Jonathan Chait Quotes
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Barack Obama knows a lot about a lot of things.
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It's possible that Trump will have success by staging jobs theatre, rather than creating jobs. It's the inverse of what Obama did: saving an enormous amount of jobs without having the televised theatre to go along with it.
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Obamaism is the future of America.
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It's absolutely true that people who believed Hillary Clinton would be a decent or even strong nominee need to think why that got that wrong. Laying the entire blame at the feet of Russia and the FBI is not sufficient. The biggest reason things went wrong were her own choices and her own weaknesses.
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In public, Barack Obama's giving the simple version of his beliefs for the mass public. In private, he can discuss it at a really high level.
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Liberals will only support you after you're gone.
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Barack Obama is an intellectual.
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Everything on Twitter is true.
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Barack Obama is a very impressive human being.
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The story of the Republican Party is of a far-right that has moved from the fringes of the party to a complete domination of the party. The moderate, mainstream and pragmatic leaders of the party have been pushed out or died off.
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Trump was the logical outcome of the Republican's irrational, racialized backlash to Obama that had utterly come to dominate the party's thinking.
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Conservatives are much more comfortable supporting the leader who's in power than liberals.
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Republicans fighting back against changes Obama made means those changes are important, as with most of the major progress in American history.
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Trump's not the future; his ideas and his coalition are a dead end.
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We're not going to be living in a world where white identity politics is the basis for a major political party.
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That's an important Obama accomplishment: he raised taxes back to Bill Clinton levels, and made a major dent in inequality doing so. That's certain to be reversed, that's going to disappear. The Republicans are going to slash the rich's taxes.
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We're not going to be living in a world of abundant coal power in a hundred years.
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President Obama is so much smarter and a better communicator than members of Congress in either party. The contrast, side by side, is almost ridiculous.
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I don't think the Democrats need a silver bullet.
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On Obamacare, every day that goes by I have more evidence that I wish I could put in my book, on how difficult it is for the Republicans to eliminate this law. They have no real alternative. They're afraid to take away health care from the 20 million people who now have it.
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I worry about the entire structure of American democracy under Trump.
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I'm convinced in 100 years Obama will have an important place in the civic pantheon of American life.
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At best, Trumpism will be a more right-wing version of the same old Republican Party.
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It's possible that the clowning and the buffoonery and the entertainment are a bigger part of what's happening than we've allowed. And that Trump is primarily an entertainer who wants ratings, and an undisciplined speaker, and it will all be less than we think. It's something that we have to consider as a possibility; we don't know.
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Because many people remembered a time when the Republican Party was not so extreme, and hadn't full grasped how much it had changed, people blamed Obama for his failure to get Republicans to agree with him. That blame coloured so much of how the public saw Obama during his presidency. The public thought he was dealing with a brand of Republican leader that just didn't exist any more.
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Trump is what Obama critics think Obama is: Someone who's focused on symbolism rather than substance.
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Liberals tend to romanticize the past, past leaders' failures.
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One of the things we've learned during the Obama era is how important norms are, because we've seen how the Republican Party behaved against Obama. So much of what they did was to smash pre-existing norms, which were nothing more than assumptions of how people would behave, which didn't have any real basis in rules or limits.
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I never thought Hillary Clinton was a very good politician.
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Barack Obama is pretty similar to the person you see in public, at press conferences. He's a little saltier, a little more sarcastic and cutting.
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