Newsweek asks "Is Donald Trump obsessed with Barack Obama?" Duh!

Courtesy of Newsweek: 

Speaking on his CNN show on Saturday, following Trump’s attempt to roll back the Iran deal, Don Lemon asked the question: “Does President Trump have an Obama obsession?” and suggesting the Republican was “making it his mission to undo every last bit of the Obama legacy.” 

Political analyst David Gergen told Lemon he believed the recent announcement on the Iran deal, as well as Trump killing Obamacare subsidies, was “more about blowing up the former president’s legacy than anybody wants to admit.”

“Anything which has the name Obama on it automatically becomes a target for Donald Trump and he’s trying to reverse as much of that as possible,” he added, warning that the tendency of presidents to reverse domestic policy set by their predecessors was now rolling into foreign policy. 

Indeed, back in August, a European diplomat reportedly told BuzzFeed anonymously that in his dealings with President Trump, he had noticed the Republican was driven more by a desire to scrap Obama’s policies than to enact his own. 

“It’s his only real position,” the diplomat told BuzzFeed. “He will ask: ‘Did Obama approve this?’ And if the answer is affirmative, he will say: ‘We don’t.’ He won’t even want to listen to the arguments or have a debate. He is obsessed with Obama.”

This is by no means a new observation, people have been talking about it almost since Trump took office. However it is interesting that now even reputable news magazines are coming to that consensus.

Former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod thinks he understands why Trump has this obsession.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

"There’s some other thing at play here that I don’t have the qualifications to analyze that clearly motivates him," Axelrod said in an interview on CNN's "Smerconish" Saturday. 

"Because every time he talks about anything that President Obama did, he talks about it in these very caustic terms as if he’s jealous or envious of the esteem with which Obama left office.” 

Axelrod added that Trump is "motivated" by the desire to "obliterate the Obama legacy."

That makes pretty good sense actually.

President Obama was a particularly gifted leader who seemed to handle the day to day problems that cropped up with relative ease and a quiet dignity.

I will always believe that Donald Trump has been obsessed with Obama probably almost since he took office in 2008, and then it was during that fateful White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011 that Trump decided he wanted to destroy him, and his legacy, forever.

David Axelrod knows where those Donald Trump supporters came from, and the trail leads right to a little town in Alaska.

Courtesy of the LA Times:  

Sarah Palin, who is in town this week to flog her latest book, no longer has the ability to overshadow the Republican presidential field. But while everybody’s favorite former Alaska governor may have flamed out as a national political candidate, she succeeded in catalyzing a movement that may well become known "Trumpism." 

“A lot of the forces we see coalescing around Donald Trump were the people we saw at Sarah Palin rallies in 2008,” said David Axelrod, a CNN political commentator and architect of Barack Obama’s political rise. 

 Seven years ago, said Axelrod, Palin inspired a voting bloc that seems to be flocking to Trump. 

“He has a similar appeal to her because he is an anti-establishment voice and very much speaks for alienated, non-college educated, white voters who have been left out of this economy and feel their voices aren’t heard in Washington,” Axelrod said. “Having observed the 2008 election and what’s happened since, you’d have to say a lot of things began with her.”

This is of course what we have been saying here all along.  And also why I have continued to cover Palin through all of her highs and lows, when many others thought she was yesterday's news.

While it's true that Palin no longer has the political power she once did, she is still the source of a lot of the craziness we see permeating the politics of today.

It was after all Palin who helped to galvanize support against Obamacare with her "death panels" bullshit.

It was also Palin who helped publicize and promote the fledgling Tea Party which has now metastasized into a cancer that is eating away at the body of the Republican party.

She also used her waning influence to endorse certain candidates like Ted Cruz, who is now one of the most dedicated saboteurs in Washington.

And yes the Donald Trump supporters are indeed the disenfranchised, knuckle draggers that we saw at her 2008 rallies.

That is almost impossible to deny if you listen to the language coming from his supporters, like the racist and neo-Nazi crap overheard during his rally right before the debate.

If you close your eyes you will find yourself almost immediately transported back seven years to when these inbred racist POS first crawled out of the woodwork.

And now they have a new standard bearer. Is it any wonder that Palin is rushing to his defense and sniffing around his coattails?

I think not.

David Axelrod reveals that the Obama campaign was initially concerned about Sarah Palin when John McCain tapped her as his VP candidate, but Obama was not.

Chris Matthews has Axelrod on to promote his book "Believer."
The first questions he asks him is about the campaigns response to Sarah Palin.

Axelrod: "Well there's no doubt that she was a little energy drink for the McCain campaign that badly needed it. And it shook things up. And it shook things up because she provided this sense of change and newness and an assault on the Washington establishment which was really undermining our message. So by the time...the day before the Lehman Brothers crash we were getting togetehr because our poll had us one point ahead in that race. And it was largely because of the energy that Palin had inserted into the McCain campaign."

Wow, you know it has been so many years now that I almost forget that there was a time when people actually thought Sarah Palin was a wunderkind and that she was the future of, not only Republican politics, but politics in America.

Matthews then reads a portion of Axelrod's book to him for comment. That section goes as follows:

"The East Coast establishment might disdain her as unlettered and ill-prepared, but that would only make her more appealing to millions of Americans who felt like they had been getting the raw end of the deal."

Matthews then suggests that Axelrod understood the disparity between the working class and the elite, and therefore understood her appeal.

Axelrod: "See that was the mistake that people made when she was picked, people focused on the fact that she was a woman. The fact that she was a woman wasn't the key, the fact that she had this cultural affinity for these disaffected workign class Americans was what made her potent."

