IOWA CITY, Iowa — Iowa was the state that made Barack Obama. He pushed Hillary Clinton into third place in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses and went on to win the swing state in the general election that year and again when he was reelected in 2012.
It was in Iowa that Oprah Winfrey anointed Obama as “the One” and his victories in the predominantly white rural state deep in “flyover” country seemed to usher in a new era not just for the Democratic Party but also for the United States, which for the first time elected a black man to the White House.
Now, Obama’s name is an afterthought. In three events in Iowa this weekend, the party’s 2020 presidential front-runner Sen. Bernie Sanders, 77, did not mention him a single time. At the other end of the generational spectrum, Beto O’Rourke, 46, did not name-check Obama either. Both candidates espoused policies far to the left of Obama, who when he was elected was viewed as in the party’s progressive wing.
The only candidate, though he has yet to declare, who is fond of mentioning Obama is Joe Biden, a self-described “Obama-Biden Democrat.” But as Obama’s Vice President Biden has little choice, and his association with the past, and his many years in Washington, could well turn out to be his downfall.
At Sanders rallies in Iowa last weekend, the Obama years were never glossed over and his signature domestic achievement, the Obamacare health reform, dismissed as a compromise and a failure.
“If you talk to doctors in this country, they will tell you they have lost patients, patients have died, because they haven’t gotten to a doctor when they should have,” Sanders said at a town hall in Muscatine. “The bottom line is if you’re sick you should see a doctor, but if you don’t have insurance or a high deductible or co-payment, they hesitate.”
Those who went to see Sanders expressed disappointment with Obama’s presidency, remarking on what they saw as broken promises and too much compromise.
“I did consider myself an Obama Democrat in his first term, which ended up being a let down,” Britney Springmier, 35, told the Washington Examiner. Although she caucused for Obama in 2008, Springmier said that she knows a lot of people in the town of 22,000 who no longer identify with the kind of campaign and rhetoric the former president ran on in his two races.
In Burlington, Sanders spoke of America being “in the midst of a healthcare crisis” and controlled by a corrupt, monied elite. In Fairfield, he said: “We are moving in the direction of oligarchy [in this country], and together we are going to turn that around. We will no longer accept 49 percent of all new income going to the top 1 percent.”
He said: “Those ideas we talked about four years ago, that seemed so radical at the time, well, today, virtually all those ideas are supported by a majority of the American people and Democratic candidates to school board to president of the United States are now supporting those ideas.”
Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, told the Washington Examiner: “I think Obama has not been all that prominent since leaving office. He’s out of sight and out of mind. Sanders feels that he doesn’t owe Obama anything, there’s a lot of resentment there. And something like Medicare for All is a repudiation of Obamacare.”
In Fairfield, Chase Brock, 28, said: “I kind of feel like Obama is a Republican-Democrat, him and Hillary are kind of the same-ish. I liked Obama was pushing for healthcare, which is a big reason why I support Bernie as well. I don’t know, I just wasn’t a huge fan of Obama,”
Debbie Becker, a retired nurse who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, said: “I was an Obama fan, but I don’t think he got done everything he wanted to do.” When asked if Biden is progressive enough: “Probably not.”
Obama was a favorite among young Iowa voters, winning a clear majority of them in the 2008 caucuses, but now many young Iowans are backing a man who was a month off his 20th birthday when the future 44th president was born in 1961. Although Sanders lost Iowa in 2016 by a razor-thin margin, he won 85% of voters under the age of 30.
At an O’Rourke event in Iowa City, someone who had missed the last decade or so of American politics would have been none the wiser that Obama had ever been president.
Ironically, one of the former Texas congressman’s most stirring lines was one that could have been delivered by one Sen. Barack Obama in Iowa in 2008. “The most powerful country that on the face of the planet, the most powerful country that world history has ever known has millions, tens of millions of our fellow citizens who cannot see a doctor,” he said.
