The Campaign for a New Age: How Effective Will Barack Obama Be in Preaching and Voting for the Reionization of the United States?

Democrats around the country are trying to get Barack Obama’s help for the upcoming elections which could decide control of Congress and governments in the states.

To these candidates, American democracy itself is on the line. And while Obama agrees with them on the stakes, many of those invitations are about to get turned down.

But despite his rhetorical impact, the question is now how effective Obama will be in driving out the vote. When he was in office, the former president was diffident in how he should be viewed by other democrats. And the question in this election is whether he’s simply preaching to the converted in addressing Democrats who already planned to vote, or whether he’s actually making the sale to independents and disaffected anti-Trump Republicans who Biden badly needs to show up to vote for his party.

Obama has had his small staff organize which appearances he will make and which commercials he will record with the White House and DNC. Such political coordination between a sitting and former president is not usually done, but like so much else in modern politics, his name was put on fundraising emails.

The kind of A-list political talent the Democratic Party lacks is underscored by the prominence of Obama. It’s an indictment that its best messenger first ran for president 14 years ago.

He’ll make a few appearances on the campaign trail, arguing that Democrats winning the Senate and governor races is essential to preserving democracy.

“We’ll explore a range of issues – from strengthening institutions and fighting disinformation, to promoting inclusive capitalism and expanded pluralism – that will shape democracies for generations to come,” Obama writes in an announcement of the event going out to donors, first obtained by CNN. “We’ll showcase democracy in action around the world, and approaches that are working. We will discuss ideas for how we can adapt our institutions for a new age.

Ben Rhodes, a longtime adviser who has been helping plan the Democracy Forum, said that the foundation’s work is removed from politics but will reflect Obama’s priorities.

“All the things he might care about as an ex-president – climate change, health care, avoiding war – all connect back to whether or not democracy survives, and frankly whether or not the worst-case outcomes happen in terms of who’s in charge of countries,” Rhodes said. He sees it as the thread that connects everything he is doing.

Since leaving the White House, Obama had put out mass campaign endorsement lists for statewide, House and State legislator candidates. The decision to stop those lists is a function, people who’ve been working with him say, of stepping back from the extended leadership role he played in the Democratic Party during the Trump years – a role they say he never wanted.

People in Obama’s extended circle have remarked that their former boss has been on fire this campaign season. Unlike his former vice president, Obama didn’t have the burden of being a president and he showed it by enjoying big political rallies that propelled him to the Democratic nomination in 2008.

While Mike Levin was one of six first-time House candidates in California with whomObama did a joint event for, he said he was not sure if he could think of Obama as an elder. Six of them went on to win. In an interview last week, he still talked about the race, almost as if it happened.

Much of Obama’s focus has been the multi-million-dollar deals continuing his transformation from president to brand. With the Emmy last month for the national parks documentary he narrated for Netflix, he’s a Tony short of becoming an EGOT, if his production company is included.

Some Democrats mock his various ventures as “Obama, Inc.” Among them: Switching his podcast deal from Spotify to Audible, expanding productions under his Netflix deal and a second volume of memoirs – adding to the already 768-page book published in 2020 that stopped chronologically at the killing of Osama bin Laden during his first term.

With the start of the Obama library, he has moved from flashy PowerPoint demonstrations for donors to actual beams and columns on the South Side of Chicago, and he is still courting multimillion dollars to fund it.

Getting Out Of The Debate: What Biden and Schumer Really Wanted to Tell the White House About Black Lives and Politics

One person is still in the ring so that we can advance our values. One high level Democrats said that the other guy is a celebrity. If you’re passionate about politics, you want to be with the person in the arena.

Still, Obama has quietly strategized with political leaders at home and abroad – from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to new, young, leftist Chilean President Gabriel Boric or British opposition leader Keir Starmer – while avoiding getting into the daily fray.

“This idea that he should be the guy to sway people’s minds is just silly. That isn’t his role. Does he speak with passion? The friend of the Obama said yes. “But he’s a pragmatist.”

Eric Shultz, who has been working with Obama since the White House days, believes he would have held the summit on democracy here at home if he wasn’t aware of what was happening around him.

Obama consulted with both Biden and Schumer about his failed attempt to push a bill through the congress that would have changed the Voting Rights Act. He was also on the phone after Biden’s Build Back Better legislation collapsed, backing the idea of slimming down the bill to just be climate change provisions and whatever else was needed to get West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s support.

