Gary Younge at The Guardian would have us believe that Obama’s to blame for the failure of the Democrats to capture the Presidency, and the core mistake was how the Great Recession was handled:
There is a deeper connection, however, between Trump’s rise and what Obama did – or rather didn’t do – economically. He entered the White House at a moment of economic crisis, with Democratic majorities in both Houses and bankers on the back foot. Faced with the choice of preserving the financial industry as it was or embracing far-reaching reforms that would have served the interests of those who voted for him, he chose the former.
Just a couple of months into his first term he called a meeting of banking executives. “The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability,” one of them told Ron Suskind in his book Confidence Men. “At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.” People lost their homes while bankers kept their bonuses and banks kept their profits.
Without referencing the implications of his argument – that Obama should have restructured the banking system somehow – I have to question whether all these voters who allegedly skipped this election really knew that he had an option to do so – if in fact he really did have such an option.
Here’s the thing – political columnists tend to know more, and impute more knowledge to the masses, than the masses actually possess. Look at the polls concerning how Obama has done vs how the American electorate thinks he’s done. Steve Benen constructs a nice graph from data supplied by Public Policy Polling:
May 2016
This is just one example. The place where the boots hit the road is the information in the possession of voters. I do not believe Younge has learned the lesson that Trump seems to know quite well – the reality doesn’t matter, it’s what the voters think is reality. Remember his relentless beating of the drum about violent crime? The worst in decades!
Or was it? From WaPo and The Pew Research Center:
And then Trump suggested the numbers were false. He understands. It’s all about what the voters believed was true, not the actual realities.
And while the voters may have been outraged that the banking system was not dismembered at the time, we should remember that healthcare reform was the priority of the Democrats, not banking. The result of the ACA, in measurable metrics, has been good so far, even as the GOP tries to put on its 20 fathom boots in order to destroy it.
So the question is, how to get the proper information to voters? While it’ll pain Obama to see the ACA destroyed, its immediate negative effect on many citizens may turn out to be a positive – teaching citizens to fucking pay attention to who you’re voting. On both sides.
