DETROIT — Democratic presidential contenders have opened a surprising new front in their effort to retake the White House — calling into question the legacy and leadership of former president Barack Obama, the party’s most beloved leader.
Like young adults seeking to break away from their father’s shadow, the candidates who gathered in Detroit to debate the party’s future this week repeatedly challenged Obama’s record, both directly and indirectly, as too timid, misguided or insufficient for the moral challenge of the moment.
“It looks like one of us has learned the lessons of the past and one of us hasn’t,” said former Obama housing secretary Julián Castro at a key moment in Wednesday’s debate, when he attacked former vice president Joe Biden, with whom he served under the former president, for refusing a more dramatic departure from his immigration approach.
Replacing Obama’s signature accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, has become the primary policy goal of many of the leading 2020 contenders. Several others have attacked Obama’s efforts to secure a new trade deal with Asia, his decision to surge troops into Afghanistan and the practice of courting wealthy donors, which anchored both of Obama’s campaigns for president.
“We have tried the solution of Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Tuesday night, defending her plan to replace Obama’s health reforms with a single government plan. “And what have the private insurance companies done? They’ve sucked billions of dollars out of our health care system.”
The turnabout comes as the party enters a traditional molting period that accompanies open presidential nomination fights. Faced with the threat of Donald Trump’s reelection and unaddressed economic frustrations, the future of the party now appears more up for grabs than at any point since the early 1990s, when Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton emerged from the Democratic primaries by promising a new third way of political moderation.
The political messaging consensus that won Democrats control of the House in 2018 — defend Obamacare, oppose Republican policies and mostly avoid disruptive liberal ideas — has also faded over the last year as candidates try to placate this year’s crop of activists.
Democratic Party Chairman Tom Perez, another former Obama Cabinet official, has been working to tamp down the rising tensions and keep the party focused on its common enemy: Trump.
“I think we have a 100 percent values alignment,” he said when asked about the new divides. “We can debate whether we are 85 percent or 90 percent up the mountain on universal health care. Every Democrat in the field wants to get there.”
Before the debate began Wednesday, he addressed the audience at the Fox Theatre in downtown Detroit, imploring them to keep their eye on Trump and his Republican allies. “Am I only one who misses Barack Obama in this room?” he thundered, prompting cheers.
But the unity did not continue into the main events. During Tuesday’s debate, the two leading candidates onstage, Warren and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), both offered calls for political and economic changes far more sweeping than what Obama offered. Both campaigns are anchored in the idea that the primary political crisis preceded Trump and was not solved by Obama — “a corrupt, rigged system that has helped the wealthy and the well-connected and kicked dirt in the faces of everyone else,” as Warren put it.
“There is a tension in the party now between the rank and file and a sort of rump element of establishment types who really answer to the donor class,” Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s 2016 campaign manager, asserted regarding the emerging split.
On Wednesday, with Biden standing center stage, attacks on Obama’s record became proxies for attacking Biden’s own rationale for the race, which is anchored in his relationship with the former president.
“Barack Obama knew exactly who I was,” Biden said. “He chose me and he said it was the best decision he made.”
But the other candidates challenged Biden for sticking too closely to the Obama script. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee bristled at Biden’s proposed climate change policy, which seeks a more gradual approach to ending dependence on coal, an echo of Obama’s embrace of “clean coal” in both of his presidential campaigns.
“The time is up,” Inslee said. “Our house is on fire.”
New York Mayor Bill De Blasio repeatedly challenged Biden to say whether he opposed Obama’s deportation policy, which expelled more than 3 million people over two terms. Biden declined to respond directly.
Biden’s advisers predicted that the onslaughts on Obama’s record could ultimately backfire.
“Many people on this stage spent more time attacking Obama than they did Trump,” said Anita Dunn, a Biden adviser who previously worked for Obama. “I think Democratic primary voters will make a judgment about this.”
Without a doubt, Obama remains enormously popular in the Democratic Party. He left office with an average approval rating of 83 percent among Democrats in Gallup polls during his tenure. A Pew poll this spring found 51 percent of Democratic leaning voters believed Obama was the best president in their lifetime.
The fusillade against the former president carries particular risk of alienating black voters, a key bloc that currently backs Biden over the more left-leaning alternatives.
“This whole suicide mission of going after Barack Obama smells like desperation, and I think it certainly shows that some of them are just not ready for where they are,” commentator and activist Al Sharpton said Thursday on MSNBC.
But even Biden has backed away from key parts of the Obama legacy, saying he would “absolutely not” continue Obama’s deportation policy, that the 2009 surge in Afghanistan Obama supported was a “mistake” and that he would seek a new approach to negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade deal with Asian countries that Obama had hoped to pass before the end of his term.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) seized on the complexity of Biden’s message, arguing that he should be burdened by the failures of the Obama years, particularly around immigration.
“You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign,” Booker said. “You can’t do it when it’s convenient and dodge it when it’s not.”
The current president’s son and campaign surrogate, Donald Trump Jr., acerbically noted the Democratic candidates’new tune on Obama.
“It was nice to see Democrats finally go after Obama’s failed policies very aggressively. Wish they would have done that years ago,” he tweeted Thursday. “Maybe if they continue to change their attitudes and actually work with @realDonaldTrump they could do some good for American workers for a change.”
On Thursday, several Democratic candidates sought to assure voters that they could be critical of Obama, or support policies he did not, without taking away from the accomplishments of the administration.
Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) cast her own support for a Medicare-for-all plan, with allowances for some private insurance, as a continuation of Obama’s legacy, not a departure from it.
“Decades of presidents have tried to reform the health care system of American, Barack Obama actually did it. But in his own words he has said it is a starter house,” Harris said on MSNBC. “My plan is building on the success of what President Obama achieved.”
Booker defended the need to criticize Obama, while also praising his administration. “He ain’t perfect. Nobody’s ever pulled that off,” Booker said on CNN. “If he were running for president for a third term, I wouldn’t be running.”
Such reassurances did not assuage all Democrats who are worried about the shift in tone and strategy.
“Attacking the Obama administration is just nutty,” former senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who lost reelection last year, said on MSNBC.
Colby Itkowitz and John Wagner contributed to this report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/facing-trump-democrats-turn-on-another-president-obama/2019/08/01/7cc0f4e8-b3c8-11e9-8f6c-7828e68cb15f_story.html
2019-08-01 14:16:21Z
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