Only a Democrat can fix the problems a Democrat caused.
That, apparently, is Barack Obama's pitch as he campaigns for Senate candidates in Michigan and Georgia.
He is really saying this out loud...in front of a crowd...After Passing Obamacare....
— Jason Robertson (@JRobFromMN) October 29, 2026
Obama's reappearance on the campaign trail has been something to behold. Almost everything he says is an implicit rejection of his legacy, though, to be fair, it closely matches the rhetoric he used to get elected and used throughout his term. Bipartisanship, loving your neighbor, one America, save healthcare.
It was bulls**t then and bulls**t now, of course. But with the added twist that he has to reject his own policies while doing it.
Most of his flowery rhetoric about peace, love, and understanding is almost boilerplate for him, but this full-blown attack on the current healthcare system is almost an open rejection of his signature policy, the one that defines his public legacy. He's even saying it while campaigning with a guy who was disparaging Obama.
Ed wrote about this when Obama agreed to appear for El-Sayed, and CNN ran a piece tracing El-Sayed's history of nasty comments about Obama, especially Obamacare.
In comments reviewed by CNN’s KFile from Obama’s 2012 reelection through the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, El-Sayed faulted him for perpetuating war, eroding civil liberties, overseeing record deportations and preserving economic and healthcare systems that he said favored corporations over ordinary people.
He also dismissed the Affordable Care Act as insufficient and argued that Obama’s incremental approach helped create the conditions for Donald Trump’s rise. ...
In a 2012 HuffPost essay written shortly after Obama won reelection, El-Sayed — who said he had voted for him — accused the president of failing to deliver the “hope and change” that defined his 2008 campaign. “This leader has perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people from our shores than any other president before him, and the list of his failures goes on,” he wrote.
“That memory will serve not as a reminder of the history we made that night – but of the silly emotions of a naïve young man who didn’t understand that hope and change required more than flowery prose and a winning smile,” El-Sayed wrote of Obama’s first election. “I have little hope because there has been less change.”
Obama's lie that Obamacare would let you keep your doctor and plan if you liked them became PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year," and since Obama promised his plan would reduce your healthcare bills by an average of $2500 a year, prices have instead skyrocketed. That $2,500 cut turned out to be a nearly $12,000 increase, which is more than many people's health insurance COST when Obamacare passed.
There were some winners, of course, but darn few. The middle class was eviscerated, and El-Sayed was right about one thing: Obama's failures led to Donald Trump's victory in 2016.
Of course, it's impossible to humiliate Obama precisely because he is entirely comfortable lying, and he certainly doesn't care what his detractors say; he cares about future power, and his voters buy every word he says anyway.
Still, we can appreciate the irony of him hitting the campaign trail and having to denounce his own legacy so loudly, if not by name, then by substance.
Delicious irony may not win elections, but we take what pleasures we can.