You're damn right, Barry. And it was glorious.
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.
yes, they still have the media -
WOW!
Twitter: Jonathan Lemire, White House reporter for @AP. Political analyst for @MSNBC & @NBCNews. Ex-@NYDailyNews:
Tweet: The Trump motorcade just drove right by the old Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas
2.29 PM 31 May 2018
first reply:
H Nicole Anderson: Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when really we need him?
https://twitter.com/JonLemire/status/1002301157065347072
He was 100 years behind in time. 1917 would have been his year, if there ever was one. Only in Russia, however.
You know I’m surprised that people were surprised Trump won. Somehow, I always knew he would win. Wasn’t surprised.
Tribe???
enough of the delay tactics. get this report out of the way and move on to Spygate investigation:
Tweet: Byron York: Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on IG report, originally scheduled for June 5, has been moved to June 11. That means no IG report this week.
3:04 PM - 31 May 2018
https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1002309941313654786
They’ll just be lined up around the block for Benny’s new book.
No doubt, Bolton and Trump will refer to it often, as will Secretary Pompeo.
He was a real Boy Genius, that DOCTOR Rhodes. A regular Rhodes Scholar. See what I did there?
Straight up narcissism.
Our first black president should have been named leroy or rashes with a solid southern background that was from Los Angeles or Atlanta local kid does good worked his way up
Well put. Well put Indeed.
L
That was the happiest night of my life!
Excellent summation, sir!
Such hubris
Exactly. I wish Obama would be sent to the Fed Pen if he refuses to produce/authorize disclosure of his fake school grades, degrees, plus you name it. We know this punk was never a US natural born type as no birth certificate when he was born said-”African American.” I had men in the units I served in who were listed as Negro from 1966 -1975. Yes, we had some outstanding /black/African American types in Special Forces. The truth is we had men who were Lodge Act types. However they were not frauds playing President of the USA. Look up men like Larry Thorne, Kiernan, Keravuori, plus so many more. I wish I were half as good as these men.
Good comment, Nateman.
Yours is the first comment I’ve read on this thread that points to the real motivation for this phony story.
Obama and his minions are planting the seed that he’s “surprised” and “didn’t know it was coming.”
It’s a bold faced lie. They deeply feared Trump and knew he might be able to pull it off!
Do you remember all those videos of Obama and hearing him stumble when he would say Trump’s name? He feared Trump, big time and now he’s trying to feint surprise through his network.
Send Boobamba to jail! He’s a traitor and liar.
Herman Cain
Maybe in part it was because he ran around being a smartarse. Saying things like “ Thats because you will never be President” and then dropping the mic like it was all over. That sort of entitled, got it in the bag, behaviour played well to his own crowd but it may have done 2 things 1) made Dem voters a bit overconfident and less likely to turn out 2) made republicans enraged and more likely to turn out. Obama never really stumped for Hillary. He was stumping for himself and his supposed legacy.
You're damn right, Barry. And it was glorious.
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