I literally do blame the Democrats for Trump, and if you don't, you weren't paying attention.
Plenty of us were critiquing Clinton's campaign on those merits and were consistently talked down to in shocker the same way we're being talked down to now. Shocker, she lost. I remember saying a few weeks before the election "We're about to get Brexited." I put my vote down for Clinton, because Trump is fucking insane, and that was clear before he was President. It was clear in the fucking 1980's.
Being able to critique our leaders is supposed to be what is the difference between us and conservative voters. They're the cult who unquestioningly believes all the bullshit that comes out of Trump's mouth and diapers. I find it weird that people think we should be more like them in regards to our leaders like that would be a good thing.
RomneyCare is not sweeping healthcare reform, especially when it doesn't include a public option (although to be fair we can blame the loss of Public Option on Joe Lieberman).
People are still going bankrupt from medical bills and dying because they can't afford treatment. So much for "sweeping reform."
You must be very young to not remember what it was like prior to the ACA. You could pay for insurance for years and get denied treatment for "pre-existing conditions". They could literally cut you off as soon as you got cancer.
And many of the people dying now are in Republican states that didn't expand Medicaid. The ACA gives free money to help poorer Americans, but Republicans refuse to take it. That's clearly not Obama's fault.
I'm pushing fifty, jackass.
I'm literally constantly on the verge of not being able to afford my cancer meds and will then just die if I can't get them.
I live in a solidly blue state.
Go on, tell me more about how my lived experience is wrong. I've had fellow Democratic voters shoving that shit up my ass for my entire voting life.
Then you probably remember how badly healthcare blew up in the Clinton's face back in 1993.
The ACA, for better or worse, was strongly shaped by that experience. Obama's biggest lessons from that debacle were 1) don't threaten the insurance industry and 2) don't threaten union- bargained "cadillac" plans.
The ACA was designed to not die the same way Hillarycare did. It's a worse law because of it, but importantly: it passed.
It passed and more people got access to health insurance. Plenty of them still don't have access to healthcare.
In my view, these half-measures are why Democrats never have much real energy behind them, because nobody gets excited for half-measures or using Republican plans just to be able to make deals with Republicans.
It was sweeping reform. Just because we are far from having something good doesn’t mean this wasn’t sweeping reform that fixed some huge problems.
The Dems in Congress had an asshole preventing them from doing more but they went as far as they could go, they wanted to go farther, but they moved things forward, not just rhetorically but legally. And it was something people had tried and failed to do at all for decades. Because some of the things that were addressed are off the table, the conversation moved towards going further in the right direction, instead of spinning in circles with the same conversations we were having in the 90s.
I see too many people on Lemmy who say this stuff about how the Democrats had a supermajority and sat around, and they are wrong on the time they had and they are wrong on the facts of how they used their time. I don’t know if it’s because they were too young to follow it at the time, they’ve completely forgotten, or they are intentionally skewing the facts to suit an agenda. But I’m so tired of seeing it.
100%...people also forget that the blue dog coalition contained people like Joe Lieberman who would not vote for any bill that contained a public option.
I get that hindsight is 20/20 and really Obama's coalition likely should've just nuked the filibuster...but this was in early 2009. Not everyone knew how unhinged the Republican party would become during Obama's tenure.
This was 2009. A significant number of people had been describing the GOP as fascists under Dubya.
I'm sure you could find a significant number of people describing Reagan as fascist as well and in a way none of them were wrong, but in another sense they all were. It was a slow erosion of norms, trust, a deepening corruption, and changing actors that were more and more unhinged, and it only really seems obvious that it was headed this direction in retrospect.
And there are still people claiming on this very site today that calling the 2024 GOP fascist is abusing the word.