Barack Obama’s Foundations: Where Are They Going? How Do They Go? Why Does He Want to Help the Democrats? And How Does He Seek to Help?
The Democrats are desperate for Barack Obama to help them in the upcoming elections, one in which control of the Congress and governments in the states will be up for grabs.
To these candidates, American democracy itself is on the line. And while Obama agrees with them on the stakes, many of those invitations are about to get turned down.
More than a dozen advisers and others who have spoken with Obama say the former president’s approach in the fall campaign will remain limited and careful. As Obama tells people his presence fires up GOP opposition just as much as it will light up supporters, that he has more of an impact if he does less, and that he can’t ruin the up-and-coming generation of Democrats, he’s cautioning them.
Obama’s small staff has instead been coordinating which appearances he’ll make and which ads he’ll record with President Joe Biden’s White House political operation and the Democratic National Committee. Political coordination between a sitting and former president is not something new, but it is very rare in the current politics.
Obama’s disdain for the current turn in the Republican Party is clear and his pitch is a more dispirited take on the hopeful pitch he used to make – that Democratic ideas are more popular and that the more people who vote, the better Democratic candidates will do.
He’ll make a handful of appearances on the campaign trail, bundling appearances for candidates for Senate and governor and secretaries of state, arguing that Democrats winning those races is essential to preserving democracy.
Even the limited amount of appearances Obama has continued to do – as he’s tried to get back to the kind of post-presidency he was hoping for before Trump’s election – demonstrate how worried he is about anti-democratic trends on the rise and progressives giving up hope.
The work of the foundation is not politics, but it will reflect Obama’s priorities, according to Ben Rhodes, an adviser who helped plan the Democracy Forum.
As a former president, Rhodes said, he might care about topics like health care, avoiding war, climate change, and who is in charge of countries. “He sees it as the thread that connects everything he’s doing.”
Since leaving the White House, Obama has put out mass campaign endorsements for state legislator candidates. The decision to stop those lists is a function, people who’ve been working with him say, of stepping back from the extended leadership role he played in the Democratic Party during the Trump years – a role they say he never wanted.
Obama continues to occupy a unique place in politics: A former President who really wants to leave politics behind but whose popularity is growing; a man already six years out of office who is still more than a decade younger than Biden and other top Democratic leaders – not to mention Donald Trump, the man who succeeded him and appears set to run again in 2024.
“I’m not sure I can think of him as an elder,” said Rep. Mike Levin, who was one of six first-time House candidates in California with whom Obama did a joint event for in 2018. All six went on to win. Levin in an interview last week was still talking about the 2008 race almost as if it just happened.
Much of Obama’s focus has been the multi-million-dollar deals continuing his transformation from president to brand. If his company is included, he can become an EGOT if he won the National Parks documentary for the Emmy last month.
Some Democrats make fun of his various ventures as “Obama, Inc.” Adding to the already large book published in 2020 that stopped chronologically at the killing of Osama bin Laden during his first term, as well as shifting his audiobook deal from Spotify toAudible and expanding his productions under the on-demand streaming service, is a few of the things he intends to do.
The early construction of his library has moved from Powerpoint demonstrations for donors to actual beams and columns on the South side of Chicago, he is still courting multimillion dollar donors to fund it.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/10/politics/barack-obama-midterms/index.html
Barack Obama at the White House: When the world turns to black people, not white men: a conversation that Obama had with Schumer, Schultz, and Robinson
One person stands in the ring with us as we look to advance our values. The other guy is a celebrity,” said one high level Democratic operative. If you love politics, you would like to be with the person in the arena.
While avoiding the daily frenzy, Obama has cultivated alliances with foreign leaders such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Gabriel Boric, and British opposition leader Keir Starmer.
“This idea that he should be the guy to sway people’s minds is just silly. That is not his role. Does he speak inspirationally? A friend of the Obama said yes. “But he’s a pragmatist.”
Eric Schultz was one of the senior advisers who worked with Obama while he was in the White House, and said if he had not recognized what was happening across the globe, he could not have convened a summit on democracy in the US.
As much as Obama likes to insist that he’s ready to start playing a more background part, he consulted with both Biden and Schumer about the failed attempt to push through a bill on voting rights. He was backing the idea of narrowing the bill to only be climate change provisions, which was needed to get West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin’s support.
He made a series of calls to tech wizards and advocates in order to build up a speech he gave atSTANFORD, in which he urged the elites and intellectuals to get involved with what he described as essentially unregulated social media companies.
The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times executive editor, and the Columbia University School of Journalism dean were some of the Black journalists that he gathered a few weeks later.
“He was in a space of how he could be helpful, how he could help to move things along from the seat he is in currently,” said Rashad Robinson, the president of the advocacy group Color of Change, who also attended the meeting.
Obama’s staff keeps in touch with the political staff of Biden at the White House, and is looking into opportunities to speak on the President’s behalf. He followed up his praise for Biden with a strong statement of support.
In August, Obama called to congratulate the President after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, and it was still an important stamp of approval.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/10/politics/barack-obama-midterms/index.html
Michelle Obama, the next seven years: The road to democracy is our reality for the next five years… Saying goodbye to the past, but sticking with the future
Attendees at a rare Obama fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in San Francisco saw a man in his new element: Tieless, in a large chair in the home of a co-founder of Qualcomm, delivering long answers to a room full of tech billionaires on a handheld microphone as he fielded set-up questions lobbed at him by Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson.