He spent months on phone calls with tech leaders and advocates, building up to a speech he delivered at Stanford that was intended to get the elites involved with what he described as unregulated social media companies.

A few weeks later, he gathered several Black journalists – The New York Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, Los Angeles Times executive editor Kevin Merida, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wes Lowery, Columbia University School of Journalism dean and New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb and Washington Post global opinion editor Karen Attiah – in his Washington office to talk about the ways in which disinformation works its way into Black communities, and what could possibly be done to combat that.

The president of the advocacy group Color of Change attended the meeting and said that he was able to help from the seat he was in.

Biden’s political staff at the White House have remained in touch with the Obama staff, who have been scheming about ways to speak up for the President. He was a sounding board for Biden on the Afghanistan withdrawal and followed up with a strong statement of support.

When Obama called to congratulate the President in August after he passed the Inflation Reduction Act, it was still an important stamp of approval.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/10/politics/barack-obama-midterms/index.html

Barack Obama at the White House: His last campaign appearance at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, Jan. 17, 2020, from 4:00 PM to 4:00 PM

Attendees at a rare Obama fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in San Francisco saw a man in his new element: Tieless, in a large chair in the home of a co-founder of Qualcomm, delivering long answers to a room full of tech billionaires on a handheld microphone as he fielded set-up questions lobbed at him by Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson.

They were struck by the intensity of his attacks on Republicans. But they also noted how he seemed to be reflecting fresh on harbinger moments from his own presidency, like when he pleaded with Republican senators not to blow up the norms of government by blockading Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court and marveling again how he said they didn’t care.

Biden and the White House say he will be on the road a lot in the coming three weeks, though it’s not clear exactly where or which candidates he will appear with.

She made her last campaign appearance at the virtual 2020 Democratic convention. She told her friends that she was too depressed about the state of the country to campaign when the racial divisions of that summer were exposed.

She gave a speech about peaceful transfers of power at the White House portrait ceremony. Despite the fact that she has a lot of power in connecting with the Black women who have been voted into office by Democrats, she will not be on the trail again.

He is the one who will direct the campaigning but she will lead the effort as leader of the officially non-partisan, multi-celebrity, co-chaired registration and turnout effort.

Always returning to the Martin Luther King quote about the “long arc of history,” Obama’s interest has remained less on the midterms or 2024 than on the network of nearly 1,000 young leaders at the center of his foundation.

Siziva told CNN, that the fight for democracy is our reality because of the testing the American democracy has gone through over the last five years.

Sheila Babauta, a foundation young leader, remembers her father when she was a child: On the consequences of a former U.S. president

It’s also a reflection of the type of young people who’ve been brought in – when Sheila Babauta was introducing Obama at last year’s international climate conference, for example, she had already been part of a march outside demanding more. While protesters were literally taping themselves to the streets in Glasgow, other activists were already waiting to speak to Obama in a small two-hour session he held after his speech.

The moments are similar to electric cars going to a charging station. Juan Monterrey, one of the inaugural Obama scholars and a delegate to the climate convention in Panama last year, said it filled his battery and got him going.

Babauta, a local legislator in her native Northern Mariana Islands, said her own association with the former president as a foundation young leader has filtered down to the children at a youth center on the island of Saipan where she works. The kids asked if they and the president were friends after seeing a picture of them together.

Sometimes Obama pipes in with advice like at the meeting with European leaders when he pressed back on the question of how to handle opposition, like when he met with European leaders in a closed-door session.

Sometimes it turns out they are angry, mean, racist and sexist. And your job is then to just beat them because they’re not persuadable,” Obama said, according to a transcript obtained by CNN.

But he warned them also: “Sometimes we get filled up in our own self-righteousness. We’re so sure we’re right, we forget what we’re right about.

Mr. Biden’s instances of exaggeration and falsehood fall far well short of those of his predecessor, who during four years in office delivered what the Washington Post fact checker called a “tsunami of untruths” and CNN described as a “staggering avalanche of daily wrongness.”

Former President Donald J. Trump lied constantly, not only about trivial details (like insisting it hadn’t rained during his inauguration when it clearly had) but also about consequential moments — misleading about the pandemic, perpetrating the “big lie” that Mr. Biden stole the 2020 election, and claiming falsely that the Capitol was not attacked by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.

