I literally do blame the Democrats for Trump, and if you don’t, you weren’t paying attention.
Plenty of us were critiquing Clinton’s campaign on those merits and were consistently talked down to in shocker the same way we’re being talked down to now. Shocker, she lost. I remember saying a few weeks before the election “We’re about to get Brexited.” I put my vote down for Clinton, because Trump is fucking insane, and that was clear before he was President. It was clear in the fucking 1980’s.
Being able to critique our leaders is supposed to be what is the difference between us and conservative voters. They’re the cult who unquestioningly believes all the bullshit that comes out of Trump’s mouth and diapers. I find it weird that people think we should be more like them in regards to our leaders like that would be a good thing.
Barack Obama had the opportunity to become the next FDR. Instead, we got a modern day Woodrow Wilson, more interested in shoring up domestic businesses and building out international military alliances than repairing the post-'08 damage to the housing economy or extending full public health benefits to a nation crippled by medical bankruptcies.
By the time he left office, he was running on… what? A Pacific Rim trade deal we didn’t need. A climate change crisis he’d failed to address. A slew of new military conflicts in the Middle East introduced under his administration that he’d originally promised to end. A federal court system he’d allowed his Senate rivals to hijack.
Hillary sucked. But far too little credit is afforded to the guy who had eight years to deliver on desperately needed federal reforms and - either through incompetence or unwillingness - failed to do so.
“Abortion is not my highest legislative priority.” -Obama 2009
To be fair, the federal government has very little ability to change abortion policy outside of the supreme Court interpreting the bill of rights as protecting the bodily autonomy of the mother. A constitutional amendment is the only other way it could be done
They could literally have passed a federal law and had been done with it.
Why would they pass a federal law that can be overturned in the next Congress when every incoming justice has claimed under oath that Roe is a constitutional right that cannot be removed?
Hindsight is always 2020
This is literally false
It’s not. The Democrats were just too hindered with propaganda to stand up to the Republicans and take control of Congress and the federal government when they had a chance.
The Republicans are our abusers and the Democrats our chief enablers.
Homie yes it is false, SCOTUS can absolutely tell Congress to go fuck itself over any legislation they choose. They do it frequently, they have nullified tons of Acts passed by Congress in the past.
And as Andrew Jackson proved, we literally can just tell SCOTUS to come down and enforce their rulings themselves if they feel some type of way about it.
And it’s WAY past time the feds started doing that.
Given the state of the economy at the time, I don’t blame him for this. He also said he believed marriage to be between a man and a woman back then. He evolved. If Obama joins Joe on the campaign trail I’m willing to bet he’ll be bringing up abortion because it’s getting voters motivated.
Sure, but for the proceeding seven years FOCA was not touched. It would likely have motivated voters in the last eight too, let alone now. It is almost cynically insulting if it can be brought up again solely as a campaign tool for voter motivation.
Except that he did fuck all about that either. Zero prosecutions just billions in bailouts for failing corporations while people were losing their homes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-A09a_gHJc
Remember how the GOP decided they weren’t gonna let him do fuck-all? The only things he could ever get done was during the slim window that the Democrats just barely had a supermajority.
They could have done away with the filibuster with a simple majority.
They didn’t want to.
“But but the filibuster”
Dude had 60 senators for two years.
Okay, look it up. He did NOT. He had that many for slightly over two MONTHS and Congress used that time to just barely get sweeping healthcare reform passed.
RomneyCare is not sweeping healthcare reform, especially when it doesn’t include a public option (although to be fair we can blame the loss of Public Option on Joe Lieberman).
People are still going bankrupt from medical bills and dying because they can’t afford treatment. So much for “sweeping reform.”
You must be very young to not remember what it was like prior to the ACA. You could pay for insurance for years and get denied treatment for “pre-existing conditions”. They could literally cut you off as soon as you got cancer.
And many of the people dying now are in Republican states that didn’t expand Medicaid. The ACA gives free money to help poorer Americans, but Republicans refuse to take it. That’s clearly not Obama’s fault.
I’m pushing fifty, jackass.
I’m literally constantly on the verge of not being able to afford my cancer meds and will then just die if I can’t get them.
I live in a solidly blue state.
Go on, tell me more about how my lived experience is wrong. I’ve had fellow Democratic voters shoving that shit up my ass for my entire voting life.
Then you probably remember how badly healthcare blew up in the Clinton’s face back in 1993.
The ACA, for better or worse, was strongly shaped by that experience. Obama’s biggest lessons from that debacle were 1) don’t threaten the insurance industry and 2) don’t threaten union- bargained “cadillac” plans.
The ACA was designed to not die the same way Hillarycare did. It’s a worse law because of it, but importantly: it passed.
It passed and more people got access to health insurance. Plenty of them still don’t have access to healthcare.
