Presidential historians agree the Obama Administration was necessarily focused on fixing the heartbreaking, recession-making mistakes of Bill Clinton’s domestic policies and, secondarily, dealing with George W. Bush’s brain-breaking stumble into the religious wars of the Middle East. They agree that Obama had important success with the first and mediocre results with the second.
They also agree he was uninterested in the affairs and management of his political party and was oblivious to the fate and futures of political colleagues and supporters within that party. He rarely campaigned on their behalf and was utterly bored with party fundraising and party infrastructure.
His detachment from party politics was generational and a matter of social class. His party was and is controlled by incipient octogenarians determined to save the world – after lunch, meds, and a nap. Photographs of his rare meetings with party leaders show a distracted teenager visiting grandma in a nursing home.
Class is the other matter. Nationalists, racists, and Know Nothings describe Barack Obama as an inner-city radical, but his time spent as a “community organizer” is hardly a footnote in a successful and upwardly mobile career. The facts are he’s the offspring of a State of Kansas Flower Child and a loving grandmother who was a banker with a home in Hawaii. He graduated from the Ivy League and married a lawyer who earned $275,000 a year. The only radical thing about Obama is by how much he underestimated the existential despair of Americans who feel left behind. Detachment is a class issue, sometimes misidentified as “elitism” by Republican strategists.
There isn’t anything Democrats can do about voters who think elitism is speaking in complete sentences and telling the truth, or that replacing the swamp with a cesspool will somehow improve their fortunes. But they can win new and undecided voters who understand that expanding and improving free lunch programs in schools, while important, isn’t the same thing as helping working parents get paid enough to buy their kids school lunches.
Since 1978 real wages have gone up 10.5% while medical costs are up 610% and college costs 1,100%. Fair wages aren’t “progressive” politics. They’re just fair.