Post
by atanamis » Tue Jan 17, 2017 12:34 pm
Speaker, love the data on the dominance of the state and federal legislative levels over the last 80 years. As Kath mentioned, it will take more time to determine if this is just another short flip like during the Bush administration, or if this holds. I kind of feel like over the last 20 years the population has become increasingly disgusted with both parties though, and that we can expect the power to flip flop back and forth until someone commits to a platform that resonates. I would be quite surprised if the Democrats don't take back the house in two years, for example. It would require the Republicans to actually generate some excitement. What we are seeing in Trump is a lot more like the "hope and change" rhetoric of Obama, in that it has made a lot of people excited but will not have any legs if it doesn't show some actual results.
Fife, I would agree that the challenges Obama had as a unifier are a big deal. It might not have been his fault (there were a lot of political and yes even racial incentives for people to just stonewall him), but to achieve the promise of his platform that is what he needed to achieve. And with the legislature as poisonous as it is right now, the only way a President can do this would be to go straight to the people. That's what many hoped Obama could do. As a community organizer and admired communicator, people had hoped he could take his message to the people and enact change. That never really happened.
He can deliver a great speech, but from his early days in office it became clear that he just wasn't able to unify the masses in the way that his strongest supporters had claimed he would be able to do. I have a lot of complaints about how Obama actually operated as President, but he does seem to be a decent person and it would have been great had he been able to help us come together to talk about common goals for our nation and our government and change the rhetoric for how we pursue them. His inability to do so is regrettable. I do think he made efforts, but those efforts as often as not fell flat or even made things worse.
