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this might be Obama being a friend to AOC. Laying in the foundations for her rise in the party.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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politics
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America vote a woman, latina, and young? Hilarious.
Pale male and stale wins.
You're talking about the guy who orchestrated the rat fucking of Bernie in 2020 for Biden. Obama is neither a friend to progressives/leftists; nor an opponent of the geriatric Democratic leadership.
It all depends on how far AOC is willing to bend over for the establishment. She has been making weird moves over the last years.
If I don't trust you to drive, or to not click on stupid popups, then I don't trust you to run an office-- let alone THE office that's supposed to facilitate this country's actions.
I don't trust the current "administration" to run a side of the road fruit stand, let alone the country...
By young, they mean not geriatric. Some of the candidate running in open or challenge seats. And we need more.
Nikki Foster (D) Age: 38 | Race: U.S. Senate (OH) | Background: Labor organizer and 2022 Senate candidate; running against incumbent J.D. Vance in an open-seat scenario.
Adam Gray (D) Age: 42 | Race: U.S. House (CA-13) | Background: State Assemblymember challenging Republican incumbent John Duarte in a Central Valley swing district.
Mia Janecka (D) Age: 38 | Race: U.S. House (TX-23) | Background: El Paso County prosecutor; running against Republican Tony Gonzales in a border district with shifting demographics.
Syler Roberts (D) Age: 34 | Race: U.S. House (OR-06) | Background: Climate policy advisor and Gen Z activist challenging Republican Andrea Salinas in a Portland suburbs district.
Compared to your Senate those are young.
Or you know could have something to do with unending support for billionaires and their anti-labor, pro fossil fuels, pro war agenda?
The longer you're in politics, the more "connections" you make. So there may be some relationship between these things.
It’s not like the “connections” don’t reach out to the politicians.
Sure, I'm not saying anything about who initiates it. Just that over time they accumulate, so older politicians are likely to have more.
This is actually a bad reason to have age limits.
you can find unscrupulous people in all walks of life. That's the primary issue with this, not how old they are.
The reason to get old people out of politics is actually quite simple. most of them will be dead in 20 years. There's no reason for them to make plans more than five years, because they'll probably be dead in five years.
I disgree with the sub-point about plan-making. I'm 50, but thanks to health issues^[thanks to undiagnosed ADHD and our lack-of-healthcare system in the US] I'm not likely to last another decade^[Six heart attacks, a pulmonary embolism, kidney failure so I'm on dialysis]. But while I do think about my probable looming death somewhat, I don't fail to make any plans because of it. As far as I'm concerned, I'm going to live forever - until I don't. I mean, that's what my brain thinks.
But I don't think most of them probably think about death until they get ill.
I'm not so worried about old people in politics - I think there should be a mix of young and old. You need strong young voices pushing for progress, and you need old experienced voices who have seen all this shit before and know how to deal with it.
What we don't need in politics is control by our oligarchs, which is what we have now that's broken our democracy.
…and you need old experienced voices who have seen all this shit before and know how to deal with it.
The problem with this is that the majority of Biden’s experience, just as an example, is of a world that no longer exists. Most of his life literally predates the internet.
His experience doesn’t include crippling college debt. It doesn’t include wage slaving at poverty levels.
It doesn’t include a time when you couldn’t afford a house if you had a job- any job.
Doesn’t include a time where you needed a 4 year degree to be an intern in the copy room.
Doesn’t include a time when loyalty to a company wasn’t repaid with more exploitation.
Doesn’t include a time where the us government could be the fascist bastards we are today.
And that’s part of how we got here.
Not only is the lived experience of most people in their 80’s fundamentally irrelevant to the modern world- it’s actively hurting us. Never forget that people like Biden allowed the oligarchs to exist, allowed the closet fascist party to fester into the openly fascist party.
~~old~~
Entrenched
Serving their corporate masters
Playing power games to keep their jobs
Losing so the republicans win
“Old” is a symptom of being good at the above, not the actual problem.
A part of me wonders if Obama really wanted to say that. But then again, Obama is also part of the corporate machine.
He’s not going to bite the hands that come to his expensive speaking event dinners.
