Seventeen Years Ago, Barack Obama Taught the Democrats a Lesson They Still Haven’t Learned

Seventeen years ago to this day, Barack Obama was launching his shocking assault on the Democratic and Republican establishments, winning the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries in the past week. The edges around this story have been sanded down by the greater MSNBC cinematic universe as Obama became subsumed by the Democratic establishment, but for those of us who lived it, we will never forget what these motherfuckers did.

The Democrats had ensured that only a few Washington General types would show up to “compete” with The Chosen One in 2008, and when Obama ruined their plans by having the audacity of hope, a lot of us learned what this party will really fight for once its authority is directly challenged. Anyone who tells you that the 2016 primary between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton was nastier than 2008 between her and Barack Obama is either misguided, lying or utterly delusional.

The 2008 primary showcased some really ugly racist moments like when Hillary Clinton said to USA Today that “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” pointing to an AP article “that found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.” Hillary famously stayed in the race long after she could win the superdelegate math (which made 2016 even more ironic), and even once defended her decision to stay in by referencing the 1968 Bobby Kennedy assassination as justification, which she later apologized for. In what was a pretty shocking rebuke to the face of the party by a guy who just arrived in the Senate, Obama went on national TV and blasted former President Bill Clinton’s “troubling” behavior to “make statements that are not supported by the facts.” Some Clinton voters were so bitter over this primary that they vowed to never vote for Obama, and CBS exit polls found evidence of this being more than just pledges made in the heat of the moment, as 16 percent of John McCain voters said they would have voted for Clinton if she were the nominee.

Obama exposed the fatal flaw at the heart of the modern Democratic Party by savvily contrasting his vote against the wildly unpopular war in Iraq to Clinton’s vote for Bush’s war, undercutting her overall credibility. In the February 26 debate, Obama summarized the central contradiction at the heart of the Democratic Party that it still struggles with today.

“Having a debate with John McCain where your positions were essentially similar until you started running for president I think does not put you in a strong position.”

Iraq exposed the Democrats in a way that nothing else had in the Clinton-Bush era, in large part because opposition to it at that point was near-universal and you could easily point to the 29 Senate Democrats who voted for it like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer. The 2008 primary was defined by the world-historic failure of the Bush administration and how to climb out of that growing hole they put us in, and Barack Obama correctly argued that the people who pursued common sense bipartisan solutions with George W. Bush should probably not be trusted to get us out of it.

Using the Iraq War, Obama pierced the veil of focus group-tested bullshit this party of consultants and fundraisers coats all of its politicians in before letting them out in public, and Clinton could never recover from it. He did the same thing to John McCain in the general election and built a political coalition that is objectively impossible for an establishment Democrat like 2012 Barack Obama to recreate. If the Hillary dead-enders want to blame anyone but her for crippling her chances in 2016, don’t blame Bernie, blame the guy who actually beat her.

What Obama Exposed

The Democrats are a bunch of weak phonies and everyone can see it. Trump seems bold and refreshing because he doesn’t talk solely from a set of talking points that have been focus tested by donors for months on end. His constant bloviating and unhinged jabbering come off as authentic when compared to the stilted Democratic style of communication that anyone with a working bullshit detector can sniff out.

This is exacerbated by the fact that Democratic leadership stays around for fucking ever, and this sheen of consultant-speak they coat the party in becomes even more absurd when contrasted to their decades-long record that candidates tend to either awkwardly ignore as the GOP bludgeons them with the unpopular aspects of it, or they go the Hillary route of trying and failing to explain why current them is different from past them.

The right has a story about themselves to tell. Sure, it’s the same story as a certain sect of Weimar Germany, but it’s still a mostly coherent one that they fight for. Simply proving themselves as crusaders for a cause wins them a lot of goodwill that helps them assert that their cause is your cause too. Meanwhile, as demonstrated by the party’s Trumpian turn on immigration, the Democrats keep changing what they say they believe in, already embracing a form of popularism that establishment cowards who don’t understand politics want them to further lean in to. It doesn’t matter if you say you support a plethora of policies that poll well if people don’t believe you, and constantly pivoting from milquetoast agenda to milquetoast agenda every election only demonstrates that you will lean whichever way suits your own interests.

The Democratic Party’s biggest problem isn’t that the average age of leadership is eleventy billion years old, or that they have anointed themselves as Very Serious semi-defenders of a manifestly unpopular status quo, but that they don’t have a story to tell about their political vision that anyone believes that they believe. The New Deal Democrats, who authored a stretch of dominance in American electoral history only surpassed by the post-Civil War Republicans, unleashed a compelling narrative of themselves as righteous crusaders for the little guy in the face of a kind of greed that caused the Great Depression and looks like it wants to celebrate its centennial anniversary with another one. In 2008, Obama anointed himself as the unapologetic successor to this proven political strategy that said it fought for something and then proved it by helping to build the strongest middle class on the planet, and Obama won freaking Indiana with this strategy.

Between leaners and non-voters, there are far more votes to gain by fighting the GOP for a different status quo instead of this Beltway-brained bipartisan bullshit that the Liz Cheney-loving Democratic Party instinctually goes for in an effort to steal twelve right-leaning independent voters every election. That so many Democrats just voted for the cynically named Laken Riley Act that advances an extremely far-right immigration agenda is further proof of how morally and rhetorically aimless so much of this party is. The only instinct many Democrats have is capitulation to those they say they disagree with, and the party lacks a concrete base of ideals to inform and explain their politics. Even though Barack Obama exposed them one near-voting aged lifetime ago, Democrats still cannot see how most of the rest of America views them: as frauds who believe in nothing and cannot be trusted.