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"Do something!" Michelle Obama's big-hearted, urgent, barn-burner of a convention speech
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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politics
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The Obama’s were right on point by Obama standards. They delivered extremely well crafted rousing speeches, positively dripping with charisma in a way that almost papers over how shallow their sentiments are. The thing I dislike about the Obamas more than anything, is that they are determined to channel a tremendous amount of talent and good will toward preserving the entrenched power structure that is ultimately the main thing that’s rotting out this country. They are feel-good oligarchs.
You don't seem to know what an oligarch is, which kind of devalues your whole comment.
Also I think you are just straight up wrong about their motivations.
I went and looked up definitions of ‘oligarch’ to make sure I didn’t misspeak. Nearly everything I found lines up perfectly with the point I was expressing.
Your focus on motivations isn’t a useful way to evaluate figures like the Obamas. It doesn’t matter what’s in their hearts, only their actions. What difference do their beliefs make, if their actions are harmful?
Obama’s entire administration was filled to the brim with actions and inactions that had the effect of protecting and preserving entrenched power structures. Here’s several examples:
Obama chose to let the individuals and organizations directly responsible for the 2008 economic collapse to avoid criminal accountability. Obama massively increased the use of lethal unmanned drones and instituted a policy of retroactively classifying civilians killed by them as combatants because of those individuals proximity to the resulting explosions. Obama sacrificed the Supreme Court seat that would lead to Roe’s overturning by choosing to not challenge McConnell’s unprecedented months long stalling. Michelle Obama’s misguided “when they go low, we go high” sentiment perfectly characterized the ineffective, elitist political strategy that enabled trump to win in ‘16. I can go on and on with examples.
By oligarch, I am referring to a small, exclusive group of rulers that hoard power.
I have already said that their ‘sincerity’ is irrelevant to my point and a useless way to assess people like this.
To address the specific examples I raised:
Providing legal cover to white collar criminals protects the ruling class that Obama served as president.
Crafting the legal framework to indiscriminately kill civilians protects the enforcement mechanism that the ruling class needs to project power.
Failing to defend an open Supreme Court seat opened the door to removing rights to bodily autonomy and moved us closer to a theocratic autocracy.
Celebrating a strategy of rhetorical weakness against racists and fascist, made it easier for them to win the White House in 2016.
Do you have anything to support your assertions, or was this just some pedantic, contrarian troll posting?
It’s interesting to me that I keep running into some version of the following argument: Yeah, Obama kinda sucked as president, but he had a heart of gold and there have been worse, so we should celebrate him! If you keep holding these people to such low standards, you’re going to keep getting such mediocre leaders.
Made sense to me. "DO SOMETHING!"
Like what?
It gets the crowd fired up without providing any productive outlet for that energy.
Barak appealed to our shared humanity. As a trans woman, he asked me to understand the views of people that wish I was dead.
Maybe it's good politics, but I don't have to like it.
yep. I loved the obamas-- still do. I'd vote for M Obama in a heartbeat over Harris. But I wanted so much more out of them. There was No work on justice or cop problems and a continued erosion of civil liberties under Obama. And picking Biden as his vp was cynical and gifted Biden tremendous soft power that he didnt earn. The price for that turned out to be a whole lot of brown mans' blood spilled, and a terrible erosion of the western rules based order and the concept of democracy, and its not over yet. I guess I'm happy Obama was as good as he was, but man, what a missed opportunity for Obama to brand away from the dem centrism that increasingly is simply republican-light. If you had suggested in 2010 that Bdien being president would result in a lot of dead non-whites, closed border, and Roe going down in flames, it would have been spot on 5x5 Bidens stated policy choices. He's always been anti choice, pro-police-thuggery, and anti minority for 50 years, but so many dems are pretending he's jesus christ returned.