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Notes -
Yeah, that explains his current behavior. Racking up the money and starting your own (uninspired) multimedia brand seem like other things people should just naturally do to leverage their win now (see also the Sussexes).
It also explains why some of that stuff feels so uninspired. The Obamas could have set up a media organization that was absolutely politically worthless but still did things like say...tell stories of some random working class person in Iowa or a particularly effective community organizer in Chicago. Instead, looking at Michelle's podcast's guest list, it's basically the same people you'd expect them to talk to
Because they're winners so they should hang with the other winners.
The article is all character analysis, but it kind of loses me when it frames so much of his geopolitics as due to him being a product or "revenge" of the periphery of the empire (even if framing Obama more generally as a cosmopolitan that isn't from anywhere resonates).
It blames his Iran and Cuba policy specifically on this but could it also be that...his side of the political aisle has always had people more ambivalent on Cuba especially?
Criticism of the US' Iran policy is nothing new. It is not even just concentrated on the Left; realists like Walt and such have been complaining about it for years (on the grounds that it failed and the main beneficiary was Israel)
Speaking of Israel:
How does this theory explain the drama inside the Women's March between the black and Jewish leaders. What about the general issue of antisemitism with prominent black performers going from Kanye and Nick Cannon today to Ice Cube in the past? What about the long links between black activists and entertainers and a clear antisemite like Farrakhan?
What about the very antisemitic story the article adduces to show Obama to be a bloodless and self-serving politician? Cokely - the black man spreading blood libel - was not a "nowhere" like Obama. Moreover, if we're going to frame Obama as a self-serving actor in refusing to denounce him, whose support was he afraid to lose? Is Chicago politics dominated by half-Kenyans?
To say nothing of the general left-wing criticism of Israel...Younger, more diverse party. Maybe the party grandees just can't keep it in check anymore? This seems to be true of a few things (do we blame the GOP's anti-trade turn on Drumpf's foreignness?)
It seems incredibly self-serving to otherize Obama first and then blame his entire (anti-Israel, at least how they see it) foreign policy agenda on his non-ADOS otherness and this sort of general seething the periphery has about some of these things . Conveniently ignores the fault lines within the US and basically blames it all on foreign troublemakers. "Real Americans wouldn't do this, it's just the rootless cosmopolitans who hate Jews that would..."
The US hasn't integrated foreign and repugnant things before? Like ,for example, an absolutist monarchy and gender apartheid regime? I wonder what the difference is between that country and Iran...
It seems to me they have absolute contempt for the Iran deal which is fine, but there doesn't seem to be even an attempt to describe why anyone like Obama might do it besides his general delusions of grandeur and desire for a legacy and basically mixed loyalties (ironic, when complaining about antisemitism).
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