'Hope and Change' Led to More of the Same: Revisiting Obama's Presidency ft. David Sirota

23:16David Sirota:I guess what I'm trying to describe is like it's an immersive process. It's more an immersive process than a sort of cash stuffed in an envelope handshake process. If you essentially capture the whole system, then you're guaranteeing that whatever outcome that system produces, it is going to be amenable to you as the industry that captured it. And so I think that explains, that's sort of the paradigm that the Obama administration is operating in. If you're Barack Obama, and I'll give people like one specific example. If you're Barack Obama who runs for president on a quasi-New Deal, quasi-FDR campaign in the middle of a financial crisis, and two of your first hires to run your White House are Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, right?

24:05David Sirota:Like Larry Summers, who engineered the deregulatory policies that created the financial crisis. Exactly, from the Clinton years, right? Like two people who participated in, both of them, Emanuel and Summers, Clinton people, who participated in the deregulation that created the financial crisis that you yourself ran against. If those are your two first hires, it is a signal that the system itself is captured. And I think, you know, ultimately you could say, well, the voters never really caught on to, you know, details like that. Oh, did he hire Ron Emanuel or Larry Summers? I completely agree. But I do think voters do catch on to sort of larger macro vibes and trends.

24:47David Sirota:And I do think voters could see, hey, lots of my friends, family, me, myself, are being foreclosed on. okay uh i see on tv the banks are getting bailed out while people are being foreclosed on i know the president has the power to do different things here and is not doing those different things and by eight years in i'm i'm not i feel like the whole system is rigged against me now some people can say obama being re-elected in 2012 is proof that like voters didn't catch on or 2016 wasn't a referendum on Obama. I would submit that Obama got extremely lucky in running against the, like, Mitt Romney was the world's worst candidate for that time.

25:32David Sirota:And not just the, right, he's not just like a bad candidate, like, on the trail. I think it's like, the Republican Party nominated, like, the avatar of Wall Street for, and people forget but like Obama ran I mean frankly a Bernie Sanders style campaign for re-election against Romney in rightly by the way indicting Romney as a as a tool of Wall Street a tool of private equity right and I guess it was like a reminder that like Obama when he when his back was against the wall and he he was afraid he was going to lose went back to the 2008 well of I'm going to run as sort of a New Deal populist. And the problem was, you know, if you if you do that once and then twice and you don't deliver on it, ultimately, at some point, people are going to get off and decide to vote for a human bomb like Donald Trump.

26:24Exactly. No, absolutely. I mean, this is this is the idea of the unit party, right? This is what Rattigan and I were talking about. It's like there is a political cartel that, you know, where these competing interests are less rivals than a more of a self-reinforcing system. This is this is your whole point here. And then it takes somebody like Donald Trump to come in and blow that thing up, even though he's totally captured by it, too. A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

26:47David Sirota:And to be clear, I like I was not happy what happened in the 2016 election. Right. Like. But but I guess what I would say is as unhappy as I was with it, I also understood it as an unfortunate inevitability. Like you can't keep doing this to people, raising their expectations. And I would argue, you know, what's even more tragic than than the Trump presidency itself is, if you tear up the social contract and you disillusion people like that, it can take a very, very, very long time to rebuild that trust. And I think it has created a problem where now, even now, whenever Democrats propose things, there is still a sort of like a vibe underneath.

27:35David Sirota:It's like, why should we believe them? Right. When we were told many of these same things for years, and then watch them not deliver, like it is very hard to rebuild trust when that trust has been broken. No, especially from somebody like Obama, who came in as this, you know, messianic figure, specifically to, to rebuild that trust after the catastrophe of the George Bush era, which we all forget about, right? Right. And I would say, I know some people will be listening and say, well, Obama is still in the polls, still relatively popular, you know, and beloved almost. Very much so. Yeah. And I would say, I think two things can be true at the same time.

