Obama’s Critique of Sanders--at commencement address to Howard University

[riversedge]

Obama’s Critique of Sanders


***Also link to the video and Full text:


http://www.c-span.org/video/?409107-1/president-obama-delivers-commencement-address-howard-university


http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/7/1524279/-Obama-s-Critique-of-Sanders


By Petey2

Saturday May 07, 2016 · 3:05 PM CST


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President Obama's commencement address to Howard University



President Obama’s commencement speech today at Howard University firmly and repeatedly challenged the central message of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. (C-Span link offers video and full text.)

The president was not attacking Sanders’ ideology of fairness. But he was clearly separating himself from Sanders’ dogmatic insistence on revolutionary transformation.

If you want to make life fair, then you have to start with the world as it is.

The balance between idealism and pragmatism was clearly at the forefront of the president’s mind.

Democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100% right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right and you still have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral security, but you will not get what you want.

This is one reason there has been somewhat of a class divide between Bernie and Hillary supporters. The “moral security” Obama refers to is an emotional and intellectual luxury if it doesn’t contribute to substantive change.

I’ve heard Bernie supporters say their movement should be the left-wing equivalent of the Tea Party — a curious sentiment, considering how much karma the GOP is currently paying off thanks to years of the Tea Party’s impassioned “moral security.”

All too often, righteous passion leads to angry cynicism, because progress never matches one’s righteous vision. Here, the president parrots Bernie’s language directly:

If you do not get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. That will lead to more cynicism, not participation — and less participation and a downward spiral of more injustice, anger and despair. And that has never been a source of progress. That is how we cheat ourselves of progress.

The president is tapping into one of Hillary’s main responses to Bernie. It’s not enough to provide critiques of “the rigged system,” you need a strategy to actually get things done.

We need, said the president, “Not just awareness, but action.”

You have to go through life with more than just passion for change. You need a strategy. I will repeat that. You have to have a strategy. Not just awareness but action. Not just hashtags but votes. You see, change requires more than talking, it requires a program and organizing.

But, the president reminds the young graduates, shifting from righteous idealism to pragmatic action requires patience — as well as an acceptance of incrementalism.

To shape our collective future [we need to] bend it in the direction of justice, freedom and equality.

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[doc03]

1. Now there you go a person that thinks. You can't change everything overnight.

In 2008 Obama supporters thought we elect him and he will change everything all by himself. Then it came to the
off year elections and since he didn't get everything they wanted they sit at home and don't vote. Now look at the results we have a Congress totally ruled by Republicans. We have all of these states with Republican led governments. The SCOTUS is hanging on by a thread and if Trump wins we will have a right wing court for decades. What makes people think it would be any different with Sanders as president? You elect Sanders maybe you may gain back the Senate, but the Republicans still has the House and nothing gets done. Then we have the same thing all over again people that supported him don't vote because he didn't the results he promised. Result we have a country angry at the dysfunctional government all over again.

[Larkspur]

2. Then in Obama's view the American Revolution should never have happend and slavery should still

be our economic model.

This is typical ideology of the powerful, who enjoy the status quo, while they look down upon the "peasants" who suffer.

Frederick Douglas said, "The powerful will not give up power without a fight, never have, never will."
Sounds like Obama would have rebuked famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass too.

[jane123]

3. It is quite a stretch to take these quotes and somehow twist them

against Senator Sanders...you clearly haven't been listening to a word Senator Sanders has been saying....Sanders has been calling for a revolution, if that is not action,I don't know what is... If anything Obama's message is more closely correlated to the things Sanders supports and believes than anything Clinton has ever said or done.