I watched this video by Kyle Kulinsk where he basically says(from 15:00 on wards):
That he would take Obama over Trump any day but that Obama did not break enough rules and norms(not laws), and that if he prosecuted Wall Street bankers after the crash, tried to push through medicare for all harder when he had a super majority, and actually took on big money interests, that it would have prevented the rise of populism with Trump? Do you, from left left-leaning perspective, think there is any truth to that?
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I watched this video by Kyle Kulinsk where he basically says(from 15:00 on wards):
https://youtu.be/lA5duXLdQI8
That he would take Obama over Trump any day but that Obama did not break enough rules and norms(not laws), and that if he prosecuted Wall street bankers after crash, tried to push through medicare for all harder when he had super majority, and bailed out people after crash, that it would have prevented rise of populism with Trump? Do you, from left left-leaning perspective, think there is any truth to that?
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Who should he have prosecuted? And for what specific crimes?
I want names.
They barely got the ACA passed as was. One of the senators who voted for it died and they literally could not vote again.
My guess is this person needs to review some history.
Personally, I like Obama, but he was a mellow, chill, quietly competent president during a time when we needed people to go crack heads.
No-drama Obama is the perfect president for ordinary times.
But he missed so many opportunities.
I have said for over a decade that Trump happened because of the financial crisis.
People saw that there’s one set of rules for the wealthy, and another set for us. People were rightly pissed.
Their sense of justice and fairness had been completely obliterated. Obama didn’t assuage that. In fact, he kinda went the Bill Clinton direction of making sure the rich were taken care of, but leaving working people to fend for themselves. I believe his heart was in the right place.
But people saw a bunch of arsonists burn down the economy. Then, saw the federal government step in and lavishly reward them for it. Then, saw the federal government do a bunch of token things for working families that didn’t help much at all.
What we’re seeing with Trump right now? Obama needed to have that attitude. He needed to go full FDR.
“That he would take Obama over Trump any day but that Obama did not break enough rules and norms(not laws)”
I think that criticism is one of those “hindsight is 20/20” things, looking back now that is easy to say. In the moment, at the time, would the first Black president attacking more rules and norms have been a better or worse things for his administration or the political climate of the time or the social fabric of the time, that is much harder to say without the benefit of looking back almost 20 years later.
It’s a lot like criticizing people for not buying Apple stocks when they first went public. Like now, with hindsight, it’s a no-duh, but even incredibly good investors couldn’t have been that confident at the time.
> That he would take Obama over Trump any day but that Obama did not break enough rules and norms(not laws)
I think this is an argument that only works in retrospect. Even if you correctly held “conservatives“ and Republicans generally in very low regard, the degree to which they would embrace authoritarianism and lawlessness wasn’t truly understandable in 2016 let alone 2008.
I already held the right in complete contempt and understood the degree to which they were willing to push norms in order to subvert democracy, but the full extent to which they hate America and American values wasn’t clear.
You also have to factor in that Democratic base voters would not have accepted Democrats breaking norms enough to make a difference.
> and that if he prosecuted Wall street bankers after crash
I think there’s a degree to which even though we were trying to rush through getting the economy back on track after GWB, Obama should have pushed harder here.
> tried to push through medicare for all harder when he had super majority
We barely had a super majority, and Joe Leiberman wouldn’t even let a public option through. This idea that if you just bang the podium harder you get Medicare for all is very silly.
On top of that the definition we now use for Medicare for all would be the most generous healthcare system in the world, and not really viable. We now know that even the Bernie Sanders campaign thought of their position as a negotiating position and their real goal was to get a public option added to the ACA
> and bailed out people after crash
I don’t think we really had the mechanisms to do individual bailouts effectively fast enough but we should’ve learned that we needed away to handle these type of payments in the future in case another major incident happened. Had we done so we could have handled Covid stimulus better.
> that it would have prevented rise of populism with Trump? Do you, from left left-leaning perspective, think there is any truth to that?