28:17David Sirota:I think Americans can like a person personally, like their demeanor, like them as a sort of public figure personally and also be disillusioned by what they experienced under that person. Another example, Jimmy Carter, right? People really did not like the presidency of Jimmy Carter, but Jimmy Carter remained a very popular figure. Probably our best ex-president. Yes. I think he even said that. Didn't he even say like I was a better ex-president than I was a president? Yes. But I think what's interesting is that some people who defend Obama will say, Well, this analysis here, Obama to Trump and Obama has responsibility, culpability there, it can't be true because Obama's popular.

29:06David Sirota:He's a popular person. And I would say somebody being a popular individual public figure does not negate the idea that people can get extremely disillusioned with and sick of feeling fooled by what happened under that person's tenure. Right. Right. Well, no. And again, this goes back to the tragedy. And I see it in myself because I've been disillusioned. I mean, I voted for him twice. I would vote for him again. It goes back to that get out quote. I would vote for him a third time. I certainly wish that he were president if it were between him and Donald Trump. And when I see him doing interviews, I was just watching something he did with MSNBC on television.

29:44It's like, yeah, like I miss having a president who has that sort of demeanor and who is probably a good person when it comes down to it, has a good family. But that doesn't change the fact that – right, that he dropped the ball. And look, this is a quote from that New Yorker article I was talking about before. When people ask President Barack – when people ask Barack Obama whether he sees the MAGA movement and Trump's consolidation of power as a repudiation of his presidency, he tells them, quote, no. actually 60 percent of the country still agrees with me so i don't take that personally end quote um well i mean to your point like maybe you should right because what you're seeing there 60 percent of people are are are saying what we're what we're saying which is like yeah you were you know we wish that we had your demeanor and you're sort of like cool-headed temperament back but that doesn't mean that 60 percent of americans agree with him or support his two terms in office

30:36David Sirota:i don't think right well i think i the way i take it is 60 percent of people might agree with what Obama promised to deliver. The deeper question is how many of those people sort of broadly agreed with what Obama campaigned on, what he says he supports now, and also felt betrayed or at least disillusioned by someone promising them what he promised and then not delivering it. And by the way, some people may blame him. Some people may blame the whole political system. I'm sure there's some people, some set of Americans who maybe don't feel betrayed, but feel, look, we voted for change twice. We didn't get change.

31:21David Sirota:The entire system is rotted to the core. So we're just not going to even pay attention to it. We're not even going to take it seriously. And we'll vote for a clown if a clown runs for president. We'll vote for the Joker, right? Like Donald Trump, right? Like that deep level - An actual game show host. Yes. Like that deep level of disillusionment is, I think, the political crisis of our age. And like when I look back on what we've lived through, I think of the 2009 and 2010 moment as like with enormous possibility comes enormous responsibility. If you mess up a moment like that, it can take decades to have an opportunity to fix it.

32:01David Sirota:Now, you know, it's now what, you know, almost 20 years later, right? 18, 20 years later, right? I think we may be arriving, hopefully, this is the optimistic voice in me, hopefully arriving at another moment of possibility. But if that moment of possibility, if a Democratic president gets elected on Obama-style promises and doesn't deliver, it is going to be the same cycle and arguably even worse. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And going back to the transition, you made the point about his treasury secretary and picks on his sort of economic cabinet. It wasn't just the economic cabinet, right?

32:39You called his cabinet picks back then a, quote, team of zombies. He's – and it was also his national security team, which included not a single Iraq war opponent, even though he ran specifically and probably won before the financial crisis happened on his lack of support for the Iraq war, his opposition to that war. He retained Bush's defense secretary and something like 150 other Bush Pentagon appointees. And again, this goes back to some – I hate quoting people back to them, but you have a lot of good quotes, David, so bear with me. I'm just quoting you again. Washington is the same one-party town it always has been, controlled not by Democrats or Republicans, but by kleptocrats.

33:19You wrote that before the first Obama inauguration. Did the next eight years confirm your diagnosis?