His stories have been repeatedly and publicly challenged, as far back as his 1987 campaign for president, when his attempts to adopt someone else’s life story as his own, and his false claims about his academic record, forced him to withdraw.

“It was nice, but I was afraid of it”: What Biden had to do in his first four years of office in Oregon

The volunteers of the state’s Democratic Party sat at long tables and called voters on their cellphones when President Biden walked into the room.

As the midterm elections draw closer, Biden has been spending more time on the road, trying to help Democratic candidates in tough races. This stop in Oregon was part of a Western swing that included a stop in Colorado and several in Southern California.

There are many competitive races in the country where Biden is not welcome. Like many presidents before him at this point in their first terms, Biden has found his approval ratings underwater. Recent polls put his approval at just above 40%. That means there are a lot of races where he could hurt more than he helps.

“The history books show that an incumbent president is not a boost to their party in their midterms. If Jesus Christ himself were an incumbent president, members of his political party would probably stiff-arm him in a midterm election,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist.

But Oregon is a very blue state that Biden carried handily in the 2020 presidential election. “God, it was nice winning by 16 points,” Biden told the volunteers, gathered on a Friday night to help Tina Kotek, the Democratic candidate for governor,

Two years later, Democrats are nervous about the tough three-way race for governor. There’s an independent candidate who could peel off the votes of the Democrats to open the way for the first Republican governor of Oregon in more than a generation.

Biden’s first rodeo: The campaign trail of Camp Hale and the hard sell that made him to design a new national monument

The next day, Biden attended a grassroots fundraiser for Kotek and the pair stopped at a Baskin-Robbins for some ice cream. There, as he waited for his waffle cone and double scoop of chocolate chip, Biden said he was certain that Kotek would win.

That’s a shift from his predecessors, former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, who held more traditional rallies ahead of the midterms in their first terms, said Brendan Doherty, a politics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who tracks presidential travel.

Biden is not directly tied to any candidates by helping them out by raising money for the party committees.

Some Democratic candidates have claimed scheduling conflicts when Biden comes to town, conflicts that preclude joint appearances. Republicans ridicule Biden and his party for this. Smith, author of Any Given Tuesday, said that Biden and the Democrats are just being smart.

This isn’t Joe Biden’s first rodeo. He lived through the 2010 shellacking, where having Barack Obama be so visible in the midterms actually hurt Democrats,” Smith said. “So, he’s having to learn from his mistakes and put his ego in the back seat.” And it’s the best thing for the party as a whole.”

But there are places where Biden can help the Democrats on the ballot: places where Democrats have a strong advantage in voter registration. Camp Hale was designated as a new national monument by Biden in Colorado. He made sure to show his support for the senator who is running for reelection in a tough race.

“I want Michael to come back up here a second after me,” Biden told the crowd as he regaled them with a tale about the hard sell that got him to designate the monument.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/17/1129524093/biden-2022-midterm-elections-the-campaign-trail

Joe Biden greeted by the LA mayor during his two-year presidential campaign on Thursday (the day after) he left Air Force One

In Los Angeles, local officials lined up on a blue tape line on the tarmac to greet the president after he walked down the stairs of Air Force One. Karen Bass, the Democratic congresswoman running for LA mayor, got a well-documented hug with the signature robin’s egg blue plane in the background.

The next day, Biden touted the infrastructure law at a construction site for a new metro line, calling Bass the “soon-to-be Ms. Mayor” in a speech where he delivered the core of his midterm message.

There is an election in a month. Voters have to decide,” Biden said. “Democrats are working to bring down the cost of things … that are talked about around the kitchen table, from prescription drugs, to health insurance, to energy bills, and so much more.”

The press secretary told reporters traveling on Air Force One that they were always getting incoming requests. “Of course. Of course. We have a lot of good things to talk about.”

Joe Biden’s midterm pitch is increasingly stark and alarmist as he grapples for momentum in an election seemingly slipping away from Democrats that could land him with a Congress inflicting two years of misery on his White House.

The President was on the road Thursday – not in one of the most pivotal Senate swing states – but in New York to tout semiconductor manufacturing. The fact that he showed up in a state he won by more than 20 points two years ago shows how his low approval ratings limit his capacity to help his party climb out of a hole.

