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Comment by bobxmax | Hacker News Reader

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That's naive and you know it. A massive drive for him was electing the first black president. A less, but still not-insignificant drive was for Hillary as the first female president.

Thats your opinion, Obama could have been white, and he still would have been voted for by 99.9% of those who voted for him. Young Kennedy-like candidates are rare (eg Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) but are incredibly electable when they show up.

Towards the end of his presidency, most of us forgot he was even black. Just those white southerners and a certain old guy in New York who were fixated on his race from the beginning still thought he was a DEI elect.

There were hit songs about what a big moment it is that he was black. At least among minorities that was a massive deal. If you didn't see that, I think you're probably closer to those white southerners than you might think you are.

Can you imagine if mainstream entertainers made songs celebrating having a white president?

Given that all of them but one are white, what the point that would be? Songs are not because Obama is black, but because he was the first black on the role.

So you are opposed to fixating on people's race and yet there you are singling out white southerners. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

It's important not to start wars first. Good arguments would also help.

They self-selected. Loudly.

Most people forgot Obama was black except them, they are also the ones constantly accusing Obama of being racially divisive, they should just own what they say. This is kind of like Trump calling people names but then being greatly offended when someone calls him a name, right?

I’d be shocked if Hilary had a net benefit being a female candidate. We’ve had 2 chances to elect a female president and they both lost the general election with not that great turnout.

John McCain’s VP was female during 08 and he lost by a huge margin.

Hillary and Kamala got boosts from being a woman. They just had a massive drop because of, especially in Hillary's case, being deeply unlikeable.

Kamala probably wins in 2016.

> Hillary and Clinton got boosts

It’s Hillary and Kamala Harris.

I’m not saying they don’t get some voters from being women, the point is they also lost votes from being women.

I think a rotting corps might have won in 2016, but 4 years later vs a women and suddenly he’s doing great.

Kamala lost because of Biden, who somehow was even less likeable than Hillary by the end.

In a way yes. Kamala lost because she was the ultimate DEI candidate (in how own words that the only reason he picked her to be VP). Regardless of her personal skills or qualities it’s very hard to move past that..

Had she had a chance to prove that she could win a primary things might have been different

Biden fucked up in many ways, but he also got a lot of flack from bad timing and poor messaging. It’s easy to say COVID hurt Trump in 20 and Kamala in 24, but I think the details mattered.

The inflation rate fell significantly under his presidency, but during periods of high inflation prices soared. Coming back from that after generations of extremely low inflation would have been tough for someone without failing facilities. I think a great politician could have weathered that storm, Biden wasn’t up to the task and Kamala’s messaging didn’t help.

Republicans getting out ahead on that inflation messaging similarly did wonders for Trump and other Republicans. Planting the idea that America somehow didn’t do well when we did far better than the rest of the world was brilliantly executed IMO.

> coming back from that after generations of extremely low inflation would have been tough for someone without failing facilities

But facing off against someone who was never particularly sharp or articulate. I think it evened the playing field.

Yes... Biden's presidency objectively wasn't bad, but the way it was messaged and the optics he gave off were just impossible to recover from.

Kamala probably wins in 2016? I mean this in a very nice way but I think you may want research the politics and candidates in the US a little more before bold statements such as that. Kamala was unable to even register on a scale in the primary and what noise she did make was to play a false game on which she essentially accused Biden of being racist filth. I think it is not just that she had no qualifications for office, we could argue about what constitutes a qualification for a long time, but she had no reasoning or theory of why she would even be someone yo run for office. She tablet in such incomprehensible ways that one could not even discern a point from her utterances. You may say the current president rambles but she think the point is always present. Kamala on her best days just spoke in long winded tautologies: “we are always doing each day the things we do every day” or whenever nonsense she chose to present to the public. Further, he main qualification to place herself as one of the poor people was to constantly talk about being a “middle class kid.” The problem is in her generation, the middle class did quite well for themselves so it was such a false premise. Let’s not discuss the accents.

It did help her to get on the ballot quite a bit. Of course it had the opposite effect in the general election.

That was not at all the main reason Obama got elected. He was charismatic, likable and promised hope and change. Why is it that the people who don't want identity politics to be a focus make it a focus?

52.9% vs 45.7% of the electoral vote doesn’t come down to race here.

Obama was vastly more charismatic and coming after for years of an unpopular Republican president, 28% on election night. https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ra...

Not that idiot was enough to resonate with voters.

Obama 2012: "There are no red states or blue states, just the United States."

You may dismiss that as just words, but the modern right does not even attempt to speak in those terms.

Does the modern left?

What about the Harris-Walz campaign? There was no identity politics, it was a message of national unity and civic nationalism.

Biden's inaugural address was full of this

"To all those who supported our campaign, I'm humbled by the faith you've placed in us. To all of those who did not support us, let me say this. Hear me out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart. If you still disagree, so be it. That's democracy. That's America. The right to dissent peaceably. Within the guardrails of our republic, it's perhaps this nation's greatest strength. Yet hear me clearly: disagreement must not lead to disunion. And I pledge this to you, I will be a president for all Americans, all Americans. And I promise you, I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did."