They were struck by the intensity of his attacks on Republicans. They also noticed how he was reflecting on moments from his own presidency, such as when he urged Republicans to block Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court and remarked how he said they didn’t care.
Michelle Obama will be hitting the road herself, but her limited six-city tour won’t start until after Election Day. She will be starring with celebrities and promoting her new book, instead of campaigning.
Her last campaign appearance was a recorded speech played at the virtual 2020 Democratic convention. She told friends at the time that she felt too dejected about the state of the country – between Trump, the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial divisions that were freshly exposed that summer – to bring herself to campaign more than that.
At their portrait unveilings at the White House last month, she delivered what she said she knew was a “spicy speech” about the peaceful transfer of power. She won’t be going back on the trail again, despite the many campaigns that believe her power is incomparable to connecting with Black women who have helped Democrats win election after election.
The Obamas are sticking with a rhythm that developed in the previous cycle and that is that he will do the direct campaigning while she will be the leader of her officially non-partisan, multi celebrity, co-chaired registration and turnout effort non-profit.
The influence of Martin Luther King, the inspiration of the quotation, has kept Obama interested more in the future than in the past.
“To find the American democracy being tested itself by different phases and episodes over the last five years,” Siziva told CNN, “makes me understand that – for democratic crusaders globally – the fight for democracy is our reality.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/10/politics/barack-obama-midterms/index.html
Babauta, the founder of the Mariana Islands, is a young leader: What do you do when you don’t want to talk about climate change?
A reflection of the type of young people who have been brought in is that when she was introduced to Obama by Babauta at the international climate conference, she was already part of the march outside demanding more. After Obama’s speech in Glasgow, other activists were already waiting to speak to him in a small chat.
These moments are like electric cars going to a charging station. One of the inaugural Obama scholars and a delegate to last year’s climate convention said it fills his battery and gets him going.
Babauta, a local legislator in her native Northern Mariana Islands, said her own association with the former president as a foundation young leader has filtered down to the children at a youth center on the island of Saipan where she works. The kids asked if we are best friends after seeing a picture of us together.
Obama is often the moderator but sometimes pipes in with advice, like when he met with European leaders in a closed-door session at his democracy speech in Copenhagen during which he pushed back on a question about how to handle opposition.
“Sometimes it just turns out they’re mean, they’re racist, they’re sexist, they’re angry. CNN obtained a transcript of Obama telling them to beat them because they weren’t persuadable.
But he warned them also: “Sometimes we get filled up in our own self-righteousness. We are so sure of what we are right that we forget.
The Iowa Voting Circus: David Axelrod during the 2008 and 2012 Obama Presidential Campaigns During the 2008/2012 Presidential Caucuses
Editor’s Note: David Axelrod, a senior CNN political commentator and host of “The Axe Files,” was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama and chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns. His opinions are his, and they’re not in this commentary. View more opinion on CNN.
Mention politics in mixed company these days, and the word often evokes discomfort, averted eyes and nervous asides meant to steer the conversation to safer shores. Many families avoid the subject at holiday gatherings to prevent unpleasantness between relatives of differing views from ruining the occasion.
The methods by which many politicians raise money and support their causes are part of the public discourse, along with social media platforms that keep consumers online for advertisers.
Our national credo, “e pluribus unum” — a Latin phrase meaning “out of many, one” — seems mockingly out of step, when divide-and-conquer politics and media algorithms have helped turn state against state, neighbor against neighbor, and lowered our expectations for what we can achieve together.
The caucuses were the culmination of a year of earnest conversations between Obama and Iowans in their homes, schools and businesses and other gathering places. These conversations were amplified by young staffers and thousands of volunteers, many of whom took leave of their homes and jobs and embedded themselves in Iowa to help bring change and progress to the country. The bonds between these organizers and their local residents were so tight that a young staffer for the Obama campaign was asked by residents in a small town in Iowa to run for the local council after the caucuses.
As a decided long shot, he began his campaign by sending a message of unity and reconciliation in a country that was deeply divided over the war in Iraq.
Iowans showed up for candidate meetings and helped the candidates in their pace. Understanding the importance of Iowa as host to the first-in-the nation nominating contest, many of its citizens would wind up having multiple conversations with the candidates before committing to support one in the caucuses. They were non-starters. If prospective presidents want a caucus commitment, they have better be prepared to have serious conversations.
Iowa also rightsized candidates. Once, while we were traveling, Obama was asked to call a high school student leader in Iowa, where young people who would turn 18 by Election Day could participate in the caucuses.
I wanted Susan and my son to join me in the hall where Obama was speaking after the caucuses were over. I wanted to share the moment with my family because I was confident that we were going to win. She said she wanted to stay in case there were late calls.
During the holidays in 2007, there was a runup to the caucuses. A bunch of volunteers flooded in as Obama barnstormed the snow state to find last-minute support for his campaign before caucus day.
The headquarters of the campaign was filled with people and energy and had a sense of mission. My wife, Susan, and our youngest son were among the volunteers working the main hotline in an adjoining, unheated annex, cheerfully bundled up against the cold.
The results were clear when Susan arrived at the hall. I stabbed her through the crowd. We hugged and we cried. It remains one the most sublime moments I have ever experienced in a lifetime of politics. Obama took the stage, and his speech beautifully captured the meaning of the journey.
They said that this day wouldn’t come. They said that our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.
More important, the possibility for national reconciliation Iowa signaled that night may seem to many like a faded dream, given the extreme polarization and acrid, reactionary politics that we have seen since then.