Obama’s Critique of Sanders at Howard Univ Commencement Speech--Great job Pres. Obama

[riversedge]

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I really wish @BernieSanders & his supporters had listened to @POTUS speech to #HowardU16






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Obama’s Critique of Sanders
I will miss Pres Obama. This is a very good read--



***Also link to the video and Full text:


http://www.c-span.org/video/?409107-1/president-obama-delivers-commencement-address-howard-university


http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/7/1524279/-Obama-s-Critique-of-Sanders


By Petey2

Saturday May 07, 2016 · 3:05 PM CST


?1462647233
President Obama's commencement address to Howard University



President Obama’s commencement speech today at Howard University firmly and repeatedly challenged the central message of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. (C-Span link offers video and full text.)

The president was not attacking Sanders’ ideology of fairness. But he was clearly separating himself from Sanders’ dogmatic insistence on revolutionary transformation.

If you want to make life fair, then you have to start with the world as it is.

The balance between idealism and pragmatism was clearly at the forefront of the president’s mind.

Democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100% right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right and you still have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral security, but you will not get what you want.

This is one reason there has been somewhat of a class divide between Bernie and Hillary supporters. The “moral security” Obama refers to is an emotional and intellectual luxury if it doesn’t contribute to substantive change.

I’ve heard Bernie supporters say their movement should be the left-wing equivalent of the Tea Party — a curious sentiment, considering how much karma the GOP is currently paying off thanks to years of the Tea Party’s impassioned “moral security.”

All too often, righteous passion leads to angry cynicism, because progress never matches one’s righteous vision. Here, the president parrots Bernie’s language directly:

If you do not get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. That will lead to more cynicism, not participation — and less participation and a downward spiral of more injustice, anger and despair. And that has never been a source of progress. That is how we cheat ourselves of progress.

The president is tapping into one of Hillary’s main responses to Bernie. It’s not enough to provide critiques of “the rigged system,” you need a strategy to actually get things done.

We need, said the president, “Not just awareness, but action.”

You have to go through life with more than just passion for change. You need a strategy. I will repeat that. You have to have a strategy. Not just awareness but action. Not just hashtags but votes. You see, change requires more than talking, it requires a program and organizing.

But, the president reminds the young graduates, shifting from righteous idealism to pragmatic action requires patience — as well as an acceptance of incrementalism.

To shape our collective future [we need to] bend it in the direction of justice, freedom and equality.

........................

[JaneyVee]

1. Sick bern.

[NurseJackie]

2. We need, said the president, "Not just awareness, but action."

There are many selfish and self-absorbed individuals (here and elsewhere) who have clearly demonstrated that "feeling good about themselves" and being morally "superior" is more important than actually getting something accomplished.

I guess there will always be people like that, and there's not much you can do about it (except to ignore them as best you can) ... but I'm so glad that their defeatist attitude and their vanity and their revenge-fetish (ie: "let it burn" and "you'll get what you deserve&quot are being soundly defeated by intelligence, reason and reality.

[mmonk]

3. We're just garbage with no redeeming values or point of view of any value.

[MineralMan]

4. Thank you, Mr. President!

Some things need to be said. I will welcome your full-throated support for our Democratic nominee. You will help us defeat the Republicans once again!

[NCTraveler]

5. K&R nt

[Armstead]

6. Same speech he's given for years -- and I agree with him...Not a bashing of Bernie

I have no problem with the ideals and vision and goals President Obama makes in his speeches. I agree with him totally.

He's overall been a really good president, and if he were able to run again I'd be happy with that.

But the problem is when he veers from that, and either started negotiating from weakness with the GOP, or deliberately sides with corporate interests (i.e. TPP and some others).

I

[riversedge]

10. Some comments by Pres Obama were directed at the Bernie camp-without naming names.

[Armstead]

15. He's always done that to "my friends on the left"...Its the thing I like least about him

I like Obama a lot,. But he has bought too much into the corporate centrist (DLC) idea that anyone or anything slightly to the left of conservative center is the "fringe of the liberal base" or "uncompromising" or "unrealistic."

Unfortunately, he includes a fairly wide swath in that -- including many who have supported him over the years.

