In his CNN podcast interview with his own former adviser David Axelrod, President Obama said he could have won a third term if he’d been able to run again. He based this on his vision and his strong belief that “the Democratic agenda is better for all working people.”
“I am confident in this vision, because I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it…I know that in conversations that I’ve had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say the vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one.”
I would really encourage people to listen to the whole hour. And I do believe Obama is right that he would have won if he’d been able to run again. He remains popular and will be for years to come. But his vision evidently meant very little at the margins, and given some of his comments in the hour-long interview (“Bernie Sanders is a pretty centrist politician … relative to some of the Republicans”) you have to think there’s some continued self-delusion about where the nation is in terms of political issues, personalities aside.
When you examine the clash between Obama’s continued high approval ratings (including on Election Day) and the election result, you cannot really reconcile that with the idea that people like him specifically because of a vision and not because of the person articulating it. If Americans really did believe in Obama’s vision and not just in his person, the 2016 general election would not have been close.
Voters were just given a choice: On the one hand, they could roughly continue along the path in Obama’s vision, but without Obama himself. On the other, they could elect a candidate who was not only historically unqualified, but also seemed determined, throughout both the primaries and the general election, to do and say whatever it took to lose. The result is a harsh indictment of Hilalry Clinton, but perhaps also a sign that people didn’t vote for Obama because of the policies they were hoping for.
When John McCain lost to Obama in 2008, it was hard to blame him — after all, he was running against a really, really strong candidate with a personality that Americans demonstrably liked.
And Trump’s win — along with the simultaneous Republican down-ballot wins — is likewise something we will always have to grade on a curve, but in the opposite direction. This makes the electoral rejection of 2016 so much more traumatic than past losses for the American Left.