In my view, these half-measures are why Democrats never have much real energy behind them, because nobody gets excited for half-measures or using Republican plans just to be able to make deals with Republicans.
It was sweeping reform. Just because we are far from having something good doesn’t mean this wasn’t sweeping reform that fixed some huge problems.
The Dems in Congress had an asshole preventing them from doing more but they went as far as they could go, they wanted to go farther, but they moved things forward, not just rhetorically but legally. And it was something people had tried and failed to do at all for decades. Because some of the things that were addressed are off the table, the conversation moved towards going further in the right direction, instead of spinning in circles with the same conversations we were having in the 90s.
I see too many people on Lemmy who say this stuff about how the Democrats had a supermajority and sat around, and they are wrong on the time they had and they are wrong on the facts of how they used their time. I don’t know if it’s because they were too young to follow it at the time, they’ve completely forgotten, or they are intentionally skewing the facts to suit an agenda. But I’m so tired of seeing it.
100%…people also forget that the blue dog coalition contained people like Joe Lieberman who would not vote for any bill that contained a public option.
I get that hindsight is 20/20 and really Obama’s coalition likely should’ve just nuked the filibuster…but this was in early 2009. Not everyone knew how unhinged the Republican party would become during Obama’s tenure.
This was 2009. A significant number of people had been describing the GOP as fascists under Dubya.
I’m sure you could find a significant number of people describing Reagan as fascist as well and in a way none of them were wrong, but in another sense they all were. It was a slow erosion of norms, trust, a deepening corruption, and changing actors that were more and more unhinged, and it only really seems obvious that it was headed this direction in retrospect.
And there are still people claiming on this very site today that calling the 2024 GOP fascist is abusing the word.
…and they let the Republicans in committee decide what it should look like.
And then they all happily voted for it while their colleagues voted against it so they could look blameless.
And this keeps getting pitched to me as a win despite the fact that net effect of that “sweeping reform” for me and many others was paying a fine for not buying things we simply couldn’t afford, and when I finally did end up being able to get “Obamacare” “insurance” years after it passed (I’m talking during the Trump admin, my state told me to go pound sand for that long), literally all it did was cap certain types of medical debt from a very, very short list at the roughly the cost of a luxury sedan.
Obamacare was straight up an owngoal and it cracks me up when people try to pitch it as a win for Democrats. It was a win for the Heritage Foundation, who devised the scheme in the first place back in the 90s.
tl;dr the ACA was written by a conservative think-tank and forced in committee by Republicans, when they literally did not have to give that much power to the minority party it was done by choice knowing full well they don’t compromise. And a Democratic supermajority passed it and sold it to you as a win.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. You’re replying to a comment where I’m calling out bullshit and I’m sick of bullshit. What you’ve written is factually incorrect, why are you replying with it? What is the point?
The Heritage Foundation did not write the bill. Some concepts, like having a mandate, that were proposed by the Heritage Foundation in the 90s but never went anywhere, were incorporated into the ACA. The Democrats looked seriously at single-payer and it was not going to get the 60 votes — indeed, even the version that passed had to get rid of the public option to do so. The whole way the process happened and the timing of it illustrate that the Democrats didn’t count on any Republican support. It was also not forced into committee by the Republicans.
Do you say these things out of ignorance or malice? I’m sure I’ll never get a real answer, but I’m so sick of it.
i’m sorry your revisionist oversimplified narrative is in conflict with what i literally watched unfold at the time because i was and am an adult who pays attention. Dems gave it away and called it a win. There’s no need to rage at me about it and i have to wonder why you’re the one with an emotional stake in this when i was the one who suffered as a result of that twisted abomination they sold to you as a “reform”.
The Heritage Foundation pitched the idea of an insurance mandate in the 80s. Mitt Romney adopted it as the central plant of his Massachusetts health care reform in the 90s. And Obama picked it up as a “compromise” bill that would satisfy both Democrats and Republicans in the '00s.
Compare this to the original idea of Medicare/Medicaid, which was simply public financing of health care, extended to a cohort of people with the lowest incomes and highest liabilities. The component of Obamacare that has been MOST effective - both in terms of lives and dollars saved - has been extending the pool of people covered by Medicaid. The part that he ran on, the part that was central to the bulk of the written legislation, and the part that everyone now hates, is the Heritage Plan for subsidized private insurance mandates.
Not to mention the whole spying on his citizens PRISM thing happened under his watch.
Spying on citizens is the backbone of the modern government and has been since at least the Palmer Raids of the 1910s.
PRISM gave Obama a golden opportunity to back off the intensive degree of domestic espionage. But, of course, he didn’t. Instead, we spent a few months arguing over the defunding of ACORN.
You have a lot of lofty ideas of what it takes to reverse shit like climate change on an oil addicted economy
o7