Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump

by Dan Pfeiffer

Obama made the case that the campaign was worth running because he had something to say that he felt was worth saying.

“How often do you get to put your shoulder against the wheel of history and push?”

The president said that it was inevitable that the country would have a president of color, but the unique circumstances of his candidacy caused this to happen much sooner than would have otherwise occurred. He went on to explain that we were living in a period of massive, disruptive economic, cultural, and technological change. And that having a black president with the middle name Hussein as the face of that change had real political and cultural consequences. In other words, Barack Obama drove the Republicans insane. So insane that the Republicans nominated and America elected Donald Trump.

When I watch Paul Ryan and McConnell bend the knee to a man they know to be dangerously unfit for the presidency, I hear Obama’s observation in my head.

The modern Republican Party is dead. It has no coherent ideology or policy agenda. It’s a conglomerate of clowns, con men, and racists and those who enable the clowns, con men, and racists. American democracy depends on having two functioning political parties. We have only one (it’s the Democrats, I swear).

Their voters hated Obama so much that it paralyzed the Republican Party. Now these Republicans should have had the courage to stand up to the rabid fringe of their party that believed Obama was a secret Muslim Manchurian candidate.

Before the Republican establishment knew it, the far-right fringe they tried to placate started calling the shots and mainstream Republicans like John Boehner served at the pleasure of the Breitbart birthers.