11/24/2023 0 Comments Was valerie jarrett reading a prompter![]() For six years, I was the liberal cohost of CNN’s Crossfire. In Los Angeles, on KABC-TV and KCOP-TV, and KABC Radio and KFI Radio. I served three years as chair of the California Democratic Party.Īnd since 1980, I’ve been a liberal commentator and talk show host on radio and television. I led a statewide initiative campaign and ran for statewide office in California. I worked for Governor Jerry Brown for four years. I went on to run local and statewide campaigns. I got my start in Democratic politics in San Francisco-by volunteering for Eugene McCarthy for president in 1968. It was something I’d been waiting my whole political life for. For passion and excitement, American politics had seldom seen a phenomenon like the Obama campaign of 2008.įor a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like me, that campaign was especially exciting. What makes our disappointment in Obama so hard to take is: It wasn’t supposed to be this way. That in itself was a painful reminder of all he might have accomplished, but did not, during his first two years in office, when Democrats were in charge of both House and Senate. On Capitol Hill, Republicans, who now controlled both houses of Congress, were often able to block him and did. For the most part, Obama’s efforts were limited to actions he could take using executive powers alone. Once the midterm elections of 2014 were behind him and he was freed from the obligation to campaign for himself or anybody else ever again, Obama suddenly got tougher and began to flex his political muscles at last, using the power of the executive order to take bolder action on immigration reform and climate change.īut by then, it was too little, too late on most fronts. It was almost as if the burden of elections had weighed him down. Ironically, from a progressive point of view, Obama’s best years may be his last two years. Time and again, he abandoned the progressive beliefs he’d promised to uphold, on issues across the board, from the economy to the environment, from immigration reform to gun control-yes, even on health care. Throughout this book, we’ll go over the countless ways Obama fell short of what he could have accomplished. Sure, we decimated al Qaeda’s leadership, but now we’ve got killer drones raining death from the sky without due process, and the NSA spying on all our phone calls and emails. Sure, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were ended, but now we’re still in Afghanistan and back in Iraq and Syria, fighting ISIS. Sure, we got health insurance reform, but without single-payer and with a monopoly for private insurance companies. Sure, we got a better economy than Bush left us with, but we also have stagnant wages, a struggling middle class, rising income inequality, and a diminished social safety net. Indeed, you could sum up this book in one sentence: On too many issues, once he got to the White House, President Obama abandoned his campaign promises and disappointed the people who worked so hard to elect him.Īt this point in the twilight of the Obama administration, looking at the differences between what was promised and what was delivered, more and more progressives want to know: I also speak as a liberal Democrat disappointed in his presidency, because he let progressives down so badly. I speak as a strong supporter of President Obama. One: Budget Battles and the Obama Economy To my colleagues in the White House Correspondents Association, who excel in their dual responsibility of holding the president’s feet to the fire and telling the American people the truth CONTENTS As Press describes it, liberals began the Obama presidency with high hopes, and they now near its end with deep disappointment and a sense of buyer’s remorse. On issues as far ranging as gun safety to health care to foreign policy, Obama has let voters down by simply not doing enough or taking the wrong actions. ![]() The tragedy of the Obama presidency is that, by trying to be the first “post-partisan” president, he ended up being one of the weakest. Press argues efficiently that Obama may have drawn the wrong lessons from the enthusiastic crowds that swarmed around him on the campaign trail in 2008-instead of seeing the potential and desire for a stronger progressivism, Obama tried to rise above and unite the parties. The bestselling liberal syndicated radio and television host Bill Press turns a critical eye on Barack Obama and assesses why his performance as president on issues liberals care deeply about has failed the American left. Updated for Obama’s last year in office, the liberal syndicated radio and television host Bill Press reflects on how the Obama administration has failed and disillusioned the American left.
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