Fair enough.

Obama taught constitutional law and served in the state and US Senate before running for president. He was [not] some unqualified hack thrust into power because they needed a person of a different race in power.

Obama's campaign was far less about race than Trump's campaigns in 2016 and 2024. Unless you can't hear the dog whistles.

Can you clarify what Trump's 2016 had to do with race

This is the part where you feign not hearing dogwhistles. How about this, are you aware of any openly racist organizations that support him?

The resentment of a chunk of white Americans who for some reason did not like having a black president.

You can't claim that while claiming wanting to elect a black president wasn't a big driver in much of the turnout for Obama. There were multiple musicians literally making songs about finally being able to elect a black president.

Trump's initial popularity was due in no small part to the anger of American white supremacists and the alt-right, this was well documented even back in 2016[0,3]. That the President elected after Obama was the man who mainstreamed the birther conspiracies against Obama was not a coincidence. It wasn't entirely about Obama, but he was the straw that broke white America's back.

[0]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/donald-...

[1]https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/donald-trump...

[2]https://archive.is/tZpFB

This wasn't because of racism. This belief is why the left keeps losing to him... a total misunderstanding of what brought him into power.

Some of the earliest figureheads of the so-called "alt right" movement were homosexuals and racial minorities

Trump's win was a revolt against the social justice age. His win was a revolt against emergent phenomenon like "cancel culture".

> Trump's win was a revolt against the social justice age.

So, it wasn't bigotry it was just a reaction against the rejection of bigotry?

The social justice age wasn't a rejection of bigotry. It was a Mccarthy-esque movement of dividing everybody between sexual and racial lines into a hierarchy of who was and wasn't allowed to speak. Speaking against the party line meant exile.

The SJW/Wokeism movement had nothing to do with true equity and "rejection of bigotry". That's why there was such a revolt against it.

> Speaking against the party line meant exile.

But that has got worse, not better.

Trump is threatening to cancel contracts with Musk and to Munich him if he funds opposition.

That’s the bluntest example of ‘cancel culture’ you’ll find.

Also: Musk and Trump deserve each other.

Of course, I didn't claim that the republicans aren't now doing everything they claimed to revolt against but worse. As it turns out "free speech" absolutism only applies to things that pwn the libz.

I call b*t. The reality is that the there is a outrage campaign in the right wing media trying to drive anger about some perceived victimhood in people who have largely been privaledged all their life. They would have found something else instead.

Obama was genuinely qualified to be president. Trump was clearly unfit in 2016 (having never held elected office and run nearly all his businesses into the ground), and constitutionally disqualified after Jan 6 2021.

Trump was also reluctant to denounce or criticize white nationalists. He repeated and reposted neo-Nazi content and phrases. He is the one ordering a zealous yet haphazard dismantling of anything that breathes the words racial equity, and without a hint of pushback from his voters.

That's your opinion though. Obviously lots of people disagree.

Read the Wiki on his 2016 campaign. Or pretty much anything he said on race prior to the campaign.

That he attracted votes from anyone without white skin is amazing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump

Don't just send me a random dump wiki dump. Give me actual racist things he said in 2016.

It's not racist to push baseless claims the opposition who is black was born in Africa and not qualified to run for office ?

How else would you define racism if not across xenophobic lines by the color of ones skin ?

Obama was not his opposition, and that was not his campaign.

So when Trump admitted on Howard Stern that he likes to walk in on naked teenage girls because his role of running the teen universe beauty pageant allows him to get away with that, that is ok because he wasn't running a campaign at the time?

Jump to 1:38 https://youtu.be/kikTv0I8XVw?si=VVfSpMDt7rKEIcRJ

What the heck are you talking about?

I’m sorry that the volume of racist statements he has made means that you have to scroll down. The below link should take you straight there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump#2...

So you can't give me a single racist statement he made.

For the risk of feeding a troll:

>There are places in America that are among the most dangerous in the world. You go to places like Oakland. Or Ferguson. The crime numbers are worse. Seriously," and retweeted a false claim that 81% of white murder victims were killed by black people.

> "We've just seen many, many crimes getting worse all the time, and as Maine knows—a major destination for Somali refugees—right, am I right?"

Just 2 of them.

How are either of those sentences "racist"?

Yes, both parties do it. In California for example left-wing politics is openly racist and I have sympathy for even the crazy republicans here.

However to defend Obama - he explictly ran on unity and went out of his away to not openly benefit his own race.

Yeah I mean to be clear, I think Obama was a remarkable leader and it's hard to believe he once occupied the same seat DJT does today

He didn't explicitly use his race (the way Hillary often used her gender), but many who campaigned for him and large parts of his caucuses did. For better or for worse.

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