The President rode into his day on the back of some unexpected good news – the economy bounced back in the last quarter at an annualized rate of 2.6%, according to initial estimates. Biden said that the figures showed the economic recovery was still going strong.

Democrat Sen. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania: Why the Congressional Blue Wave is Singular and Why America’s Social Security Can Go Unnoticed

His approach reflected the extreme nature of the election environment facing Democrats who are in danger of losing control of the House of Representatives and their ability to cling onto Senate as their hopes of clinging onto the Senate seem to ebb.

The Republicans are targeting deep blue areas that could enable them to build on their previous success and gain a majority in the House. Republicans only need a net gain of five seats to flip the chamber, and they could win enough seats in the Empire State alone to do that, CNN’s Harry Enten wrote Thursday.

And races that will decide the fate of the Senate also appear to be narrowing, like in Arizona, for instance, where Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly once had a clear lead. Pennsylvania Senate nominee John Fetterman, who’s still dealing with some issues after a stroke, had a shaky debate performance this week. The commonwealth represents the party’s best chance to pick up a seat and could be critical to their hopes of holding control of the 50-50 Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris casts the tie-breaking vote. Chuck Schumer said in the conversation that the Pennsylvania debate didn’t hurt us, but he was concerned about the high-profile race in Georgia.

The loss of either chamber could be disastrous for the President, who is bracing for a barrage of Republican investigations targeting his administration, his handling of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the business affairs of his son, Hunter Biden, who is under investigation by the Justice Department.

There is sufficient uncertainty in polling following recent elections that it is far too early to properly judge the state of the race. The historical pattern of first-term presidents getting a blue wave in the election may be reversing after Biden said that Democrats were saddled with this election, after their hopes of bucking the trend in the summer were dashed.

It’s impossible to highlight positive aspects of the economy when there is inflation and the unemployment rate is low.

If political control is split between Democrats and Republicans, there may be a lot of bitter years to come in Washington.

Unless we capitulate to their demands to cut Social Security and Medicare, America will become the first country in history to fail to pay its bills.

The President admitted that Democrats always charge Social Security is at risk in elections but also argued that proposals by Republican senators, such as Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, really do threaten the retirement program.

The issue is that if those measures succeed then there won’t be time for any of them to be felt in this election. If Biden decides to run for reelection in 2024, they may help him, but at the moment they are aspirational.

Some 47% of voters in Wisconsin, 46% in Michigan and 44% in Pennsylvania said that the economy and inflation was the most important issue affecting their vote. In each state, this more than doubled the number of those most exercised about the next-highest-ranking issue – abortion. Democrats had hoped outrage over the Supreme Court decision would have neutralized their economic liabilities heading into the November 8 election.

The latter has even made the gubernatorial race in New York – which hasn’t elected a Republican statewide in two decades – unexpectedly competitive. Hochul and Biden were together in Syracuse, which is home to a competitive House race.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/politics/biden-blue-states-midterm-election-analysis/index.html

Joe Biden, the Making America Great Again Movement, and the Failure of the Establishment: The Case of the Democratic Inflationary Era

The problem, however, is that the President was conjuring a vision of an economy that many Americans do not recognize. Democrats could be in for a tough time because of the way the economy is performing and the experience of the people in it.

The election is turning out to be an object lesson in the impact of inflation on politics, a lesson that has not been experienced by many adults since the 1980s.

When a voter feels that their income is not keeping up with their expenses, they are likely to look for scapegoats. Biden gets the blame as the president in power.

Biden blames outside factors for the hike in living costs, including Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which also pushed up gasoline prices – though these are now easing – and the aftermath of supply chain disruption during the pandemic. Biden is blamed by Republicans for causing the economy to overheating by pouring billions of dollars in cash into the system.

In an interview with Phil Mattingly, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told him that many of the administration’s measures to boost the economy will take time to be put into action.

People are still struggling with inflation. In a virtual fundraiser for Iowa Rep. Cindy this week, VP Joe Biden said that he grew up in a community where his father would warn him at the end of the month if they didn’t have enough money to pay all their expenses.

His comment showed that Biden understands acutely the problem that appears increasingly likely to doom Democrats this election season. But there’s nothing in the short term he can do about it.

Barack Obama and Donald Trump personify two rival visions of the meaning of America itself and are extending their bitter years-long duel as they find themselves on opposite sides of a profound confrontation over the future of US democracy.

