What Did Obama Stand For?
glennloury.substack.com
What Did Obama Stand For?
with Norman Finkelstein
A major part of Barack Obama’s appeal to voters was his supposedly astounding intellectual acumen. But how much of this is backed up by the facts and how much of it was political myth-making? In this excerpt from this week’s episode, Norman Finkelstein and I ask whether there was any political or intellectual substance behind the public image of the former president.
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The problem is that the choice we're presented with is a Republican Party that actively and unconstitutionally destroys rights, as with Dobbs, and a Democratic Party that actively does not stand up for rights. The GOP is the worst choice. Obama was and is not progressive, he's an Eisenhower Republican. He was in office at a time that the GOP was using him as a symbol to further their right-wing, conservative extremism while the Democrats, neo-liberals, wrung their hands.
Not being obviously stupid is peculiarly impressive compared to his bookends.