Bernie is old af and he seems to understand shit.
The man is a unicorn, unfortunately.
It is partly age, but is also the general establishment, I think that the party overall has become too set in their ways. They are playing a completely different game than the Republicans are, at the most of the Dem leadership is. They didn't seem to understand that the GOP is playing for keeps, these plans have been in the works for decades and now that they are out in the open they seem caught unaware for some reason.
“Huh, we just can’t seem to connect with the yonges. Clearly it’s because we don’t use TikTok enough and don’t get their slang”
No, it’s because the platforms you keep running people on are totally divorced from the interests of the constituencies you want to mobilize, and party leadership continuously torpedoes policy that is actually popular. Communicating a platform perfectly, getting the message seen by every potential voter, won’t do a thing if they don’t want what you’re promising.
Not sidelining and running hit pieces against your most energizing grassroots candidates, then trying to substitute hand picked party insiders for them would be a good start. You can win elections or you can enforce party orthodoxy, not both.
You're making Obama's point while pretending that he missed it.
One can understand someone's point and expand further on it.
You missed it entirely and are now covering for that.
I didn't miss anything. I wasn't the one who made the comment.
The primary problem is that we have allowed our oligarchs to take control of our country. The oligarchs keep these older politicians around because they tend to serve them well, but it's not really about age. It's about the corruption. Follow the money. And the money flows from the oligarchs to the politicians who take that money and then serve the oligarchs.
Do we need to fix our broken democracy? Yes, yes we do. And the first step is to break out the guillotines and handle the oligarch problem. Then sweep out all of those corrupt politicians. There's a few that I'd keep - I think folks like AOC are not taking that money. And maybe there's a Republican or two who might be the same, but I sure don't know of any, but if there are, fine, keep them if they don't support fasicsm. But sweet everyone else out. Time for a new Constitution with more protections, although you can't fully protect the people from themselves. But we need to make sure nobody can get rich enough to control the government. Make it so people can get rich, fine, just not SUPER rich. Roll out social safety nets - universal health care, univeral basic income. Protect our rights.
Can we do it? Well, maybe not. It'll take a LOT. But that's what we need to do, and the more of us that realize it and talk about it, the closer we get to any possibility of accomplishing it.
The oligarchs keep these older politicians around because they tend to serve them well, but it’s not really about age. It’s about the corruption.
Idk man, I agree corruption is the core issue, but from Dianne Feinstein to Joe Biden to Mitch McConnel to probably Donald Trump, I think it's almost the opposite end of the "boy king" phenomenon. Boy kings could be controlled by their advisors because they were immature and unexperienced. Senile politicians can be controlled by their advisors (who are controlled by moneyed interests) because they aren't fully lucid.
It certainly has nothing to do with the utter complacency of the party at large.
For longer than I’ve been alive, the dems have done little to stop what’s come. This was decades in the making.
Even if you don’t want to go that far back, the stuff in the Epstein files was known during Clinton and bush and Obama and Trump and Biden.
So yeah. On that one topic… both parties are literally the same.
The commonality is corruption by our oligarchs throwing money into politics to control most of our politicians.
There's still a difference between the parties, but it's our oligarchs that have corrupted and broken our democracy, and it won't get better until we start with them.
I didn’t say there was no difference.
I said on the one topic of Epstein- neither party has done anything meaningful.
There’s still differences. Like one party has better hygiene.
You focus on one phrase I wrote (to support my statement) at the expense of everything else I said. I assume because it sounded like I was disagreeing with you, when I was jumping off your comment to make a broader point about oligarchs being the cause. :)
yeah because trump would win against biden because he was a few months younger yet kamala the much younger canidate still lost to him. Granted though. Everyone over 50 should be handing over stuff to younger folks and take on more advisory roles if anything and hard cap step away at 60. 65 is a joke and part of the reason not enough younger folks have enough opportunities.
If you want younger people in office at the national level, you need to be supporting younger people at the local level. It's not a 100% pipeline, but that's a huge part of the current. And it's not just about voting for them, you need to be out there actively canvassing, campaigning, donating, and continuing that support after they get elected, if they get elected.