The Make America Great Again movement was created in order to counteract the idea that the culture of a largely White, working-class nation is under attack by political correctness, immigrants and the establishment.

Obama is lambasting politicians, celebrities and sports stars who peddle conspiracy theories, fear and social media “garbage” of which Trump is the most prominent exponent. He is taking a hard look at the candidates who are running for reelection in 2020 because of the false statements the 45th president made on the platform.

I don’t understand why voting for someone who is not telling the truth would be beneficial. I don’t care how nicely they say it. Obama said he didn’t care what the former TV news anchor looked like, as long as he was well-lit.

“What happens when truth doesn’t matter anymore?” Obama added that he did. If you repeat a lie repeatedly, and it is true, you can say it’s ok because your side is saying it.

Trump adopted exactly that tactic in his return to the campaign trail in Iowa on Thursday night, in what was ostensibly an appearance for veteran GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, but felt like a first-in-the-nation caucus warmup for 2024.

“Your favorite president got screwed,” Trump told his crowd on a frigid night in Sioux City, in which he repeated false conspiracies that Obama spied on his campaign in 2016.

On Thursday, Trump had his crowd in stitches as a stiff wind blew around the teleprompters showing his prepared remarks.

Why is Obama the Explainer-In-Chief? The onetime boss of the 42nd president, Barack Obama, is the explainer-in-chief

He was the one who fought for this. And then, his adult children bought not one, not two, but three private planes because apparently, carpooling was not an option. Now, you need three? Obama made fun of himself.

It is easy to tell if a president doesn’t have his heart in his job. In the early rallies of his 2012 election race, for instance, he was lethargic and weary, and he didn’t approach top form in his events last year in an off-year election in Virginia.

But his rallies this year have rocked with the pulsating energy and enthusiasm that is often lacking at appearances by the incumbent president, an older, more conventional politician. Obama has also come up with far more relatable and focused economic messages than Biden has managed – ironically performing the same role for the current president as another ex-president, Bill Clinton, performed for him in the 2012 campaign – a service that led Obama to dub the 42nd president “the explainer-in-chief.”

Obama has a talent for oratory that is undiminished and he is showing it off. He is like a basketball star who just came back from retirement and just started draining three-pointers. The president can go to important states where candidates won’t welcome him because of Biden’s unpopularity.

Former Obama political strategist David Axelrod, who is now a CNN commentator, said that this onetime boss is being used by his party on a specific electoral mission.

“In the main, this is the time when you try and get your base out and for Democrats this is really important because the reason why incumbent parties generally lose in midterm elections is that their base is not as motivated as the out-of-office party which tends to come and vote its grievances,” Axelrod said. There is an enthusiasm gap in the polls between Republicans and Democrats.

The most recent ex-president has displayed his extraordinary hold on the Republican Party by campaigning and endorsing a group of candidates who did not vote for him in the election. There is a question, however, whether Trump’s role in orchestrating inexperienced or extreme nominees, like senatorial candidates like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia and Blake Masters in Arizona, could cost his party the critical seats in swing states that will decide control of the Senate.

Republicans have been worried about the former president putting his own ambitions ahead of his party. Many still blame his false claims of voter fraud for helping two Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, win Senate seats in Georgia runoffs, which enabled their party to control the 50-50 chamber with the help of the tie-breaking vote cast by Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump has not been holding multiple rallies in states that are close to him while he is in the country. The GOP has been able to return the attention of the election to Biden, high inflation and the economic fears of voters since the start of the year.

There are increasing signs that Trump may announce his candidacy for president much sooner because he is already going to use the campaign to brand legal investigations he faces for his conduct leading up to the election.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/politics/obama-trump-campaign-trail-return/index.html

Donald Trump: The War on the Justice Department is Against the Weakening of the Constitution,” he tweeted at a news conference

“They are weaponizing the Justice Department,” Trump said at his rally Thursday, accusing Democrats of a transgression of which he himself was guilty when he was in the White House and treated attorneys general as his personal lawyers.

A decision by the former president not to take the focus off the Republicans in the upcoming elections may be a sign that he will try to undermine Biden if he runs in the campaign of the 20th century.

“He’d like to have done it already. I think you can expect him to announce his campaign soon, I think you can. “He’s being urged by some people to still have a November surprise.”

“Donald Trump is just getting started. I think you should keep your cellphone on,” Conway told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast on Thursday.