Barack Obama knows a lot about a lot of things.
Barack Obama is pretty similar to the person you see in public, at press conferences. He's a little saltier, a little more sarcastic and cutting.
In public, Barack Obama's giving the simple version of his beliefs for the mass public. In private, he can discuss it at a really high level.
On Obamacare, every day that goes by I have more evidence that I wish I could put in my book, on how difficult it is for the Republicans to eliminate this law. They have no real alternative. They're afraid to take away health care from the 20 million people who now have it.
Obama took 20 million people from the category of ignorables and put them into the category of unignorables. No one had to do anything for these 20 million people because they were outside the system. Now they're inside the system. Taking away their health care imposes all kind of political pain. We don't know the outcome, but every passing day it show how difficult it is for Trump to deprive them of what they now have.
It's possible that Trump will have success by staging jobs theatre, rather than creating jobs. It's the inverse of what Obama did: saving an enormous amount of jobs without having the televised theatre to go along with it.
At best, Trumpism will be a more right-wing version of the same old Republican Party.
Trump is what Obama critics think Obama is: Someone who's focused on symbolism rather than substance.
Republicans fighting back against changes Obama made means those changes are important, as with most of the major progress in American history.
In some ways, Trump is just going to continue the trend: by continuing the norm-smashing behaviour that Republicans used in opposition.
It's absolutely true that people who believed Hillary Clinton would be a decent or even strong nominee need to think why that got that wrong. Laying the entire blame at the feet of Russia and the FBI is not sufficient. The biggest reason things went wrong were her own choices and her own weaknesses.
Conservatives are much more comfortable supporting the leader who's in power than liberals.
I don't think the Democrats need a silver bullet.
Barack Obama is extremely smart.
Because many people remembered a time when the Republican Party was not so extreme, and hadn't full grasped how much it had changed, people blamed Obama for his failure to get Republicans to agree with him. That blame coloured so much of how the public saw Obama during his presidency. The public thought he was dealing with a brand of Republican leader that just didn't exist any more.
The Republicans' response to Obama confused a lot of people. I really think there's been a measure of clarity at the end, with Trump's election, that was not present during the Obama presidency.
Trump was the logical outcome of the Republican's irrational, racialized backlash to Obama that had utterly come to dominate the party's thinking.
American democracy faces a massive challenge. I don't think it is a certainty that we're headed toward Putin's Russia, as some commentariat does. But people need to mobilize and build up small-d democratic institutions to prepare against that eventuality.
