Political reporter Astead Herndon appeared on Thursday’s New York Times front page with “Obama Uplifted Them. Now They Want to Fight – Ex-President’s Idealism Tests Supporters in a Time of Hard Hits.” The text box: “Some Democrats say their party needs to fight fire with fire.”
As if the Democrats under Obama ever occupied some kind of moral high ground in their political tactics (harassing politicians trying to eat in public, screaming at Republicans while protesting in the halls of Congress). Yet judging by the paper’s coverage of #MeToo, The Times clearly thinks they are).
This is the same president who urged his supporters, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” and “I want you to argue with them and get in their face,” and who criticized the Supreme Court justices as they sat before him during the 2010 State of the Union address.
Is Astead making an affectionate pun on Obama’s catch-phrase, “Let me be clear,” in his lead:
John Toles-Bey wants to be clear: He loves Barack Obama.
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But even as Mr. Toles-Bey waited outside one of Mr. Obama’s recent rallies, he wondered aloud if his political hero’s signature idealism had a place in today’s flame-throwing political climate.
“It’s a different world we’re living in,” Mr. Toles-Bey said. “And we need something different.”
As Mr. Obama has crisscrossed the country in support of Democratic candidates, nerves are rattling among some members of the coalition that fueled his historic rise from backbencher in the Illinois Statehouse to America’s first black president. A week of domestic terrorism has shocked the political system ahead of the 2018 elections. And while Mr. Obama’s speeches this election cycle have largely stuck with his trademark themes of idealism and hope, some of his supporters wonder if they’re witnessing a living time capsule from a bygone era of civil political rhetoric.
To be fair, the article actually wasn’t as affirming of Obama as the headlines, but that was just because it was wondering if the former President’s supposed idealism was out of step with the more radical tactics of current left-wing activism.
This part was scary – “constitutionalism” is a dirty word on the left:
“There has to be a reframing of how we go about making change,” said LaTosha Brown, an organizer and co-founder of Black Voters Matter. She said that although she respected Mr. Obama, particularly because he was a former community organizer, she had come to see him as a “constitutionalist” in a political era that requires more radical action.
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This year alone, some prospective contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination have raised eyebrows for their willingness to take anti-Trump rhetoric to new levels. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said he would “beat the hell” out of Mr. Trump in a fight (he later apologized), and Michael Avenatti, a lawyer who has repeatedly clashed with Mr. Trump, challenged a member of the president’s family to a physical altercation.
Eric Holder, the former attorney general who served under Mr. Obama and is eyeing a run for president, caught the ire of Mr. Obama’s network when he took a more dark spin on the famous Michelle Obama line, “When they go low, we go high.”
“When they go low, we kick them,” Mr. Holder said in Georgia this month. “That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.”
This line seems overstated:
Mr. Obama’s speeches are littered with appeals to conservatives, and in Milwaukee he oscillated between indicting the modern Republican Party and appealing to those he called “compassionate conservatives” interested in building a coalition.
But the next generation of Democrats may forgo such wavering in favor of a more uncompromising tone.
In the last week, amid an eruption of political violence, two members of that new group of progressive Democrats stood out for their forceful language: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
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Mr. Obama did not publicly respond to Mr. Holder’s comments, but repeatedly in his speeches this summer, the former president has made an impassioned plea for his brand of politics: hopeful, civil and driven by incremental progress.
Astead wrote a similar front-page story on Obama for the Boston Globe in January of this year, which can be summed up by the print headline (“Gone But Still Growing On Us”) and the online headline (“Trump is making Obama great again”).
