"At some point, we gotta be upset about this," says Ezra Klein, nervously chuckling.

Yeah? What point?!

Ezra Klein explains how it feels to be a Democrat in under 30 seconds:
Ezra Klein: "The stimulus bill under Obama, that had 3 big headline projects for reinvestment.
High speed rail, smart grid, a nation wide system of interoperable health records. 0 for 3"
Gavin Newsom: "I… pic.twitter.com/Rlq1z8fGRb

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 26, 2025

Via Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, who's put together a nice series of clips and quotes on the theme "The Democratic brand is toxic right now."

This is a theme that gets my tag "Democratic Party in Trumpland."

BUT: Really, the problem Klein chuckles over pre-dates the Trump era. It's the failure of the Obama agenda:  "The stimulus bill under Obama — that had 3 big headline projects for reinvestment. It had high speed rail. It had smart grid. And it had a nation wide system of inter-operable health records.... 0 for 3."

"I loved early Democratic Socialists of America leader Cornel West. I loved author of the 1993 book Race Matters West."

"I loved everything about West until he supported spoiler Ralph Nader against then–Vice President Al Gore in 2000. A lot of my political friends supported Ralph Nader back then. And a lot of them have since apologized. Even Michael Moore.... West never apologized. He didn’t see a third party playing a spoiler role to Democrats as bad—obviously, since he’s about to do it again. He did support Barack Obama in 2008, but he turned on him fairly quickly, making criticisms that went way beyond Obama’s political decisions. Then he supported Jill Stein in 2016. More recently, West has gone off the deep end. He promoted his 2024 candidacy, on the fringe People’s Party line, with an appearance on former comedian Russell Brand’s Web show, now frequented by right-wingers.... This is a downhill spiral even for West, who also spiraled downward after Obama’s victory.... [C]alling the president 'a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats' was awful. West went on to claim that Obama was afraid of 'free black men' thanks to his white ancestry and Ivy League education.... What does West bring to the [2024] race?"

Writes Joan Walsh in "Cornel West Should Not Be Running for President/He doesn’t see a third party playing a spoiler role to Democrats as bad—and that’s inevitable" (The Nation). 

West was on Russell Brand's show? Let's take a look:

"The new left sees society as a web of overlapping power structures or systems of oppression, constituted by language and norms as much as law and policy...."

"[Almost everything debated recently — critical race theory, the distinction between sex and gender, we can go on — originated in academia over the last half-century.... Academic scholarship is ... the source of the expanded, academic meanings of 'trauma,' 'violence,' 'safety' and 'erasure,' which implicitly equate the psychological harm experienced by marginalized groups with the physical harms of traditional illiberal oppression.  This does not readily lend itself to a 'politics of hope,' as virtually everything about America might have to change to end systemic racism. No law will do it. No candidate can promise it. But it does imbue individual actions that subvert oppressive hierarchies with liberatory and emancipatory implications, helping explain the urgency of activists to critique language and challenge norms in everyday life.... This is quite different from Obama-era liberalism...."

Writes Nate Cohn in "What’s 'Woke' and Why It Matters/A marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years" (NYT).

When in conflict, the new left prioritizes the pursuit of a more equitable society over enlightenment-era liberal values. Many of the academic theories, including critical race theory, critique liberalism as an obstacle to progressive change. In this view, equal rights are a veneer that conceal and justify structural inequality, while some liberal beliefs impede efforts to challenge oppression. The liberal value of equal treatment prevents identity-conscious remedies to injustice; the liberal goal of equal opportunity accepts unequal outcomes; even freedom of speech allows voices that would offend and thus could exclude marginalized communities. 

Is this a definition of woke? No. But it covers much of what woke is grasping toward: a word to describe a new brand of righteous, identity-conscious, new left activists eager to tackle oppression, including in everyday life and even at the expense of some liberal values....

So what are ordinary Democrats supposed to do when Republicans square off against this new "new left"? 

"Biden was not part of the Obama entourage. He was sort of a goofball and windbag. He was a member of an older, outmoded generation."

"In other words, uncool. The West Wing attitude was that Biden should simply be grateful that the Great Obama had handed him a ticket to ride. Biden was viewed as a past-his-sell-by-date pol who needed the president’s guiding hand to keep Uncle Joe from making a fool of himself as vice president.... They trashed him anonymously to reporters, froze him out of meetings and barred him from doing some national media.... In eight years, Biden said in a recent reveal that stunned Anderson Cooper — and left Washington gasping — he and Jill were never invited by the Obamas to their private digs in the White House.... So now comes a delicious twist: President Biden is being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to L.B.J. and F.D.R. aplenty, while Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don’t put their foot on the gas.... Obama’s failure to go big and to send the tumbrels rolling down Wall Street certainly greased the runway for Donald Trump. The paradox of Obama is that Americans embraced radical change by electing him but then he held himself in check, mistakenly believing that he was all the change they could handle.... Obama seems more comfortable as Netflix talent, sitting pretty with celebrities and chit-chatting with Bruce Springsteen...."