[tonedevil]

17. A wise old rock man...

once said you see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear.

[SecularMotion]

7. K & R

[zazen]

8. and sometimes pragmatism means knowing when to give up trying to change people

Sadly, Obama is really wrong on this, and it's been illustrated by his 8 years in office.

Pragmatism means taking a cold hard look at the patterns around you and recognizing toxicity, destructiveness, alcoholism, abuse, persistent lying . . . whatever and determining what you can change and what you can't. It's true on a personal level--that's what recovery and escape from living with an abuser is all about--and it's true at a societal level.

And when you really, really, really are dealing with people who are too sick to be capable of any kind of reasonable persuasion, then you have to take more tough-love measures.

Obama is the idealistic one who thought he could reason with these people--that if he were just reasonable enough, just said the right things, they'd come to their senses. Sanders is much more realistic about the toxicity with which we're dealing in the mainstreams of both parties, the media, the global corporate elite and their minions who pepper leadership in the academy, major non-profits, and "think tanks."

Hopefully someone more eloquent than I will take on his profound misunderstanding in an essay and publish it. Sad sad sad.

[Skwmom]

13. When Clinton said in the one debate that Obama was no different than her, she was right

[Martin Eden]

9. If you want to make life fair, you have to CHANGE the world as it is.

Not nearly good enough is the enemy of the necessary.

[NurseJackie]

11. Kick! DU-rec! Bookmarking!

[Skwmom]

12. The system is rigged and our government is corrupt and NO speechwriter is going to be able to cover

up those facts.

[Nye Bevan]

14. Anyone who hates Hillary will hate that speech (nt)

[lostnfound]

16. He identified his own strength in those words, and confirms what I've always hoped about him.

Thank you for posting this.
Where he sees opportunity, he has often done a lot with it, in spite of large obstacles.
Great stuff.

Now, what does this have to do with Bernie? Obviously he doesn't have Obama's charisma or grace. Everybody has their own gifts and strengths. Has he done nothing good with his candidacy? It remains to be seen. Some of us think he was his own kind of incrementalism. He proved that a grassroots-funded candidacy COULD be fairly viable. And the phrase "enormous wealth inequality" has been heard on TV more than I would have ever thought possible. A lot of us are now aware that the US has 25% of the world's prisoners with only 5% of the world's population. Will that awareness make a difference? I don't know. Do you plan to take any action on it? Do you plan to push your candidate on any of it?

As powerful of a position as the Clintons hold in our political society, I think that there is a tremendous amount that they could accomplish, if they are both aware and willing to act on that awareness.

What's hard to understand is the choice to act in ways that are opposite of what are awareness tells us. I don't blame Obama for not getting single-payer health care; I admire him tremendously for accomplishing what he did accomplish with the ACA. But why anybody would want to stand in the way of higher wages for Haitian slave labor is beyond me.

[Triana]

18. "moral security" is electing TRUMP.

Oh. He'll get things DONE. But WHAT THINGS and for WHOM?

That's always the question (or should be) in the end.

Same question applies to Hillary. She'll "get things done". But for WHOM?

Oh. And guess what?

THE. SYSTEM. IS. RIGGED.

EDIT: And 'acceptance of incrementalism' NEVER - E V E R - got us any goddamned substantial change in this country.

How would 'acceptance of incrementalism' have garnered our separation from British rule in the revolution?

It didn't. It wouldn't.

"what do we want?"

small incremental changes that take our and our children's lifetimes!

"when do we want it?"

sometime in the next 150 years!

SERIOUSLY?

Ourselves, our kids and grandkids have to live in this world while politicians push milquetoast 'change' and 'incrementalism' and try to tell us we only THINK the system is rigged - when it really IS RIGGED.

Obama's lawyer speak really shines in this speech.

He tells us 'revolution' is impossible.

He tells us "incremental' change is all we can expect (so as not to hurt the powers that be, millionaires, Wall St and to give them time to thwart any change that might hurt them) - and especially since the politicians pushing said incrementalism are PART of the millionaire/billionaire class who might be hurt by any other kind of change ie: revolutionary kind.

He tells us we only THINK the system is rigged because we're frustrated.

WTH kind of lying and mockery is this?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

19. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice. Thomas Paine