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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.

Jonathan Chait

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Jonathan Chait
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Columnist
Commentator
Journalist
the United States of America
Level
Levels
Discuss
Public
Version
High
Versions
Belief
Beliefs
Simple
Obama
Giving
Private
Really
Mass

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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.
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Barack Obama is extremely smart.
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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.
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Liberals tend to romanticize the past, past leaders' failures.
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One of the things we've learned during the Obama era is how important norms are, because we've seen how the Republican Party behaved against Obama. So much of what they did was to smash pre-existing norms, which were nothing more than assumptions of how people would behave, which didn't have any real basis in rules or limits.
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Barack Obama knows a lot about a lot of things.
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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.
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In some ways, Trump is just going to continue the trend: by continuing the norm-smashing behaviour that Republicans used in opposition.
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We're not going to be living in a world of abundant coal power in a hundred years.
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Barack Obama is a very impressive human being.
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President Obama is so much smarter and a better communicator than members of Congress in either party. The contrast, side by side, is almost ridiculous.
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I never thought Hillary Clinton was a very good politician.
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Obamaism is the future of America.
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Trump has a lot of authoritarian tendencies that need to be a serious concern.
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I don't think the Democrats need a silver bullet.
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In the long run, however much damage we come through, Obama's vision is the one that's going to be left standing. It's a question of how much pain and suffering America has to endure in the meantime.
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