I sat down today to write a post about how Barack Obama was a good President, and then I remembered that I already wrote it, back in 2022:
What’s funny is that back in 2022, I was aiming my defense of Obama at progressive critics, but today I was going to write in response to his conservative critics. And yet the post I was planning to write today is very similar to the one I wrote before.
The commentariat has a very interesting relationship with the 44th President. Obama is still incredibly popular — far more popular than Trump, Biden, Bush, or Clinton:
And yet among hyper-engaged politics enthusiasts, almost everyone bashes Obama. Progressives bash him for not being the left-wing hero of their dreams, moderate liberals bash him for not being successful enough at building the foundations for enduring Democratic electoral success, and conservatives basically view him as Satan.
The latter group of critics is by far the most rabid and irrational. The political right seems to have made up a fantasy Obama out of whole cloth to blame for everything that has gone wrong in America since 2008. Obama’s administration was probably the most scrupulously clean in American history — the exact opposite of Trump’s — and yet you see right-wing people claim to this day that Obama ran America like a Chicago political machine:
When Obama criticizes wokeness, as he frequently does, you see conservatives say wild things like this:
