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he's been very successful at masking it, but obama really is the archetypal demagogue the ancients warned about, who employ populist rhetoric and their personal charisma to channel legitimate frustrations toward serving their personal (and broader class) interests THREAD w/ clips
a common misconception about obama's 2008 primary run is that he was the leftist counterpart to hillary. true in rhetoric and some areas of policy, but in other respects he was to her right, like healthcare, where he attacked her w/ right-wing propaganda
it's important to drill down a bit more on healthcare given how it came to be a top concern for many and was a key part of bernie's prominence with medicare for all. obama opposed hillary's more robust healthcare plan and trotted out the "accessibility" talking point to attack it
and this was true of other policies as well. when you actually read what obama was running on, he was a "standard centrist politician", even to the right of hillary on some key issues like healthcare, as chomsky noted at the time
when obama chose biden as his vp, he didn't do so merely to assuage the fears of white voters given biden's palling around w/ segregationists, but also bc that's the wing of the party he himself came from and was most comfortable with. the entire '08 primary was kabuki theater
it was just a personality contest between hillary and obama, and of course when you're up against one of the most reviled politicians of the modern era and you add a touch of populist rhetoric to it plus obama's charisma, that's an easy win
for more clips of obama just totally annihilating hillary clinton by wielding populist rhetoric as a weapon see the clips in this thread: https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1223917810918875136. but he never had to face a total media, super pac and billionaire class onslaught. many of them were on his side
and they were on his side bc they were able to look past the rhetoric and see what he was actually proposing, which was, again, standard centrist guff. the most destructive element of obama's demagoguery was his successful pretense of being something different
it is that pretense that, as befits a demagogue, he has continued to wield to serve his personal and broader elite class interest after leaving the presidency, from installing his puppet tom perez as head of the dnc to the phone call he made after sc to ensure a biden nomination
and of course during his presidency as well he successfully absorbed a lot of genuine frustrations and sublimated it toward serving those interests. it really is hard to estimate the untold damage obama's demagoguery has caused. without it, it is unlikely trump would be president
and without it, it's unlikely we would now see a second trump term or a biden term which will lead to a worse trump. the right-wing's hysterical whining about obama being a radical marxist maoist is exactly the opposite of the truth: he was and remains the establishment's savior