Honestly, I think we could only delay it. Looking back it’s clear that Republicans have rejected democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech and the rest of our civil liberties, free markets and capitalism.
That could only be delayed and not averted due to the incentive structures created by right wing media, the electoral college and the method of apportioning power in the Senate.
Kyle Kulinski doesn’t know what farmland is
Edited for clarity
Two misconceptions of the super majority:
First: the super majority did not “fall in line”. The democrats party is a wide umbrella and just like Manchin and Sinema shooting down tons of dem efforts, the same happened under Obama with the super majority
Second: I believe it may have been illness, but for one reason or another, MOST of the time that congress was in session, Dems did not actually have all members of the super majority PRESENT to vote rendering them unable to actually exercise the powers that a super majority should have. There was a very very VERY slim window in which the super majority was present to vote, but again refer to the first point of not falling in line
Qualified yes. I do not know if I agree that Obama should have directed the DoD to prosecute bankers. But certainly Obama was too safe, and bought in too hard to “incremental change” and “being everybody’s President”. He even criticizes himself in his own book for being naive when it came to working with elected Republicans. He said he at first thought they were reasonable people who wanted to make the country work better, just like he did. LOL.
Don’t get caught into the brain rot that its left-wing YouTube videos. They’ll tell you that anyone power should always do more, but they’ll never name specifics.
> ..tried to push through medicare for all harder when he had a super majority..
Yes, he should have threatened to primary Joe Lieberman if he didn’t get on board with the plan (which, for the record, was never Medicare for All).
Oh wait, we already did that in 2006 and Lieberman lost the primary only to win the general election as the leading member of the “Connecticut for Lieberman” party. Some people really need to study their recent political history better.
I do think Obama was a pushover but this is a case of easier said than done.
I remember right wing media successfully turning a lot of people against the idea of universal healthcare at the time. I doubt it would have been received as some messianic act and I’m not sure it would have warmed left wingers up to the Democrats
Of course. From a leftist perspective the single largest issue with a liberal democracy is the ways that its civic functions and democratic element will be co-opted by the capitalist markets that it protects and maintains. In a more primordial sense this appears in unmistakable elements of the government’s construction, for example the elevation of private property to the status of having its own rights, but in a more “late-stage” capitalist sense this materializes as simple corruption: Obama had to choose between losing his donors and watching the economy collapse or actually enacting and executing on laws that protect the collective power and interests of the population.
Actually a user put this even more succinctly than me (credit to user Mr_Quackums):
>Liberalism is the belief that society should be organized with a democratic political system and a capitalism economic system.
>The problem is that democracy uses cooperation to distribute power while capitalism uses competition to consolidate power, it requires an unsustainable amount of energy to keep the two working together. Eventually one of the two systems will overwhelm the other.
No.
These guys just want a left authoritarian. They are jealous that the right got one.
I kinda doubt it. To me it seems like you could trace part of MAGA and right wing populism to the Tea Party. And those folks went batshit at the ACA. It would’ve been even worse had Obama done the things listed here.
At best, you could better parry a few talking points, but I don’t think it would’ve led to any major change of the political landscape.
So tired of the “Democrats suck because if they just did this we wouldn’t have these problems a decade later.
It is really easy to look back and say we could have.
Even something like Rowe. It was settled law for 50 years. Yes we got duped, no one imagined that people who would get nominated as a SCOTUS justice would just lie and say it is settled law, just to get into a position to overturn it. It just wasn’t done.
I think that there is truth to some of it.
As it pertains to the ACA, Obama’s hands were tied. Joe Lieberman and his cronies were the ones who forced us into the version that we have. While Obama had a supermajority in name, it was contingent on getting these moderate Democrats on board. There’s very little that a President can do to force the legislature to do something, and that’s by design. Norms aren’t what stopped him; the Constitution was.
