Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani blamed Barack Obama — the nation's first Black president — for a deterioration of race relations in the United States.
On his Sunday radio program, Giuliani called Democrats "the party of slavery."
"These miserable anti-American leaders of the party of slave...
Yeah, Obama was really popular on the international stage. But domestically, he was milquetoast at best. Still better than Biden by miles, but he was 100% a centrist who ran as a liberal. Hell, on the international stage, he was considered conservative. Because the USA’s political spectrum had always leaned pretty far right, so a moderate conservative seems liberal by comparison.
The issue is that the republicans adopted a party policy of “we don’t care what it is. If Obama wants it, we’ll oppose it.” Not because they were against whatever Obama’s policy was, but because they had spent so long vilifying him to their voter base. It was suddenly political suicide for a Republican to agree with Obama. After all, they had been telling their voters that Obama was a Muslim, a terrorist, a satanist, a communist, a socialist, unamerican, coming for your guns, and any other insults they could think up.
So when Obama won the election, they suddenly had to vehemently oppose a man who was… Slightly right of center? This meant the pendulum had to swing way past the moderate right and landed squarely in fascist territory.
If Obama had actually been any of the things they accused him of, they probably would’ve been more moderate when opposing him. But since he was a centrist, they suddenly had to pander to the racists, the misogynists, the xenophobes. Those groups had always been conservative… But Obama was the first time in a long time that conservatives started saying the quiet part out loud, and pandering directly to those groups.
To summarize:
Obama pushed back race relations 40 or 50 years… because Republicans couldn’t handle him doing well.
Captures Obama really well, I think he is the best the Democrats can offer in the current political era, the ideal person to carry the brand of the center-right neoliberal ideology of the party. I posted Adolph Reed Jr’s take on him from 1996 in the comments which basically echoes this sentiment as well.
One thing that captures this is that America on the world stage basically is what it is, even someone like Obama, who was known to frequent pro-Palestinian talks and events, had to be pro-Israel in his role.