Democrats turn on Obama

Some members of the Democratic Party appear to be turning on former President Barrack Obama.

Among them, according to Fox News, is a "progressive strategist."

The unnamed individual placed a lot of blame on the Democrats' recent struggles - as demonstrated in the 2024 elections - on Obama.

As we will see, this individual seems to have a point, and, as we will also see, he is not the only Democratic to turn on Obama following the election.

Obama "gave it up"

In speaking with The Hill, the strategist argued that the Democrats did so poorly in the 2024 election because they gave up "populism." Then, the strategist went a step further and argued that it was Obama who did so.

He said:

I don’t know exactly when Democrats lost their comfort with populism, but I don’t think it was because Trump picked it up. I think Trump picked it up because Democrats gave it up during the Obama years, when they started chasing Silicon Valley money and Obama wanted to appeal to college-educated people who think populism is icky and uneducated.

This, however, is only part of the criticism that the "progressive strategist" had for Obama.

The other half has to do with what Obama replaced the Democrats' populism with, namely, "condescension."

"We replaced it with a really prominent condescension," the strategist added.

There's more...

Fox News points out that this strategist is not the only one to offer some harsh criticism for Democratic leadership - which would presumably include Obama - following the party's defeat in the 2024 election.

The outlet reports:

Since Trump’s win, prominent progressives have criticized the party for losing focus on the issues most affecting the working class. In a statement following Trump’s win, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said, "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."

Even David Axelrod, Obama's former advisor, joined in the criticism.

Axelrod said:

The only group they won among – Democrats won among – were people who make more than $100,000 a year. You can’t win national elections that way. You can’t approach people like missionaries, and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’ There’s an unwritten, kind of unspoken – unintended disdain in that… But the party itself has increasingly become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of backlash we’ve seen.

There is definitely some truth in that.