One problem: Younger people in many parts of the country literally cannot afford to or aren't able to make it work out. You end up with a lot of retired people in those elected positions because they have the time to run a campaign and then do the job, and the non-livable wages that these positions pay out (if they pay out at all) are just icing on the retirement income cake. But even candidates that aren't retired often have to put special effort into appealing to the retiree crowd, because those are the folks who have the most time to help support the campaign and/or money to donate.
Another issue: Young voters are, super generally speaking, not reliable voters especially when it comes to mid-terms and primaries. You can say they don't vote and don't help out with campaigns because nobody/the party doesn't appeal to them, but it's a chicken and egg issue.
Anecdotally speaking for my general area, the younger folks who run often seem to lack appeal to older folks (who do vote), have a hard time communicating their platform, and/or their platform has little to do with the position they are running for. Simply speaking, they aren't electable, either.
You can argue the older folks also aren't electable, but that doesn't change the truth. Somebody running for town council with a platform to vaguely support Palestine and regulate AI comes across as out of touch with local politics and what they could reasonably achieve compared to the older folks who want to stick to milquetoast agenda items such as to approve funding for new classrooms and expand pedestrian walkways on main street.
It’s AIPAC
And the consequences of Citizens United and the recent Supreme Court decision (Snyder v. United States) that legalized bribery even further.
Along with a host of other foreign and domestic donors paying our representatives to represent corporations and investment bankers and the like.
Just too old, and just too sold.
Too old? But didn't you see Kamala Harris launched Project 6-7 or whatever the other day. She probably even smelled a jazz cigarette!
She started her campaign really late. It was basically half over when Biden got out of the race and she got started. Not only did it look bad but, by then, she couldn't really get the forces moving. Dems really stumbled on the mid-game change out, and she couldn't seperate herself from the stuttering (made him seem senile)—especially after working under it for 4 years. He should have stuck with being one term and gone out to pasture with the rest of the ancients.
Thats all on top of her making the age-old mistake that all dems make: they start out appealing to the left, but then they run to the right. On such a short click, she had no discernible platform. The "I'm not Trump" platform was top notch, but it wasn't enough to get people to show up at the poles.
It doesn't help that the oligarchs control our media, so Republicans get pass after pass after pass, but Democrats get put under the microscope. (And it doesn't help that our oligarchs have corrupted most politicians even on "both sides", but that doesn't mean there isn't still a difference between the parties, just that we need to clean house on both sides......)
There were also the two obvious things that actually mattered to the outcome of that election that you just didn't menton at all?
Huh, look at that.
I wonder if the people that attack Obama from the left but also buy into the ageism that seems to be all the rage now (I mean, surely it's not a plot from the Epstein Class to have everyone infighting at the bottom level and not look up, right? Divvying people up even further by generations and microgenerations resulting in even more atomization than we have already creates lots and lots of solidarity, right? ) will have any epiphany here.
I mean... it's mainly corruption but I do think a 75 year old guy will struggle to understand the needs of current teens and prepare the country to serve them well as they try to find their place in it.
I would like to suggest a few alternative
*) being old doesn't mean you are not informed, you can call the most inform people to speak in the white house or congress and get recommendation.
*) anyone can understand number such as: expansive health care, student debt, and housing cost. While old, they are making millions inside trading. So i dont think age has anything to do with it.
*) “hey old man, there is someone killing pets and you keep giving them money and support them, even hiding the pets, can you please stop?” Even if you are old, the fact you are actively and unconditionally supporting a genocide has nothing to do with understanding genz terms or concerns.
Age has nothing to do with it imo
No, just neoliberal. I don’t care what age you are, but if you are neoliberal, capitalist trash then you can fuck off whatever your age, gender, skin tone, hair texture, sexuality, or favorite color.
Anything to deflect from corruption. Fuck Obama and his pyrrhic legacy.
Fuck Obama and his pyrrhic legacy.
:rolls eyes:
If you have major problems with Obama (i.e. outside of disagreements with individual things, but enough general disagreement that you're all "fuck Obama"), you are part of the problem because nobody will even be good enough for you.