33:24David Sirota:Yeah, I mean, I think that Obama had a chance to really break the party away, the Democratic Party, away from Clintonism. And I think what he ended up doing was filling his administration with mostly Clinton veterans. And so it was more continuity than change. And you could argue, look, he did that because he had only been a freshman senator when he gets elected president. He wanted old hands around. I think that goes as far as a little bit far, but I don't think it explains the whole thing. I think there's more of an ideological foundation here is that, again, was not willing to move beyond the current paradigm of that era.

34:20David Sirota:And I think the Democratic Party is only now seems to finally be having the fight over what the paradigm should be, a fight that it should have had back then. I wrote a book called The Uprising in 2007, in which I said, and I'm not like patting myself on the back here, but which I said, like, like the anger and the simmering anger of that moment was going to go in a in a right leaning direction or a left leaning direction. and that's going to define our political age. And I think what ended up happening was the Obama candidacy channeled the left of center version of that anger into the Democratic Party and into, you know, essentially fandom for Barack Obama personally.

35:09David Sirota:And the right of center anger, I think, was channeled into the Tea Party, into what ultimately became MAGA. And thus and so, here we are. The reason I'm optimistic now as opposed to – and I was optimistic then that it would go in a different direction. But what didn't exist back then and what exists now, because I think that's what we really need to be thinking about, about how do we not repeat this cycle, is that back then when you looked at polls among independents, Democrats, liberals, et cetera, there was still a lot of support for the Democratic Party brand and its leadership. So people were disillusioned with the country and the political system, and Obama channeled that.

35:53David Sirota:But there wasn't a deep disdain for the party machine itself. Fast forward to today, and it's the same level of sort of simmering anger, but people are deeply disillusioned, not just with the political system as a whole, but also with the Democratic Party in specific. And I think that opens up the possibility that these electoral contests and these battles inside the party actually birth something new, something that should have been new in 2007, 2008. But there's a potential for that possibility to be back on the table this time, but in a very different political cauldron. Look, I mean, again, from your lips, I hope you're right.

36:34And then I see polls that say, you know, the two leading – I mean, obviously it's early, but the two leading Dems are Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom.

36:41David Sirota:Yeah, honestly, I look at that. I mean, maybe I'll be proven wrong. Okay. And maybe I'm just like a hopeless optimist, you know, trapped in a pessimist brain. But I see those numbers and I say, that's a name ID poll. I mean, I remember a poll that showed, I think it was in 2004, that the leading contender for the nomination for president, not that that presidential election went that well, but that the leading Democratic candidate early on was Joe Lieberman. right like that was like before the camp so i don't those polls are just like who was the shoe in in 16 right exactly so those polls don't really mean anything uh this new yorker story is really interesting uh because it's it's sort of notable because obama you know he sort of goes out of his way to stay out of the day-to-day you know political conversation and again i i don't blame him for that like if i had netflix and spotify money i would be hanging out in my one of my mansions playing pickup basketball too.

37:34But this New Yorker author gets him to sort of opine on Trump in ways that he doesn't typically do. He also sort of – he does the classic Obama thing of trying to keep like an arm's length distance but also criticizing Trump. This is one of the things he said that I thought was interesting, quoting Obama here. People don't care about the fact that no other ex-president was the main surrogate for the party for four election cycles after they left office, end quote. I mean, he's complaining about the fact that he is sort of still the leader of the Democratic Party. Part of the reason for that is the Democratic Party, to your point, is so weak, and part of the reason why it's so weak is that he did not particularly do much in office to promote the next generation of Democratic leaders, I think.

38:15David Sirota:I mean, you're understating it. I mean, you're understating it. I mean, there was among the largest losses of Democratic Party power in the Democrats' history. 900 state legislative seats lost. Right, right. Congress law. 20 state house chambers. Exactly. So it is certainly true that Obama did not successfully build up a farm team or a successor, not just a specific successor, but like a sort of successor entity. Like the Democratic Party did not emerge stronger from the Obama presidency than it did before, than it was before the Obama presidency. And I think, you know, there are some deep questions there about why not.

