“This is actually happening,” said Michael Wear, who worked on Obama’s first campaign and then went to work in the White House on evangelical outreach. “If folks would have considered it a real possibility that Donald Trump could succeed President Obama, how would we have acted differently? Would our ambitions have been changed? Would our actions have been changed, not just in 2016, but is there more that we could have done that would have affected the outcome of the election?”
Hari Sevugan, the senior spokesman for Obama’s 2008 campaign, said that ever since the president’s farewell speech in Chicago last week, he’s had in his head all of Obama’s chastening clichés about taking two steps forward and one step back, the Martin Luther King quote about the arc of the moral universe being long. Thinking about Trump has driven that home in a sobering way.
“He’s always told us this,” Sevugan said. “And we haven’t always absorbed it.”
Axelrod’s well-worn theory of presidential races is replicas and remedies—that in choosing presidents, people tend to go with the candidate who provides what they’ve found lacking in the incumbents, rather than the person who seems like a continuation.
Trump “is the antithesis of Obama in many ways,” Axelrod said.
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