Here's an interesting bit of political analysis from Vanity Fair.

Such questions are behind a recent spike of debates on the left over Barack Obama’s record. More and more voices seem to be saying, either obliquely or bluntly, that Obama was a bad president.

If you click on the links you will find they lead you to a tweet from David Sirota, a retweet from Michael Grunwald of a Jonathan Chait piece that says the opposite of what author T.A. Frank claims is going on, and a tweet from Matt Stoller. This is not a debate at all, let alone a spike in one. This is two people who agree on something agreeing with each other on that thing. There is no debate: the former president's approval ratings with people who identify as Democrats is always north of 90 percent.

(There's a noxious bit of business in this piece that casts Obama as someone who was led by The Establishment into policies of which the author disapproves. This is edging very close to some unsavory conclusions.)

Zach Gibson Getty Images

The central conceit of this argument seems to be that a revolutionary moment is upon us and that Obama could have led it in 2008, and that Bernie Sanders should have led it in 2016.

In the 1990s, the radicals had been on the fringes, but that was no longer the case after 2008. An anti-war and anti-corporatist message sent Ron Paul riding surprisingly high in 2012, and a filibuster by Rand Paul in 2015 over the issue of drone strikes prompted even Democrats to deploy the #StandWithRand hashtag. Tea Party Republicans began to team up with Democratic union members to oppose Obama’s trade deals. Fury over the bank bailouts made its way into the congressional campaigns of Republicans and Democrats alike.

If, in 2019, you're still arguing that the Pauls ever were major figures in American politics, I really don't know what to tell you. But I would hazard a guess that running in 2020 on a platform that the first African-American president, a guy of whom 95 percent of the Democrats polled think favorably, was something of a schlub in the White House will not be a campaign that likely would prevail in the Democratic presidential primaries.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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