The Clintons, infuriated by the raft of Democrats who deserted them during the 2008 campaign, sneered at Obama’s hope and change message. Hillary protested, “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country.” Bill groused, “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”
.. But in this election, Bernie Sanders’s idealistic young people were cast as unrealistic dreamers who wanted free stuff or, according to Gloria Steinem, dates.
.. The same Obama who sparked a revolution has now made it his mission to preserve the establishment for Hillary. He told Rutgers’s school paper in May that Sanders supporters needed to stop searching for silver bullets and recognize “we have to make incremental changes where we can, and every once in a while you’ll get a breakthrough and make the kind of big changes that are necessary.”
.. Yes we can — incrementally!
.. Showing his icy pragmatism, the president passed over his loyal vice president because he thought Joe Biden would not be as strong a candidate, given his tendency for gab and gaffes. (That was before Donald Trump made Biden seem exquisitely bridled.) When Biden didn’t take the hint, Obama sent his former strategist David Plouffe to break the bad news.
.. Emanuel, who was hosting a party at the convention that night, was rightfully upset. It was his job to warn the president of the political consequences, and after Obama decided, it was Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi who had to arm-twist the bill through with no Republican votes.
Israel and U.S. are close to a deal on the biggest military aid package ever
According to U.S. and Israeli analysts familiar with the negotiations, the Obama administration is insisting on phasing out a special arrangement that has allowed Israel to spend 26 percent of U.S. aid on its own defense research, development and procurement.
..With Israel’s defense industry now thriving, the administration wants to pare that back and require that more U.S. aid go to American companies providing goods and services.
The possibility that Israeli defense companies could lose hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts is already causing controversy. Critics say they fear it could impair Israel’s ability to maintain equipment that is the most advanced in the region, known as its qualitative military edge.
.. “Though he has been a strong supporter of Israeli security throughout his term, there’s clearly a difficult relationship between Netanyahu and Obama,” said Ilan Goldenberg, director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. “For them to agree on this would send a signal to the world that although their personal relationship is not great, here Obama is making a down payment on 10 years of deep U.S.-Israeli security cooperation. That’s a powerful message.”
.. Makovsky also cited the “unpredictability factor” of Donald Trump as a potential successor to Obama.
How the white working class lost its patriotism
but I did know that Breathitt allegedly earned its name because the county filled its World War I draft quota entirely with volunteers — the only county in the entire United States to do so.
.. Mamaw always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.
.. The factories that took to the hollows of Kentucky and West Virginia to recruit my grandparents’ generation refused to hire mine, or closed down altogether.
.. Polls suggested that, unique among all subpopulations in the country, the white working class expected its children to live less prosperous lives.
.. But most of the people I know dislike Obama for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. They think of him as an alien because, compared to them, he is.
.. At my high school, ranked for a time in the bottom 10 percent of public schools in the state, none of my classmates attended an Ivy League college. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy and speaks like the law professor that he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent — clean, perfect, neutral — sounds almost foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening;
.. Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities: He is a good father while many of us struggle to pay our child support. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.
Obama’s Death Sentence for Young Refugees
In effect, we have pressured and bribed Mexico to do our dirty work, detaining and deporting people fleeing gangs in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. This solved a political crisis that Obama faced with refugees in 2014, but it betrays some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
The American-Mexican collusion began in 2014 after a surge of Central Americans crossed into the U.S., including 50,000 unaccompanied children. Obama spoke with Peña Nieto “to develop concrete proposals” to address the flow. This turned out to be a plan to intercept Central Americans near Mexico’s southern border and send them home.
.. So what should the U.S. do? Most important, it must work at the highest levels with Honduras and El Salvador to address the chaos in those countries, particularly because the U.S. bears some responsibility for the problems: The Central American street gangs were born in the United States and traveled with deportees to countries like El Salvador.