Obama: From Cool to Chilly

In 2008, and for a few years after, 44th United States president Barack Obama was cool. More than ten years after his first-term election, he is chilly.

I don’t have a positive let alone warm feeling for Obama.

I think Ralph Nader had it correct, from years ago, when Nader said he doesn’t respect Obama and considers him a “con man.”

Part of the latest con from Obama occurred when he gave a speech in Berlin and he told his audience, “One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States…is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘Uh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be’ and then we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad’, where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues. And when that happens, typically the overall effort and movement weakens.” (Source: Barack Obama warns progressives to avoid ‘circular firing squad’.)

Obama is trying to gaslight. He, and his likewise corporate Democrats, are not allies to progressives. Actual progressives. Let us keep in mind that, in his first two years in office, Obama had 59/60 members in the Democratic-held U.S. Senate and more than 250 Democratic-held seats in the U.S. House. And, yet, his Affordable Care Act had no public option, let alone single payer or specifically Medicare for All, and no reimportation from Canada for prescription drugs, and it came with a mandate requiring people, if they weren’t already insured, to buy private insurance. That was not a failure to get his Democratic Congress on board with an actual progressive healthcare bill. That was intentional.

Nearly ten years later, the Affordable Care Act is obviously not good enough. While it gave people more “access,” they are not protected from potential bankruptcy. (I have a family member with the experience.) We need Medicare for All. What reveals the opposition to that, in Democratic ranks, are people like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Barack Obama—all, from their positions, recent party leaders.

I see Obama now as a political enemy. How could I not? In December 2012, one month after he won re-election, he told Miami, Florida-affiliate Noticias Univision 23, “The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.” (Source: Obama: More Moderate Republican Than Socialist.)

Imagine if a December 1984 Ronald Reagan or a December 2004 George W. Bush, the last two two-term Republican U.S. presidents, “The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1960s, I would be considered a liberal Democrat.”

I, frankly, don’t like Obama. I used to. Not anymore.

My favorite video response, in addressing that speech by Obama, came from MCSC Network’s Niko House. It will be the first of the following videos. I have also included ones by The Jimmy Dore Show’s Jimmy Dore, The Rational National’s David Doel, The Humanist Report’s Mike Figueredo, Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski, and Status Coup’s Jordan Chariton.

Here they are: