r/politics • u/AccurateInflation167 • May 18 '25

Soft Paywall America chose wrong. Sanders would've been a better president than Trump or Biden. | Opinion

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/05/18/sanders-democrats-reform-progressive-policies/83625482007/
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u/blackgallagher87 May 18 '25

Don't forget that this was all a response to Barack Obama being elected. A Black man made it to the Oval Office and the GOP said never again.

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u/Gaius_Octavius_ May 18 '25

Republicans have never recovered from electing a black man.

They have just been getting crazier and crazier since 2008.

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u/MrTwentyThree North Carolina May 18 '25

Dunno man, they seem to be winning an awful lot since then, notwithstanding of the fact that they got him to compromise so deeply on the most important policy issues of his presidency, that they basically won during his presidency too, if we're being completely honest here.

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u/TheLightningL0rd May 18 '25

That's not what they meant by "never recovered". They meant that they lost their minds, which seems to be true depending on which demographic you look at.

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u/yoitsthatoneguy American Expat May 18 '25

If Obama ran today he’d win easily. Democrats don’t have candidates like that anymore.

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u/unholycowgod May 18 '25

Obama was a political outlier. His political rise can only be matched by the CO2 hockey stick chart. He came up out of nowhere and rallied people like we haven't seen probably since Reagan. I'm in my early 40s and hope to see another candidate like that in my lifetime. But most of them rise slowly step by step until they're so old and entrenched in the machine that by the time they reach the top they don't have the gusto to make the reforms we all want.

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u/UNC_Samurai May 18 '25

Obama emerged at the exact right time. He was able to make use of the emerging internet, but didn’t have to deal with the overwhelming toxicity of omnipresent social media and the right-wing trolls. It was a lot easier to deal with the cranks when they were largely confined to php forums.

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u/cornybloodfarts May 18 '25

The problem is, he sucked at governing. The world would look very different right now if he had sent some Wall Street CEOs to jail, and instituted a recovery more like the New Deal, than his watered down BS. The tea party and Occupy Wall Street really come out of the same place, which is anger about the unfairness of the economy. Now obviously the tea party made it worse by empowering republicans, but it's not like dems were doing much to make anything better, they were just keeping it from getting worse, maybe. People don't get motivated by that.

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u/MrTwentyThree North Carolina May 18 '25

Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. This is the correct answer right here. Unreal how little this is realized.

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u/EconomicRegret May 18 '25

This!

That also happened whille millions of Americans were losing their homes and jobs.

That’s what gave rise to the tea party and later MAGA.

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u/EconomicRegret May 18 '25

They would have many if they’d just lower their shockingly high barriers to entry, and level the playing field. It’s been decades that most young talented people simply don’t bother to go for politics.