Writes Maureen Dowd (NYT).

"Barack Obama continues his rather strange mission to confront and correct young liberal activists...."

" Wednesday morning on Peter Hamby’s Snapchat show, 'Good Luck America,' Obama said this: 'If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan like "Defund the police," but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.' It was not the first time Obama had taken aim at these young activists. Last year he also took a swipe at wokeness and 'call-out culture,' saying, among other things: 'If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.'... [T]he politician navigates the system, while the activist defies it. The politician builds a coalition by using middling philosophy and policies that appeal to the most and offend the fewest. The activist is driven more by purpose, morality and righteousness.... Obama is a good man and a great politician. History will always record him as such. But he is not an activist.... His presence as president was his greatest symbol of change: a smart, competent Black man, devoid of personal scandal, who brought class and professionalism to the White House.... That simple act, him doing his job well, was monumental in the quest for racial progress. But none of that negates the legitimate cries of the activist that much more must be done, that Obama altered a racial image, for the better, but wasn’t able to alter the system of oppression.."

Writes Charles M. Blow in the NYT.

My tag for this is "Obama attacked from the left."

Donald Trump Jr. — talking about his book "Triggered" at UCLA — was heckled offstage by "diehard Make America Great Again conservatives."

The Guardian reports.

The audience was angry that Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, would not take questions. The loud shouts of “USA! USA!” that greeted Trump when he first appeared on the stage of a university lecture hall to promote his book Triggered: How The Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us quickly morphed into even louder, openly hostile chants of “Q and A! Q and A!”...

When the shouting would not subside, Trump Jr tried – and failed – to argue that taking questions from the floor risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would abuse and distort. Nobody was buying that....

The fiasco pointed to a factional rift on the Trump-supporting conservative right that has been growing rapidly in recent weeks, particularly among “zoomers” – student-age activists....

Two [supporters of Nick Fuentes, a 21-year-old activist with a podcast called America First, said that] the pro-Trump movement was being infected with “fake conservatism” and that the president himself was at the mercy of a cabal of deep state operatives who wouldn’t let him do many of the things he campaigned on.... “We wanted to ask questions about immigration and about Christianity, but they didn’t want to face those questions.”

I'm creating a new tag, "Trump attacked from the right." I had a comparable tag for Obama, "Obama attacked from the left." We'll see where the hard-core right attack on Trump (and son) goes. The tag is here to collect the stories. It's very interesting that Trump Jr. went to UCLA with his book "Triggered," perhaps as some sort of demonstration of his own courage and to cause liberals to act triggered and prove his point. That's not what happened!

That's the story as told by The Guardian. The Washington Post has "Donald Trump Jr. went to UCLA to decry ‘triggered’ liberals. He was heckled offstage by the far right." If you get far enough into the WaPo article, there's an indication that the protesters were not against Trump Jr. but against Turning Point USA:

"Omar says the 'hope and change' offered by Barack Obama was a mirage."

"Recalling the 'caging of kids' at the U.S.-Mexico border and the 'droning of countries around the world' on Obama’s watch, she argues that the Democratic president operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as his Republican successor. 'We can’t be only upset with Trump. … His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was,' Omar says. 'And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.'"

From "The Democrats’ Dilemma/What Ilhan Omar and Dean Phillips tell us about the future of the Democratic Party" (Politico).

Obama tags on this blog that have collected a surprising number of posts.

You can see all my Obama tags below the fold. I'll just list some I particularly like for various reasons — odd specificity, surprising usefulness, whatever:

Obama the mood elevator (74)
Obama the boyfriend (58)
Obama and manliness (24)
Obama's psyche (68)
Obama is everywhere (15)
Obama and irony (14)
Obama and pop culture (87)
Obama the father (19)
Obama the teacher (28)
Obama and the fly (13) (Let's see Trump catch a fly with his bare hand.)
Obama eats dog (12)
Obama attacked from the left (11)
Obama gets mad (3)
Obama is bland ( 63)
Obama's tired (5)
Obama is like Bush (78)
Obama is like Carter (15)
Obama is like Nixon (35)
Obama is like Reagan (4)
Obama is like Sarah Palin (4)
Obama's umbrella (5)
Obama says something strange (1)

"Obama’s Catastrophic Climate-Change Denial."