38:57David Sirota:Is that all Obama's fault? Absolutely not. As the party leader, is it some part of it his fault? Absolutely. Yes. And so I think like complaining now that there isn't a presumptive set of leaders and that he's, you know, he's sort of he's a martyr because he's still considered a leader and he doesn't want to, I guess, be a leader. I mean, you know, cry me a river, right? Yeah, truly. What I look at Obama, and look, I'm with you in that I understand that, like, the ex-presidential game is a delicate game, right? You want to, like, you don't want to sort of bigfoot your way into politics all the time.

39:42David Sirota:I get it. Like, that makes sense. Like, it allows, we have a gerontocracy problem in this country where people are holding on to power forever. So, like, you don't want to see Obama, you know, he's termed out of the presidency, you know, he's every day, you know, leading the news and engaging. Like, I think he's making, like, there's a logic to that. But I also think, like, he barely ever engages. Like, there's a crisis of democracy, you know, the world is on fire and he's releasing, you know, his list of favorite books and music for the summer. And you're like, dude, like. What's going on here?

40:18David Sirota:Right. Like, engage a little bit. Or don't. Or do the George W. Bush route and go paint pictures of dogs. Right. Like this sort of dabbling is like, you know, like I'm a celebrity. I'm kind of dabbling. I'm kind of not. Like it's like you can't – to my mind, I think it's weird to sort of dabble in attention and celebrity and also yet not engage in the fire burning the entire country down. Right. And also, I mean, he's just – he gets this reputation as sort of like a democratic kingmaker. But he really isn't. And he's been on the losing end of a lot of political bets. I mean choosing – telling Biden not to run in 16 so Hillary could, I think you could make an argument that Biden would have won that election against Trump or at least he would have put up probably a better fight than Hillary did.

41:05Intervening in 2020 in the primary to hand it to Biden. I mean Biden technically won that election I guess. But – I mean he did. But where did that – it just put off the inevitable by four years. He didn't get involved until the last minute to get Biden out in 24, at least to our knowledge, for the reporting we know. And then he endorsed Kamala Harris, who was like probably one of the worst presidential candidates in recent history. It's interesting.

41:31David Sirota:There was a very – people forget this. It was very brief. There was a story right after Biden dropped out in which Obama was, it was reportedly, Obama was like trying to stir the pot for an open convention where the candidates would actually, there would be a bunch of candidates. They would like pressure test them. I remember that, yeah. Right. And that was quickly squashed down. And I remember thinking like, you know, I think Obama's right. like i like i if he if that's where he was that there look it's a bad situation like the democrats should have some kind of contest between the candidates and that idea was sort of crushed down and i think it's like in microcosm a kind of very familiar behavior by obama right like float a decent idea right propose a decent idea and then like oh it's it's going to be a little bit hard like i'm then i'm going to back off i'm not i'm not going to do that right like i would have liked to see i mean if obama had thundered in and been like there should be an open convention you know yeah i think people would have listened absolutely they would have listened he still has the he still has the party in the palm of his hand and he didn't do anything right so he like but but i think it's actually it's it's it's almost worse that he like kind of floated a good idea and then was like yeah but i'm not i'm not really gonna like i'm not gonna i'm not gonna like trouble myself with like fighting for it right no he's got he's got documentaries to produce whatever It is that he does now.

42:59Be very hard on him for obvious reasons. But what was I going to say? I lost my train of thought here.

43:06David Sirota:I mean, look, to be clear, I do have some good things to say about Obama. Like I do. I'm not like a – like, look, I think he ran a brilliant 2008 campaign. I think he had a vicious and understandably so primary with Hillary Clinton. and he taught Democrats in that campaign how to really fight in primaries. And I think it was – some people say, oh, it was too negative. I actually thought it was admirable. Here was a guy who was willing to really fight for the nomination and provide a model for how to run a really good cutthroat campaign. Against an entrenched establishment like the Clintons or the Bushes.

43:44Absolutely.

