jobs, trade, job protections, and being proud to be an American get your foot in the door. This isn’t a hard voter bloc to win over. They’ve voted for both parties in past elections. Instead, Democrats would rather consider them to be irremediable racists, a batch of deplorables - which is the mentality that contributed to their 2016 loss.     


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: 2016election; barackhussein0bama; donaldtrump; hillaryrottenclinton; postedseveraltimes
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To: ClearCase_guy

They thought/think they are God....but He showed them (and us) that He has plans that are far superior to any human!!!

AMEN!!! Yes, America was blessed by the election results!


21 posted on 05/31/2018 4:08:54 PM PDT by YouGoTexasGirl
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To: Kaslin

Give people a candidate worth voting for and they will come out and vote. They didn’t vote for Romney and they didn’t vote for McCain but they believed in Trump.


22 posted on 05/31/2018 4:08:58 PM PDT by cradle of freedom
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To: TTFlyer
What if you’re an idiot, Barry?

Of course, he is an idiot, only, the left thinks he is brilliant. But, they also think Communism works.

23 posted on 05/31/2018 4:09:31 PM PDT by depressed in 06 (60 in '18.)
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To: Kaslin

Reads like some Democrat writing this with all these minimizations.


24 posted on 05/31/2018 4:10:36 PM PDT by Luke21
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To: Kaslin

It’s not just gun ownership. That issue is symptomatic.

It’s about government choosing winners and losers. Government raising taxes.
Government forcing healthcare.
Government regulating every muscle twitch of the people. Government crushing business people who were politically incorrect.
Government doubling the national debt.
Government militarizing and super-sizing the alphabet agencies, empowering them to grind businesses with regulations.


25 posted on 05/31/2018 4:10:45 PM PDT by lurk
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To: Kaslin
That is where that arrogant pos and his entire administration belongs, if you ask me.....

I think he should have some close friends with him.

26 posted on 05/31/2018 4:12:08 PM PDT by mountainlion (Live well for those that did not make it back.)
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To: Kaslin

Of course he was suprised. He cheated and made sure the fix was in. To still lose after abusing all the power he did must have made him sweat after it failed.


27 posted on 05/31/2018 4:14:32 PM PDT by Nateman (If the left is not screaming, you are doing it wrong.)
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To: ClearCase_guy
They stuffed ballot boxes.

We all noticed how quickly Jill Stein's recount in Michigan ended when they discovered "irregularities" - more ballots than voters, in Detroit.

28 posted on 05/31/2018 4:18:09 PM PDT by InABunkerUnderSF (Time to BLOAT again.)
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To: Kaslin; All
The article treats the 2016 presidential election as if it were a non-rigged election imo. I accept the possibility that it was a rigged election, rigged in Hillary’s favor.
Hacking Democracy - The Hack

I’m not surprised that Obama was surprised.

29 posted on 05/31/2018 4:29:01 PM PDT by Amendment10
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To: ClearCase_guy
You don't present the half of it.

They had the media. They had the unions. They had the universities. They had Hollywood. They had every newspaper. They had all the networks. They had a two hundred vote head start in the Electoral College. They had the pop stars, the movies stars and the athletes. They had money. They had illegal foreign campaign contributions. They had the FBI, the DOJ and the IRS. They had the pundits. They had purloined FBI files. They had the Clinton Crime Syndicate. They had the Pope. They had 95% of foreign leaders. They had the intelligentia, they had the RINO's.They cheated and lied.

.And they STILL lost.

epic fail

30 posted on 05/31/2018 4:34:23 PM PDT by fhayek
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To: Kaslin
>> “What if we were wrong?”

Nope. Sorry, not buying it. Malignant narcissistic socialists like Obama don't engage in self-reflection and correction.

Never happened.

31 posted on 05/31/2018 4:35:02 PM PDT by NewJerseyJoe (Rat mantra: "Facts are meaningless! You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!")
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To: mountainlion

Please add to your statement....
AND FORCED LABOR!!!!
The Kenyan Klown hasn’t worked a day in his life. Not certain Moochie the caboose knows what work really is, either.

OMG! Stubborn stains on concrete, we’ll never see them leave.


32 posted on 05/31/2018 4:36:07 PM PDT by V K Lee (Anyone who thinks my story is anywhere near over is sadly mistaken. - US Pres. Donald J. Trump)
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To: Nateman

Not nearly enough. The klown is still standing, electrolytes appear to be balanced.


33 posted on 05/31/2018 4:40:23 PM PDT by V K Lee (Anyone who thinks my story is anywhere near over is sadly mistaken. - US Pres. Donald J. Trump)
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To: mountainlion

ROPE!


34 posted on 05/31/2018 4:41:30 PM PDT by Gator113 ( ~~Trump 2020~~)
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To: Kaslin

The only time Obama uses the term “we”, is when he is referring to his collective of rube followers and believers.
Otherwise it’s always me and I.

So it wasn’t we as Obama and company,
it was we as in Obama believers, who were wrong.


35 posted on 05/31/2018 4:47:48 PM PDT by mountn man (The Pleasure You Get From Life, Is Equal To The Attitude You Put Into It)
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To: fhayek

In one paragraph, you’ve nailed this epic Clinton/Obama/Democrat/Liberal fail better than anything I’ve read since the election.

GREAT JOB, I’m keeping a copy of your post handy. It’s accurate, tight, and completely true.


36 posted on 05/31/2018 4:48:22 PM PDT by Husker8877
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To: Kaslin; All
Go look at the number of manholes (utility service points-of-entry) in front of the property....


There is either a lot of crap or some other use for all of those manholes.

37 posted on 05/31/2018 4:50:33 PM PDT by ptsal ( Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please. - M. Twain)
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To: Kaslin

Only thing Barry could see was another line of coke for those big old nasal passages of his. I ,uh ,um, uh, but, uh, yeah, uh , I, uh ahem but um yeah...


38 posted on 05/31/2018 5:01:12 PM PDT by Karliner (Jeremiah29:11,Romans8:28 Isa 17, Damascus has fallen)
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To: Kaslin
a peek into Mr. Obama’s tightly sealed inner sanctum

NO thanks! Won't be peering into that particular obama.

questioned his very birth

You mean his hatching.

.

39 posted on 05/31/2018 5:03:46 PM PDT by repentant_pundit (LibertyLifeboat.org)
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To: Kaslin
"Awestruck" has very positive connotations.

"Dumbstruck" was probably more accurate.

40 posted on 05/31/2018 5:04:37 PM PDT by x
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