I do, however, think that there should have been a significant number of people go to jail over the events that led to the 2008 financial crisis. The fact that we bailed these people out and let them keep their golden parachute, even though many committed what amounted to commercial fraud was, in my opinion, a huge mistake.
And, it’s not like we got anything in return for not prosecuting. The people that caused that crisis went on to support Republicans who tore out all of the protections put in place to stop a future similar crisis. I think that Obama anticipated that if he played nice, the industry would respect those guardrails. That was naive.
I agree that the bankers were let off too easily and not enough help was given to main street. Even just that one thing would have made a huge difference IMO. Instead we got occupy Wall Street in which we learned that that no politicians had their backs in any substantive way. If the people would have been listened to in this instance and some relief or even just some justice were to have happened, it might have at least slowed the rise of someone like Trump.
We already had the Tea Party rising on the right and while they were mostly a fringe, obstructionist faction, at least those on the right felt like someone was listening to their problems. The politicians on the left basically just turned their backs and covered their ears IMO. Gotta stay right in the sweet middle spot to not rock the boat and stay electable, don’tcha know.
I see “Kyle Kulinksi” and I can already tell that the criticism isn’t valid. That guy is about as dumb as they get.
> prosecuted Wall Street
Yep, called it. Obama wanted to, but there wasn’t any legal framework for a legal case. Just more hot air from this malcontent.
I’m not watching a stupid fucking youtube video, just on principle.
We’re not Conservatives. We don’t worship our Dear Leaders. There’s no Saint Reagan on our side. We’re not wearing blue hats with “Yes She Can” or some other stupid fuck’in slogan on them…
We criticize our own. If you want a giant list of stuff we think Obama did wrong, just ask ANY Liberal and you’ll get a giant list. Obama did PLENTY wrong.
I don’t want Obama to break rules. I don’t want ANYONE to break rules.
But norms? Sure! A lot of people should have been dragged in front of Congress to explain themselves after the crash. (That’s congress, not the POTUS). He should have tried to push through medicare for all harder when he had a super majority and that’s not breaking any laws, that’s just politics. He should have done more to take on big money interests.
He also should have closed Gitmo and spanked Putin harder when Putin took Crimea in 2014. We might not have the Ukraine situation NOW if Obama had spanked Putin then.
I can keep going! Hindsight’s a real !@#$ of course, but that doesn’t stop us from criticizing our elected officials. The point is that we don’t do that thing that Conservatives do!
We don’t change our values based on who says a thing. Gerrymandering is bad, even when it’s done to benefit Democrats. Breaking the rules is bad, even when it’s done to benefit Democrats.
Notice how R’s were soooo mad about Hillary using private email? Notice how they don’t seem to give a shit that the entire Trump cabinet is using private chats specifically to avoid legal requirements for record keeping and FOIA requests? Yeah… We don’t do that. Bad is Bad, no matter who is doing the bad thing.
It’s why we think Conservatives don’t have any real values. They seem to abandon their values if it’s “their guy” at the drop of a red hat.
Would Dems working for regular people instead of their big money donors have helped prevent the rise of a Populist like Trump promising (but lying) to help regular people instead of big money donors? Maybe. I think that’s a good argument to make. Hard to say for sure of course, but it’s a good argument!
I personally think Trump is just the culmination of 60 years of The Southern Strategy. I think the MAGA tail is wagging the Republican dog… R’s courted racists and dumbasses for power, gerrymandered districts had R’s worried about primary challenges from the Right, so they went Right and Right and more Right until they elected dumbasses that believed the Southern Strategy lies, and now the R’s are fucked. The dumbasses are in the halls of power and old school R’s can’t get rid of them. I think Trump, or someone like him, was inevitable eventually, no matter WHAT Obama did…
But it’s still a good argument, and it can be true at the same time as my own thoughts on the matter. Shit’s complex yo.