43:44David Sirota:Absolutely. And I just think like where is that Obama to the Obama who became president? and today's Obama. Like, you want to show those clips to Obama and be like, this was you as an underdog fighter. Where did that go? Yeah, where's the fire? Where's the fire in the belly, man? I don't know where it is. I mean, one thing it seems to me, like, again, this New Yorker piece goes on. He does a lot of complaining about how, you know, he's forced into this now. Michelle hates it that he has to, like, what? I talk to a New Yorker reporter every once in a while. Like, I don't even really know. One thing he could do, So why doesn't he get Ken Martin out at the DNC?

44:25I mean the DNC is a disaster. They have no money. The entire job of the DNC is to raise money. And this guy Ken Martin, in addition to sort of just like looking like a weasel, doesn't raise money. Couldn't Obama get somebody better in there? Obama's good at raising money.

44:40David Sirota:There are so many things Obama could do. And I just think, I think the tragedy of Obama, certainly his post-presidency, is that he clearly desires and enjoys attention for its own sake. He does not seem to desire attention to really do anything. He wants to be a celebrity. I didn't think that criticism of him in 2008, that was, by the way, the big criticism, John McCain's kind of criticism in that campaign was Obama is a celebrity. I'm John McCain. I'm the real deal. And I think we're now seeing that Obama clearly now, at least now, wants to be a celebrity which is different than being a political leader or even a political power broker.

45:32David Sirota:He wants to be a celebrity. And by the way, one other thing. I always find it interesting that one of Obama's rhetorical tics, and it's not even a tic, it's like a strategy, is for Obama to comment as if he's a bystander. He will comment like, if you read how he talks, he'll talk about his presidency. There was this problem and there was that problem and it could have been done this way or that way. And you're like, if only somebody like this guy was in the job of the most powerful office in the – it's like this weird third-party disassociation with the fact that he was actually the guy in power.

46:17I mean I remember this relatively recently. He was speaking at some book event or something, and he was heckled by I think like a Gaza protester or whatever. And his response was like, I don't know why you're yelling at me. I'm not the president of the United States.

46:31David Sirota:It's like, yeah, you have a giant platform. You still have political agency. Stop pretending. Any utterance that you make is international headlines, and yet you're using that platform to pretend you have no agency. Yeah, that you're just some guy. It's ridiculous. No, it really is. I mean, look, we talked about this, but again, because we have a very liberal audience. A lot of them are going to be very annoyed at me for having this conversation with you because, to your point earlier, Obama remains the most beloved figure in the Democratic coalition. You know, we mentioned the 60 percent overall approval that he mentioned.

47:09He has 96 percent of favorability among Democrats. That was according to Gallup last year. What do you say to the people for whom this entire conversation we're having is simply unacceptable for Democrats to be having? And I hear this in my emails all the time. They say, look, why are you criticizing Obama? Why are you criticizing the Democrats? You know, Donald Trump is literally like ripping the copper out of the walls of the White House right now. Can't you focus on him?

47:31David Sirota:Yeah, I get that feedback sometimes as well. And my answer is this. The reason to try to understand what happened in the Obama presidency, the reason to try to understand specifically the not only mistakes, the betrayals of the Obama presidency is in service of making sure those betrayals are not repeated. it again, which is in service of making sure we do not have another Obama to Trump cycle in the future. If you cannot, I mean, it really is the old cliche. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. And while history does not repeat, it does rhyme. And I think it is not just to like set, like you're not trying to settle scores or just be cathartic and make yourself feel better to try to understand what went wrong in the past.

48:25David Sirota:If liberals cannot understand what delivered Donald Trump to the presidency, then liberals will likely participate in those same things that will create another, possibly even worse, future Donald Trump presidency. So to my mind, to make it more specific, the reason to understand how turning hope and change into more of the same Wall Street policies, prop up the healthcare industry policies, don't limit the power of big tech policies. The reason to understand why doing that after so many expectations were raised, why that would lead to Donald Trump, understanding that, internalizing that, is a way to understand how to prevent that cycle from repeating.