A NYT op-ed.

Now, having watched the Arctic melt, does Shell take that experience and conclude that it’s in fact time to invest heavily in solar panels and wind turbines? No. Instead, it applies to be first in line to drill for yet more oil in the Chukchi Sea, between Alaska and Siberia...

And the White House gave Shell the license....

This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn’t real. This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground.

Cool eyes hallucinating at the constitutional lawprofs of war.

"Obama attacked from the left" is a tag of mine, and I'm applying it to this NYT op-ed by Yale conlawprof Bruce Ackerman: "Obama’s Betrayal of the Constitution." Dateline — ominously! — Berlin. Excerpt:

President Obama’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris....

That's a bold beginning, but it's actually weakened by seeming to open up a discussion of the need for a formal declaration of war, something that the United States hasn't had since WWII. But Ackerman proceeds to discuss the "authorization for the use of military force," which Congress gave to President Bush 3 days after the 9/11 attacks. That vote was practically unanimous.

Let me take a little detour of my own here. The "no" vote in 2001 was from Barbara Lee, who was called a "traitor" and a "communist" at the time, but whose words are strikingly prescient today.

Are educated, intelligent adults allowed to complain that they didn't get what Obama's smiling 2008 campaign persona made them feel they could get?

Ah, it's a free country. You can complain about anything you want, but you look foolish if you don't take responsibility for your own gullibility.

Thomas Frank interviews Cornel West:

Frank: I... remember... being impressed by Barack Obama who was running for president... I sometimes thought that he looked like he had what this country needed... That was a huge turning point, that moment in 2008, and my own feeling is that we didn’t turn.

West: No, the thing is he posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free. The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair.... 

Another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair? That's what I hoped I might get when I voted for Obama in 2008. He never assured us he'd be a left-winger, but some people — people who wanted that — projected their hope onto him, and of course, he invited everyone to see him as the embodiment of whatever it was they hoped for.

West: And we ended up with a brown-faced Clinton. 

That's crudely stated, and I wouldn't talk like that, but that's about exactly what I hoped for. A pragmatic centrist like Bill Clinton, and as a bonus, we get the first African American President. I didn't vote merely on that hope. It was also the case that John McCain lost me. It's always only a choice between 2 (or, rarely, 3) candidates. You can't get everything you want, and you can't know everything about what you are getting.

Happy birthday to Professor Irwin Corey. He's 100 years old today.

Here's video of him performing in 2011, when he was 97:



And the video below comes from way back in 2007, when the President of the United States was George Bush, and Professor Irwin Corey looked much more than 5 years younger. He criticizes the President in both videos, and perhaps the years weigh very heavily as you approach 100 — I'm saying "you," but do you really think you'll have the opportunity to feel the increasing weight of the years leading up to 100? — but perhaps for a true left-winger like Professor Irwin Corey, the experience of disappointment in Obama hurts far more than getting what you knew you were going to hate from George Bush.



From Wikipedia:

"All of us who do what Thomas Frank does — what I do — have failed. Our goal was to persuade the public to move in a liberal direction..."

"... and that didn't happen. In the end, we didn't persuade much of anyone. It's natural to want to avoid facing that humiliating truth, and equally natural to look for someone else to blame instead. That's human nature. So fine. Blame Obama if it makes you feel better. That's what we elect presidents for: to take the blame. But he only deserves his share. The rest of us, who were unable to take advantage of an epic financial collapse to get the public firmly in favor of pitchforks and universal health care, deserve most of it."

Writes Kevin Drum in Mother Jones (citing the same Thomas Frank article we were talking about here yesterday).

"Pitchforks" refers to Obama's claim to be "the only thing between you and the pitchforks." And "you" was investment bankers. Drum is saying the financial collapse was the opportunity for left-wingers to turn the American people into a pitchfork-waving mob, but they let that serious crisis go to waste (as they say).

Why a pitchfork? In pop culture, it's "standard equipment for any angry mob on a Witch Hunt."

The mob may be going after a witch, an evil wizard, a vampire, a Mad Scientist, a "perverted" person, or any other unpopular local figure. If the mob is after the villain, he most probably ends up being shamed by the mob. f they're coming after the good guys for one reason or another (like if our heroes are hiding a Reluctant Monster), their best defense is Shaming the Mob or an obstacle that will force them to go one by one, raising the question of Who Will Bell the Cat?

But Drum is pro-mob. He wants out-and-proud pitchforkery.



