POLITICO’s Lara Seligman and Dan Diamond talk about how they broke the story on the Pentagon’s $2.2 billion well being care controversy — and
POLITICO’s Lara Seligman and Dan Diamond talk about how they broke the story on the Pentagon’s $2.2 billion well being care controversy — and what it’s prefer to have the president affirm your reporting.
“None of this needs to be controversial,” Obama stated, with the attribute exasperation he reveals when he can’t consider that others don’t see one thing that’s so blindingly apparent to him. “These should not be Republican ideas or Democratic ideas. They’re American ideas. However at this second, this president and those that allow him have proven they do not consider in this stuff.”
After all, that’s the large impediment the Biden conference faces this week: the blinding obviousness of the Trump menace as Democrats see it isn’t shared by roughly half the nation and 90 p.c of Republican officeholders. Not solely is it not shared by them, however it’s passionately denied. The president himself has invented a complete counternarrative that Obama is a prison — responsible of ”treason” — who masterminded a fraudulent Russia investigation to kneecap his administration from its earliest days.
In a earlier period, Obama would have spent a while making an attempt to speak to these on the opposite aspect who believed such issues. However it’s not 2004, when Obama grew to become well-known for arguing that the blue/pink divide was a fiction invented by pundits. “I do know that in occasions as polarized as these, most of you’ve gotten already made up your thoughts,” he conceded.
His pitch was to these on the fence, Individuals “nonetheless undecided which candidate you’ll vote for or whether or not you’ll vote in any respect.” He tried to empathize with these Individuals and forged them as basically individuals who have given up on democracy: a white manufacturing facility employee with stagnant wages, a Black mother who believes the federal government “by no means regarded out for her in any respect,” a brand new immigrant who wonders “whether or not there may be nonetheless a spot for him right here,” and a cynical younger particular person turned off from politics due to “the circus of all of it, the meanness and the lies and conspiracy theories.” His level was that democracy can’t be taken away, however it may be given away when sufficient voters are inspired to choose out of the system.
Earlier than he was a U.S. senator from Illinois, Obama was a lecturer in constitutional regulation on the College of Chicago. His view of American historical past is that the Structure was an imperfect doc that excluded most Individuals from citizenship and but nonetheless gave future generations one of the best system to repair the unique doc’s deficiencies, and that progress is the story of our nation.
He closed by retelling that historical past — the fights for abolition, and labor rights, and spiritual equality — and reminding voters that nevertheless unhealthy issues appear now, there may be all the time the possibility for renewal.
“If anybody had a proper to consider that this democracy didn’t work and couldn’t work, it was these Individuals, our ancestors,” Obama stated. “They had been on the receiving finish of a democracy that had fallen brief all their lives. They knew how far the day by day actuality of America strayed from them then. And, but, as an alternative of giving up, they joined collectively they usually stated in some way, a way we’re going to make this work. We’re going to carry these phrases in our founding paperwork to life.”
In most Obama speeches that inform the story of American progress and the way now we have all the time labored to dwell as much as the promise of our founding paperwork, he appears optimistic and assured that that historical past will proceed. In Wednesday’s speech, the query of whether or not America will get this proper this time — no less than in his view — appeared unsure.
This is similar uncertainty Obama has been wrestling with since Trump was elected. In line with one among his adviser’s memoirs, in late 2016 Obama’s confidence in his understanding of the American temper was shaken by Trump’s victory.
Since then, Democrats have regained numerous political turf, largely in 2018. However after Trump’s victory, Obama turned to his aides and requested a query that also hangs over the 2020 marketing campaign.
“What,” he puzzled, “if we had been incorrect?”