You know this is a fascinating quote because I actually don't think that she had that affinity with the working class. I really think that much of her appeal had to do with her looks, and that the mere fact that she was so clearly undereducated meant that certain segments of the electorate felt that they could identify with her, in that if SHE could be a candidate then why couldn't they?

I also think that because at first little was known about her, she was a blank slate that people could fill with what they wanted to see, rather than what was really standing there before them.

It is only now, so many years later, that some conservatives are finally willing to drop the rose colored glasses that they put on the moment she took the stage to see her for who she really is.

However apparently Obama himself was not fooled.

Axelrod: "One thing I want to say about this though, Obama had a really interesting reaction when we heard she had been picked. He said 'You know I understand why he's doing it (McCain) but this is really tough, this national thing. It took me six months to be a good candidate.' He said 'She may be the greatest politician since Ronald Reagan, that she can come out of Alaska after a year of being Governor and handle this,' he said, "but give this three weeks, four weeks, let's see how this settles.' And the truth is she ran into some problems."

Boy there's an understatement.

I just really found this whole conversation quite interesting.

So it seems that many experienced political operatives were panicked by her appearance, but the President himself recognized that the road that lay ahead of her would reveal if she had what it took to be the star that so many already believed her to be.

And of course the road did just that, and no she was not.

David Axelrod: Barack Obama was always a supporter of same sex marriage.

Courtesy of Time Magazine:

Barack Obama misled Americans for his own political benefit when he claimed in the 2008 election to oppose same sex marriage for religious reasons, his former political strategist David Axelrod writes in a new book, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics. 

“I’m just not very good at bullshitting,” Obama told Axelrod, after an event where he stated his opposition to same-sex marriage, according to the book. 

Axelrod writes that he knew Obama was in favor of same-sex marriages during the first presidential campaign, even as Obama publicly said he only supported civil unions, not full marriages. Axelrod also admits to counseling Obama to conceal that position for political reasons. “Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union,’ ” Axelrod writes.

The article goes on to characterize this as a "flip flop" and a "black mark" on the President's record as a progressive, and I heard much the same yesterday by some MSNBC commentators.

But I disagree.

It is impossible at this point to argue against the fact that this President has helped to usher in more rights for the gay community than any other president in history, and that by the end of his term he will have done for the LGBT community what President Johnson did for the African American community in the 1960's.

And I think it is also impossible to argue against the fact if candidate Obama had come out in support of gay marriage that it is very likely he would have lost the nomination, or "shudder" lost the general to John McCain and Sarah Palin.

And how much progress do you think the LGBT community would have enjoyed under THAT administration? (Actually would there even be an America left in which to have this debate?)

Look politicians manipulate the truth for their constituents all of the time. Obama was not denying any personal wrong doing, or covering up for a crime, he was simply adopting a political strategy that he needed in order to get the job that would help him to make real change in this country, and do far more for the LGBT community than could be accomplished by a failed presidential candidate.

That's not so much devious, as smart.

 By the way the President has spoken out about this the other day as well: 

“I think David is mixing up my personal feelings with my position on the issue,” Obama said. “I always felt that same-sex couples should be able to enjoy the same rights, legally, as anybody else and so it was frustrating to me not to, I think, be able to square that with what were a whole bunch of religious sensitivities out there.”

Okay isn't that kind of what Axelrod was saying?

“Where my evolution took place was not in my attitude toward same-sex couples, it was in understanding the pain and the sense of stigma that was being placed on same-sex couples who are friends of mine, where they’d say, “You know what, if you’re not calling it marriage, it doesn’t feel like the same thing,” Obama told BuzzFeed. 

Clearly the President is affirming that his personal belief was that ALL Americans should be able to marry who they wanted and enjoy the legal protections that come with that legal union, but was struggling with what Christians in this country would accept at the time he ran for office.

Once again, sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

For those who believed that replacing David Gregory with Chuck Todd would rescue Meet the Press. Boy were you wrong!

So that was a clip from this Sunday's MTP.

As you see the whole thing turned into a shouting match with Joe Scarborough essentially hijacking the show and attempting to turn into a sixth day of Morning Joe.

Here is how Mediaite summed it up:  

Scarborough’s been on MTP as a guest before, and he’s usually toned down his act to Weekend Joe to befit the more respectable Sunday show environment. Weekend Joe, however, was nowhere in evidence Sunday when he and MJ-regular David Axelrod got into a name-calling spat over the ebola panic, leading to one of those shoutfests that plague cable news and are in no short supply on Scarborough’s weekday show. In fact with MJ-regulars Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell flanking the two the bit was indistinguishable from a Morning Joe segment, and just as ultimately useless.

Scarborough is definitely pushing the Right Wing position on the Ebola situation, which is to foment fear and then attempt to direct the blame toward the President. As reiterated by Ted Cruz just today.

By the way he is not the only MSNBC host to engage in that kind of behavior. Which inspired me to send this tweet.

I'm watching MSNBC's Chris Matthews have a full on Lindsay Graham case of the vapors over one Ebola case in America.
— Gryphen 2009 (@Gryphen2009) September 30, 2014

Yes I realize I spelled Lindsey Graham's name wrong, but I was irritated when I sent it.

If Chuck Todd wants to maintain control of his show he might think about suspending Scarborough until he learns to play nice with others or perhaps fit him with a shock collar to keep him form going feral on the MTP set.

President Obama shows Mitt Romney how to travel with your dog.

This from David Axelrod's Twitter account:

How loving owners transport their dogs.

 That Bo is one lucky dog. I bet he has never ONCE had to worry about being strapped to the roof in a dog carrier.

If you have not yet seen it you have to go and visit the Dogs Against Romney site.