I'll take the cotton candy. And I won't let the opportunity of this post go to waste. This is my time to say that when I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I was not hoping for the United States to lurch way left. I was hoping for the very moderation that irks guys like Frank and Drum. Frank-n-Drum. Frankendrum!

On the topic of Obama's failure, Thomas "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Frank emits the purplest prose that ever...

...  included the word "shitty":

The task facing the makers of the Obama museum, however, will be pretty much exactly the opposite: how to document a time when America should have changed but didn’t. Its project will be to explain an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over—when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers miming “seriousness” for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both. It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in—and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless.

"It's not that I think everyone to 'the left' of me is a posing emo-prog and everyone to 'the right' of me is a posing o-bot."

Reading that, I see I need to catch up on lefty lingo.

I'm beginning to understand why that lefty blogger asked Axelrod if he knew the term "hippie punching"?

Tobin Harshaw reviews the incident in the NYT. He quotes me. You may remember that I said I'd never heard the term (and I've been something of a hippie since the original days of the hippie movement). The light bulb went off in my head when I scrolled down to the comments:

Hippy punch is frequently used on many blogs I read: Pandagon, Eschaton, Hullabaloo, to name just three. They've been using it since 2008, at least. They are among the more popular blogs on the left -- it shows that while the White House may have some sense that the so-called professional left is upset, they don't care enough to read what they are writing.

Ah! It's a shibboleth. This is a term used within an in-group. If you don't know the term, you reveal that you don't read those blogs. Here was Axelrod trying to get the lefty bloggers to help Obama out, but — gasp!!! — he doesn't even read their blogs. How devastating for them! LOL. Imagine if Axelrod sat around reading Pandagon, Eschaton, and Hullabaloo?

"I busted my chops getting them elected, and they caved. They're all lily-livered wimps, and Obama has the backbone of a worm."

The special pain of left-wing (erstwhile) Obama supporters. 

"The hope that the next justice will be a check on the power of corporations is entirely appropriate."

Writes Jeffrey Rosen:

After all, Stevens holds the seat that was previously occupied by William O. Douglas and Louis Brandeis, two of the leading anti-corporate crusaders of the twentieth century....

Anti-corporate crusaders? Sure, pick an anti-corporate crusader, Obama, and let's see how the back-and-forth in the Senate Judiciary Committee plays out. I mean, the nominee will still be confirmed, but in the rest of the political arena, leading up to the November elections? That would be brutal for the Democrats.

Yet none of the leading candidates for the Court appears to be an economic populist....

Why the absence of liberal economic populists from the shortlist?...

Since the 1960s, grassroots progressives have focused on non-economic issues: reproductive choice, for example, or civil liberties in an age of terrorism. That means that the current Supreme Court candidates had their legal sensibilities shaped in a political environment that was less preoccupied with questions of economic justice....

The Supreme Court itself stopped its own progressive forward glide when the opportunities for expanding constitutional rights arose in the context of redistribution of wealth (which is what Rosen and his ilk spin as "economic justice").

That’s a shame, because the most important issues the Roberts Court will confront over the next decade involve the constitutionality of environmental measures and economic regulations passed in the wake of the crash of 2008.... [I]t will not be enough for liberals simply to champion judicial deference for its own sake. The next justice will, like Brandeis and Douglas, need to make a substantive case for why these regulations are indispensable to protecting American democracy from the narrow interests of a corporate oligarchy....

If "environmental measures and economic regulations" are going to be passed, then why is anything more than deference to legislatures needed? Why should a Supreme Court Justice think he could bolster arguments for deference to democracy by expressing enthusiasm for the substance of the choices that legislatures have made?

The judicial role is strengthened by the appearance of neutrality and fidelity to law. Conversely, judges undercut their own power when they make it sound as though they are reaching their decisions because of their support for legislation that is challenged as a violation of constitutional rights. When arguments for constitutional rights fail, it should be (or at least appear to be) because the claimed rights don't exist, not because the rights claimants' interests are "narrow" and run counter to what the majority wants. Rights are supposed to work against the preference of the majority, so we should be wary of someone who says courts must "protect[] American democracy from... narrow interests." He is saying rights are not rights.

Although the next justice may not be an economic populist, the confirmation hearings ahead are an opportunity to cast the spotlight on the intersection between economic populism and the law. Leahy and other Senate Democrats should use the hearings to ask the nominee to discuss these questions in depth. 

Great! A bloodbath. Sounds exciting. I'll watch.

And the answer to the question When will Althouse defend Obama? is:

When liberals attack him.