I actually don’t want presidents breaking a lot of rules and norms at this time. I would like Congress to assert itself more and work together more. I find the power creep that the present has gotten over the last few decades to be not great and a threat to our system. The president is too powerful. Even some of Obama’s accomplishments particularly in his second term that I agree with probably should have been stuff that Congress passed rather than through executive order.
Obama was a good president. He did a lot to undo the damage caused by the Iraq War under Trump, uniting the US and its allies in a unified front. He passed major legislation for healthcare and a stimulus, he presided over a long economic recovery with low inflation. He saved the US auto industry, he produced executive orders that pushed the US towards clean energy, he was responsible for DACA and he displayed great leadership and communication skills.
People unfairly criticize him for the first stimulus that was necessary and also passed before he came in office, for the recession which started before he came into office, for the stimulus not being strong enough which a.) wasn’t something he had control of and b.) worked fairly well for what it was, the recovery was long with low inflation. They blamed him for essentially continuing the “war on terror” when there was really no alternative and ultimately this led to the defeat of ISIS and Bin Laden being eliminated. His criticism of drone strikes is because he was extremely transparent about what the government was doing and why. His predecessors were not as transparent.
Obama had to work with an entirely skeptical Europe for most of his time as president as American interventionism had become a political anchor for European politicians. So, Obama had to unite the EU with the US on policy again, he used the invasion of Crimea to do that and this made possible the stronger reaction to Russia’s future invasion as well as the expansion of NATO under Biden.
Obama also wanted and succeeded in cooling down the animosity between the US and Iran until that was blown up later by Trump only to now be revived again after Trump stoked tons of Iranian proxy maneuvering.
As far as prosecuting people who committed crimes during the financial crisis. The problem there was weak legislation. Some people got prosecuted, but for the vast majority of people no crimes were committed despite the terrible results. Obama understood that the US financial industry/banking industry was incredibly important for US stability. So he signed legislation to make the type of legal malfeasances that occurred in the lead up to the crisis more difficult.
So overall he made the country better, displayed good leadership and made the best decisions he could with the circumstances he was given. He was the best post-cold was president by a long shot imo.
I remember there was a lot of doubt over Medicare-for-All even among Democrat voters. And the Democratic Party had a lot of neoliberals who were pro-business.
It’s bullshit. God there’s so much of this bullshit out there
Obama couldn’t have just prosecuted the bankers because they likely didn’t do any crimes. The constitution is clear about ex post facto, no amount of leftist screaming about “just DO something” and “break the rules more you spineless coward” will take away from those protections. And Obama did get Dodd Frank passed to prevent future issues. But that’s just how it works, after something is done, you can take action to prevent future issues, but you can’t throw people in jail for shit that isn’t a crime
And Medicare for all is just garbage policy that has no place in serious policy discussion. We should instead look more towards systems in places like Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, and Obamacare moved us a lot more towards that. Obamacare was also the best we could realistically do.
Even with just simple majority votes, medicare for all was never going to pass congress under Obama, there were too many moderate and conservative Democrats. It’s common for far leftists to act like the national party can just “use the bully pulpit!”, and do things like threaten to remove committee assignments and primary the annoying moderates to try and force them to fall in line. But this stuff would have no way of working. A lot of the moderates made their whole careers based on pissing off the national party and running as independent minded politicians who would gladly spit in the face of the national party if it pushed them to go an inch to the left of what they preferred. They’d never bend the knee to additional pressure, and Dems would need to basically do dictator shit to get them to go further than what they wanted
The moderates likely wouldn’t have even passed a simple public option – there was some consideration of doing a public option via reconciliation but there were likely only around 48 possible votes for even a “weak public option” which would have been neutered to the point of borderline uselessness, and only around 45 for a “strong public option” (a real Medicare buy in). So they didn’t even have the option to just do a public option via reconciliation. The idea of Dems under Obama going so much further and doing single payer is just absurd, they’d never do that, and understandably so
The far left is just wrong, so very wrong
From my lose recollection of history, I think Obama came in on a wave of change and young voters looking for a shift from the Clinton era and like your summary alludes he didn’t really deliver on much change and instead pivoted more to the status quo.
