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NY Times Op-Ed, July 31 2016
Thanks, Obama
by Maureen Dowd
PHILADELPHIA — IT wasn’t easy for Barack Obama, a skinny newcomer to
national politics with an exotic name and scant résumé, to overthrow the
voracious Clinton machine.
The 45-year-old had to turn himself into a dream catcher. He had to
become an avatar of idealism and persuade Americans that he could take
us to a political Arden beyond lies and vanishing records and money
grabs and Marc Rich and Monica and Motel 1600.
“We need a leader who’s going to touch our souls,” Michelle told a South
Carolina rally in 2007. “Who’s going to make us feel differently about
one another.”
Obama was going to lift Washington to a higher plateau — not one where
the president consulted a pollster to see where he should vacation or if
he should tell the truth about his intern/mistress. The young senator
from Chicago was going to prove that the White House could be a gleaming
citadel of integrity and ethics and exemplary family life.
Watching Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich go at it, Obama once wrote, “I
sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom
generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a
handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”
He presented himself as the ticket to the future. He made us feel good
about ourselves, that we could be better, do better.
Making the case against Hillary, he said that America deserved more than
triangulating and poll-driven positions and “the same old Washington
textbook campaign,” more than a candidate answering questions whatever
way she thought would be popular and “trying to sound or vote like
Republicans, when it comes to national security issues.”
What about principles, he asked, what about a higher purpose?
Obama was not surrounded by the mercenary likes of David Brock and Dick
Morris but true believers like David Axelrod.
The Clintons, infuriated by the raft of Democrats who deserted them
during the 2008 campaign, sneered at Obama’s hope and change message.
Hillary protested, “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our
country.” Bill groused, “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve
ever seen.”
Voters, however, were starved for the fairy tale. For many, the line in
an Obama ad rang true: “Hillary Clinton. She’ll say anything and change
nothing. It’s time to turn the page.”
Evidently, President Obama folded the corner of that page over so he
could go back to it later. Remarkably, he bought us our return ticket to
the past, rolling out the red carpet for the restoration of the Clinton
blurred-lines White House.
An army of idealistic young people had moved to Iowa in 2007 to help
Obama beat seemingly impossible odds. But in this election, Bernie
Sanders’s idealistic young people were cast as unrealistic dreamers who
wanted free stuff or, according to Gloria Steinem, dates.
The same Obama who sparked a revolution has now made it his mission to
preserve the establishment for Hillary. He told Rutgers’s school paper
in May that Sanders supporters needed to stop searching for silver
bullets and recognize “we have to make incremental changes where we can,
and every once in a while you’ll get a breakthrough and make the kind of
big changes that are necessary.”
Yes we can — incrementally!
The president passed the baton to Hillary, as he puts it, more than
three years ago, feeling she’s the safest bet to protect his legacy. As
Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports, Obama wants to create what he calls “a
16-year era of progressive rule” and refocus American politics as the
“Reagan of the left,” as one of his advisers put it.
Showing his icy pragmatism, the president passed over his loyal vice
president because he thought Joe Biden would not be as strong a
candidate, given his tendency for gab and gaffes. (That was before
Donald Trump made Biden seem exquisitely bridled.) When Biden didn’t
take the hint, Obama sent his former strategist David Plouffe to break
the bad news.
Maybe Obama felt he owed Hillary, after leapfrogging over her to make
history as a “first” — with the help of a lot of Democratic luminaries
who publicly broke with the vindictive Clintons, only to find themselves
having to spend the last couple years crawling back into their good graces.
Besides Biden, Obama threw another loyal former lieutenant, Chicago
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, under the bus.
In the D.N.C. video introducing Obama at the convention, the president
was built up as a hero on health care. It said Emanuel went to the
president and said, “You’re going to have to pull the bill, because if
you push this legislation, you will lose in 2012.”
Emanuel, who was hosting a party at the convention that night, was
rightfully upset. It was his job to warn the president of the political
consequences, and after Obama decided, it was Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi
who had to arm-twist the bill through with no Republican votes.
Before he died, Beau Biden told his father he wanted him to run partly
because he didn’t want the White House to fall back into the miasma of
Clinton family values.
The president made his vote-for-Hillary-or-face-doom convention speech
only 22 days after his F.B.I. director painted Hillary as reckless and
untruthful.
He argued that there is no choice but to support Hillary against a
“self-declared savior” like Donald Trump, perhaps forgetting that Obama
was once hailed as such a messiah that Oprah introduced him in 2007 as
“the one,” and it became his moniker.
In the end, Obama didn’t overthrow the Clinton machine. He enabled it.
It turns out, who we choose is not really about our souls. It’s just
politics, man.
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