A Quote by Jonathan Chait
Because many people remembered a time when the Republican Party was not so extreme, and hadn't full grasped how much it had changed, people blamed Obama for his failure to get Republicans to agree with him. That blame coloured so much of how the public saw Obama during his presidency. The public thought he was dealing with a brand of Republican leader that just didn't exist any more.
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One of the things we've learned during the Obama era is how important norms are, because we've seen how the Republican Party behaved against Obama. So much of what they did was to smash pre-existing norms, which were nothing more than assumptions of how people would behave, which didn't have any real basis in rules or limits.
It's been interesting seeing how vulnerable Obama is: not the secure president I thought he was or the strong leader that many people hoped he would be. He's a conciliator. But I've been listening to the Republican primary debates, and they're a bunch of lunatics. Just crazy.
Let me speak to you as someone who is a republican, like Stuart Stevens who worked for Romney, right? He said if Barack Obama in '08 had said, oh, you know, [Vladimir] Putin is better than George W. Bush as a leader, he said republicans would have said Obama, get out of the race. You're a disgrace to the American people.
Now that Mr. Trump is the President-elect: If he chooses, he can, by executive order, repeal most of what President Barack Obama brought into existence, including the thawing of the relationship between the United States and the people of Cuba. And because there is a Republican Senate, a Republican House of Representatives, a Republican president, it is more than likely that his legislative program will be accepted; his nominations to the Supreme Court may very well be accepted.
After the Republican Party did everything that Colin Powell says it needs to do to grow, and nominated the very kind of candidate he wanted in 2008, what did Powell do? He endorsed Obama! So according to the Drive-Bys and David Gergen, Republicans should let somebody who campaigned and voted for Obama, tell us how to build our party.
I think President Obama is clearly, you know, a Republican. I know, because in the 1990s I was a Republican, and he's way to the right of me, and I've hardly changed any positions.
It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican. It is even more outrageous to suggest that he would support the Republican Party of today, which has spent so much time and effort trying to suppress African American votes in Florida and many other states.
Obama is not just a powerful speaker, but a thinker engaged with the ideas of his country and his age--this argument by historian James Kloppenberg should therefore fascinate anyone interested in American politics or how ideas shape public life. Tracing the influences of Obama's family, educational, and work experiences on his ideas, Reading Obama locates a unique individual in the crosscurrents of American democracy and continuing fights over American ideals.
In 2008, Barack Obama had all the wind at his back, everything going for him. He was an African-American at a time when the country was eager to do that. The Republicans had, in the view of many of us, pretty much disgraced themselves at home and abroad for eight years.
I can not, therefore, see how this can be imputed as a crime, or how any of the king's ministers can be blamed for his doing what the public has no concern in; for if the public be well and faithfully served it has no business to ask by whom.
I want to say with the utmost of sincerity, not as a Republican, but as an American, that I have great respect for Senator Obama's historic achievement to become his party's nominee, not because of his color, but with indifference to it.
I don't think that Donald Trump represents the traditional Republican values and heritage of my party. That's one reason that I don't support him. The Republican Party has always revered the individual. We led the way in abolishing slavery, for example, and we recognize the dignity and worth of every human being. it is clear that Donald Trump, by his derogatory comments, by his mocking of the most vulnerable people in our society, by his marginalization of ethnic and religious minorities, doesn't reflect the traditional Republican values.
This is a column collection, or as one colleague called it, "history in real time," recounting my perspective on the highs and lows of this presidency from an African-American perspective. More than simply a column collection, the book has a substantial introduction that frames the [Barack] Obama presidency, explores the way Obama was treated by the political establishment and also how this first black president treated "his" people. In the epilogue, I use numbers to tell the story of African-American gains and losses during this presidency.
Truth be known, President Obama has never been particularly driven by principle. Right after his election, I wrote a column in a few days warning people that even though I voted for Obama, he was not what people were describing him to be. I saw him in the Senate. I saw him in Chicago.
Obama's the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn't public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time.
Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign, his refusal to showcase Obama's extreme liberalism and, thus, his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama.
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