• GladiusB@lemmy.world
        632·
        11 months ago

        I don’t know if I would consider him mediocre. His policies may not have been the greatest. However the nation’s esteem while he was in office was unparalleled. There are always blind spots, but he was well spoken and inspiring. No President or most of Congress has even come close in the past 30 years.

        • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
          53·
          11 months ago

          Obama was basically the best brand and spokesperson for the Democrat neoliberal ideology but ultimately he was an actor of the US as a global hegemon.

      • kaffiene@lemmy.worldEnglish
        33·
        11 months ago

        As a non American I thought he was better than most you’ve had since, maybe Carter

        • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
          151·
          11 months ago

          Yeah, Obama was really popular on the international stage. But domestically, he was milquetoast at best. Still better than Biden by miles, but he was 100% a centrist who ran as a liberal. Hell, on the international stage, he was considered conservative. Because the USA’s political spectrum had always leaned pretty far right, so a moderate conservative seems liberal by comparison.

          The issue is that the republicans adopted a party policy of “we don’t care what it is. If Obama wants it, we’ll oppose it.” Not because they were against whatever Obama’s policy was, but because they had spent so long vilifying him to their voter base. It was suddenly political suicide for a Republican to agree with Obama. After all, they had been telling their voters that Obama was a Muslim, a terrorist, a satanist, a communist, a socialist, unamerican, coming for your guns, and any other insults they could think up.

          So when Obama won the election, they suddenly had to vehemently oppose a man who was… Slightly right of center? This meant the pendulum had to swing way past the moderate right and landed squarely in fascist territory.

          If Obama had actually been any of the things they accused him of, they probably would’ve been more moderate when opposing him. But since he was a centrist, they suddenly had to pander to the racists, the misogynists, the xenophobes. Those groups had always been conservative… But Obama was the first time in a long time that conservatives started saying the quiet part out loud, and pandering directly to those groups.

          • ouRKaoS@lemmy.today
            7·
            11 months ago

            To summarize:

            Obama pushed back race relations 40 or 50 years… because Republicans couldn’t handle him doing well.

          • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
            11·
            11 months ago

            Captures Obama really well, I think he is the best the Democrats can offer in the current political era, the ideal person to carry the brand of the center-right neoliberal ideology of the party. I posted Adolph Reed Jr’s take on him from 1996 in the comments which basically echoes this sentiment as well.

            One thing that captures this is that America on the world stage basically is what it is, even someone like Obama, who was known to frequent pro-Palestinian talks and events, had to be pro-Israel in his role.

    • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
      42·
      11 months ago

      My favorite thing about Rudy are his sexts with the assistant he was banging. They sound like someone who doesn’t really know how to talk dirty but the partner really wants it.

      “Those tits… those are MY tits. You like my tits? That’s right, I own those tits. They’re mine. Those are my tits.”

  • Reddfugee42@lemmy.world
    1931·
    11 months ago

    “Things were fine before minorities started being able to express themselves without pushback.” - old white guys

    • taggart_mccallister@lemm.eeEnglish
      831·
      11 months ago

      Exactly. When people say Obama hurt race relations it’s because those white people hated seeing black people succeeding where only whites could, triggering them into hating them more.

  • vitamin@infosec.pub
    139·
    11 months ago

    What he meant to say was that Republicans would have continued to pretend to not be racist and stuck to their wink wink dog whistles, but electing a black man president drove them so insane that they regressed 50 years and returned to being openly racist.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I even remember in 2016, most especially right after donnie won the EC, all the gaslighting cons were doing classic DARVO and telling everyone how they “had” to vote for the likes of donnie because they were made to do it because of something, something, Obama. [1]

      If they didn’t blame it on Obama, they blamed it on Hillary being “shrill” or something. I think Patton Oswalt summed it up pretty well when he talked about donnie being a racist palate cleanser:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4cHWDTNWBs

      [1] Of course Tucker has gone further and said that people like him will be forced to go fascist because something something “woke”.

  • spider@lemmy.nz
    1061·
    11 months ago

    Electing Obama Trump has ‘taken us back 40 or 50 years on race relations’

    fixed that for ya, Rudy

    • Telorand@reddthat.com
      39·
      11 months ago

      Like, this is the laziest attempt at projecting I’ve seen in a while. It’s like watching someone become more bigoted as their facilities deteriorate from dementia, and it’s just sad to watch.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        They’ve spent years (all 8 years of his presidency, at least) claiming it was Obama - not the racist AF GOP - that is “divisive” and is “dividing” the nation. They’ve been saying the same about Biden, I notice. Given the underlying racism of the claim about Obama, I notice the attempts at Biden don’t have as much traction.

    • PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.comEnglish
      932·
      11 months ago

      “You think it’s accidental; I know it’s Marxist planned and executed over a long period,” he claimed. “Open border is not coincidental. The open border comes right out of Karl Marx. It comes right out of [communist activist] Saul Alinsky, who, by the way, Saul Alinsky and his acolytes taught Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.”

      This shit? The insane musings of high profile Republicans.

      • BigWheelPowerBrakeSlider@lemmy.world
        41·
        11 months ago

        Who the eff are all these marxists, communists, socialists, etc., wielding all this incredible power in the US and how do they stay so hidden? Deep state? But isn’t the deep state mostly rich white guys pulling the strings?

          • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world
            11·
            11 months ago

            I heard someone ranting about Marxist banks at one point. Like, just tell me you don’t know what words actually mean am I right?

        • jonne@infosec.pub
          18·
          11 months ago

          They’re so crafty that even the policy they’re passing is pure neoliberal dreck that’s to the right of Reagan. Nobody would suspect a thing!

      • Jaysyn@kbin.social
        271·
        11 months ago

        Lead poisoning is a huge part of why the 60+ age bracket is acting so erratically now.

      • jonne@infosec.pub
        17·
        11 months ago

        Ah yes, famed communist Obama, whose biggest accomplishment was shoveling huge amounts of cash to the health insurance industry in exchange for tiny concessions on the margins.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
          3·
          11 months ago

          And who teamed up with Bush before his term started to give a shitload of money to wall st so the events of 2008 didn’t cause a transfer of wealth in the wrong direction. Who sat by as the banks foreclosed on a lot of people’s only homes. Or maybe it was communism that made the judges decide that banks had to have proof they owned the mortgage before they could take homes from people?

      • DigitalTraveler42@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        You know they’ve digested too many Nazi talking points when they start breaking out Saul Alinsky and start trying to link him to prominent Democratic leaders.

    • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      11 months ago

      I forgot how obsessed they got about Saul Alinsky. If there were a college major called “Being a Leftist,” his Rules for Radicals would be on the syllabus for the class on pre-internet organizing. But I’m pretty sure Fox News hosts said “Alinsky” more times during the Obama administration than all the DSA members combined.

      It’s like if they were discussing Boston Celtics history and just kept mentioning Antoine Walker. (No disrespect to Toine. Or Alinsky.)

      • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        11 months ago

        Remember when they got pissed at that Reverend guy that Obama may have saw once or twice for saying that 9/11 was “chickens coming home to roost” (by the way, he was 100% correct of course)?

        Like, I wish Obama could have (publicly at least) stated that and still had a chance to win…

  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
    70·
    11 months ago

    Yeah, because all those tiki torch marches happened under Obama? Hmmm… good people on both sides? Well all the Black Lives Matters protests… no? Not Obama either?

    • jonne@infosec.pub
      50·
      11 months ago

      See, if you just hadn’t scared those white people by electing a black president, things would’ve been so much better!

    • schema@lemmy.world
      28·
      11 months ago

      It’s basic abuser mentality. “Because a black person has dared to become president, you forced us to be more racist and divisive.”

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      11 months ago

      All the teabaggers will just never get over Obama. All those boomers that loved to whine about Carter and Clinton got so much more butthurt over Obama and seemed to talk about the former a lot less once Obama got into office. Gee, I wonder why. 🤔

        • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          11 months ago

          I noticed even those people tended to be mostly occupied by Obama ever since his election - I bet it has something to do with melanin. I guess Hillary running resurrected some of that, which triggers their misogyny and that does battle with their racism. Also, some of the older ones would still grumble about how Nixon and Ronnie Raygun were so “unfairly” treated by the “liberal media”. The resentment among the teabaggers about Nixon is easy to underestimate, I think. I bet most of them would have rather he just stuck it out and did not resign, no matter what.

          Same thing with their view of Ronnie Raygun. They won’t listen to one iota of truth about the real Raygun and they will practically start spitting if you bring up Iran/Contra (which was worse than Watergate, and of course, Raygun’s administration was objectively the most criminal in history up to that point - I’m not sure if donnie’s admin surpassed it).

          But once Obama was elected, wow, they seemed to never let up with all the dog whistles and their brain seemed to be occupied with ODS primarily.

  • PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works
    603·
    11 months ago

    Even from a right/conservative view of things this makes no sense. Obama was a fucking legal scholar. He’d learned CRT in the context of law and brought it to bear not at all in a social context.