49:18David Sirota:And my hope is, again, that in learning those lessons, we learn, it was, frankly, it was a lesson of FDR who warned about this. In 1938, I'm paraphrasing here, FDR said people in other countries did not give up democracy because they hated liberty and freedom. They gave up democracy because they got tired of seeing a dysfunctional government effectively betraying its campaign promises, and they ultimately decided to vote to get something to eat. The point being, in FDR's comments there, were if you campaign for power, achieve power, and do not deliver, you are creating the conditions for, back in his time, fascism.

50:00David Sirota:Like, there will be a backlash. And I think, like, that gaining power is not to be gained for its own sake. Power is not like an Oscar trophy. Power is to be used to deliver or people will get angry. And if there's another, like, so what I want all of this to be used for is that in the Democratic primary in 2028, and if there's a Democratic administration, I don't think it's a good thing if liberals are like, hey, it's fine if these candidates aren't making big promises to deliver. Hey, it's fine if candidates who make big promises to deliver get into power and don't then tell us they couldn't really deliver or aren't really trying to deliver.

50:43David Sirota:That is not only not fine in the moment, it will create the conditions for another Trump style backlash that could be even worse. Yeah. And I mean, if you look at some of the voices on the far right, especially among the younger generation, they make Donald Trump look like Gandhi almost. Right. And let me use one other metaphor that people seem to get. If the Republicans are, to liberals, the Harlem Globetrotters of evil, you are not doing your side any favor by just cheering on the Washington generals in a game that the Washington generals have essentially agreed to lose every time over and over.

51:26David Sirota:The way to actually prevent the Harlem Globetrotters of evil from winning is to demand changes to the roster, demand changes to the plays, demand changes to the ownership so that you're not putting on the court an opponent that is trying to lose or will inevitably lose. You're not doing any favors to your party by not having these fights. having these fights. And by the way, a good reminder, the person who proved this to bring it really full circle is Barack Obama. When Barack Obama ran for president, he was told by lots of liberals early on, lots of consultants, if you vigorously challenge Hillary Clinton for the nomination and bring up criticism of Hillary Clinton supporting the bankruptcy bill and being too Wall Street compliant and supporting NAFTA, etc., etc.

52:23David Sirota:If you do that, you will weaken the party. You will make it harder to win against the Bush Republicans. You're doing the Republicans' favors, Barack Obama. He rightly ignored that, understanding that, one, he could win, but also understanding that a party that is willing to have these fights will emerge with stronger candidates, stronger nominees and a more robust political project than a party whose rank-and-file members decide they want to suppress that kind of discourse. David, it's a perfect place to leave it. Before I do let you go, just tell us a little bit about what the levers, if there's anything cool you guys are working on.

53:07I'm particularly interested in what's going on with the latest edition of Master Plan, which is your great podcast. Thank you.

53:13David Sirota:Master Plan is our seasonal podcast. It comes out about once every year. It is a series that takes a look at a current problem in the present and how it was created over many, many decades. Our first season was about the secret 50-year plot to legalize corruption. You may think you know that story. Trust me, you do not, because we reported all sorts of things that had never been reported. Our second season right now is being released right now. It's called Master Plan Season 2, The Kingmakers. It's about the plot to turn the presidency into a monarchy, which I know there's a very familiar for lots of people right now.

53:50David Sirota:It's on the minds of lots of people. It includes a look at presidents of both parties. And again, an example of how these situations that we're living in, they did not just happen overnight. They were created deliberately by a specific set of people with a specific set of plans and a specific set of goals. So you can find that just search Master Plan in your podcast app. You will find it there. that's great and then the book of course is called master plan the hidden plot to legalize corruption in america we'll link to all of this stuff um and definitely check out lever news it's it's one of my one of my top reads every morning david soroto thank you so much my friend thank you thanks so much for having me i appreciate it great conversation and uh yeah barack obama if you're listening which i doubt you are still love to have you on still love to have you on but keep keep pushing okay all right sorry about the nuggets david and uh see you soon man thanks man