I would have to watch the video, but just on the surface I think had Obama done more on a populist front he may have sated some of the appetite of independents for someone to break the norms of the major parties. Obama certainly had the following to wield much more aggressive control over the party to make changes.
I think one of the things most dems (and others) won’t admit or wrestle with is that Medicare for All, while empirically better on the whole, is not some slam dunk in terms of implementation and administration. I am not someone who believes the government cannot function well, or that private business is always better or more efficient, but there are huge problems with Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA that seem intractable. Gambling that the federal government would be able to take on ensuring the health of all citizens with competence is, in fact, a gamble that could cost thousands of lives.
It’s risky because the it would take a Herculean effort to pull off, it’s risky because the government’s track record is mixed, it’s risky because you’d be putting a target on the dems back and the grades would be curved, and it’s risky because you now allow the GOP (when in power) to control how and what types of healthcare are provided to people. There is some alternative reality where the GOP is currently telling providers they cannot provide gender affirming care, vaccines, medical care to foreigners, or mental health services by fiat.
The fact is that too many Americans do not believe in public health. Just look at the responses to public health rules set up during covid to see how Americans resent basic sacrifices in the name greater health and safety for their fellow citizens. This is the sentiment that would need to be dealt with for anyone would have tried to implement M4A. People lost their shit because they “couldn’t keep their doctor” and because the website didn’t well for a few weeks with Obamacare, but we think they would be okay with the much greater changes M4A would implement?
I think we should probably endeavor to some form of universal healthcare, but I worry that people don’t appreciate that just how difficult the transition would be, and how little tolerance people have for collective sacrifice for the greater good.
I don’t think breaking rules and norms is beneficial to society long term. That is a vicious cycle that we need break free of, not one we should accelerate. Also I don’t think the first black president acting in a manner similar to Trump first term would have gone over well.
I do think the lack of prosecutions of people responsible for the 2008 crash was a mistake and something he had enough control over that it is fair to blame him for.
I think we could have done better on the ACA than we did, but only marginally. There’s zero chance Obama would have gotten single payer and a high likelyhood pushing harder than he did would have resulted in nothing similar to what happened with Kennedy and Carter but in reverse.
I don’t know if taking on big moneyed interests more than he did (CFPB was created under his watch and he did some stuff on overtime rules etc) would have been super helpful to preventing the rise of populism. I think people underplay the economic factors there, but I do think it is predominantly social issues that those people are upset about. What I actually think was a mistake is just not being generous enough to average people when doling out assistance. I think the administration was too worried about rising interest rates that probably wouldn’t have occurred or increasing the debt which no one actually cares about.
yeah, it’s an argument i’ve been making for a while
I think it’s counterproductive to criticize Obama at this point, and I think this is being stirred up by conservatives to divide their opposition.
No, this point is patently idiodic. If Obama, the first black President, began his term by trying to “punish” Wall Street bankers after he was elected, Republicans would have siezed on that immediately and scared voters senseless about an authoritarian black man running our government. That would have fractured Obama’s fragile coalition in the Senate, making it nearly impossible to get anything done.
The same goes for any effort to violate rules or norms.
Leftists need to give Obama much more credit: he did about as well as was possible given the constraints he faced.
Obama ran on bipartisanship, and stuck to that promise; Republicans still painted him as a tyrant. Just imagine if he did 1/10 of what they claimed he was doing?
Why not provide a pony for everybody as well? As much as I’d love something like Medicare for All, the actual reality is they didn’t have the votes for it, and I don’t see how there was anything Obama could do to get more passed. Hell, they barely managed to get more conservative Democrats to agree to milquetoast legislation like the ACA, and in fact had to resort to tactics like reconciliation to get that through.