Obama Blames Palin for Paving the Way for Trump

What could be worse than that woman paving the way for that man?

10.3.2016

In an interview published in New York Magazine, President Obama credited Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential nomination in 2008 as the origin story for the rise of Donald Trump today.

In Obama’s view, Palin’s surge onto the political scene is responsible for shifting the “center of gravity for the Republican Party,” leading to the Tea Party movement and the push for smaller government. Reading between the lines, he seems to be saying she unearthed the nastiest -- that is, racist -- base of the GOP:

“I see a straight line from the announcement of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee to what we see today in Donald Trump, the emergence of the Freedom Caucus, the tea party, and the shift in the center of gravity for the Republican Party. Whether that changes, I think, will depend in part on the outcome of this election, but it’s also going to depend on the degree of self-reflection inside the Republican Party. There have been at least a couple of other times that I’ve said confidently that the fever is going to have to break, but it just seems to get worse…

“[T]he moods that I think Sarah Palin had captured during the election increasingly were representative of the Republican activist base, its core.”

Obama said these attitudes made it clear early on in his presidency that he would be resisted at every turn and therefore make it impossible for future Democratic presidents to make deals so long as Republicans dominated the Congress:

“For Democrats, it’s important for us to understand that whether or not we are able to achieve certain policy objectives is going to be primarily dependent on how many votes we’ve got in each chamber and our ability to move public opinion. And it is not, these days, going to be as dependent on classic deal-making between Democrats and Republicans, or that we won’t move enough to the center on fiscal policy or my — not just me, but subsequent presidents — playing enough golf or drinking enough Scotch with members.”

The president said he noticed the country was polarized against him by his second year in office when his hometown of Chicago failed to win the bid to host the 2016 Olympics. Obama said he noticed how “strange” it was that “there was big cheering by Rush Limbaugh and various Republican factions that America had lost the Olympic bid.”

Obama fails to see that it was his fast-track progressive agenda that Republicans resisted since the beginning, not his skin color or other distractions. Palin’s rise, along with the Tea Party, was a threat to the Washington establishment because they fear a small government. Obama aims to stop that threat with one last act as president: do whatever it takes, say whatever it takes, to ensure Hillary Clinton is the next president.

H/T Politico

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