Sort of. NPR does a good analysis here:
They conclude that the degree to which Obama is stumping is certainly unusual, but that there hasn’t been many occasions in the past where you would expect it to happen, eg because the incumbent President was deeply unpopular so the candidate from the same party wanted to distance themselves anyway.
Like me, Obama has children. And like me, he’s probably a little terrified of the effect a Trump presidency would have on his children.
As he been cited, there are plenty of precedents of sitting presidents campaigning for his successor. The limitations have primarily been for two reasons: sometimes the candidate doesn’t want to have to outshine the president. The Gore campaign was conflicted on how much to use Clinton, for example.
Or, if the outgoing president is not very popular, as was the case with GWB, it wasn’t like Bush could go barnstorming all over the country. Instead, his activities were generally limited to strong Republican areas.
You could point out to your friend that the incompetent Republican Congress and the general hatred of Trump - what with his extremely low personal approval ratings, significantly lower than even Clinton’s - is making people like Obama more. Obama’s approval ratings are at their highest since his re-election, and the primary reason for that is that his party and candidate are making him look good. Thanks, Mr. Trump!
Hell, GHW Bush has come out for Clinton, although I doubt he’s in much shape to stump for anyone these days.
Anyway, even if it was completely unprecedented the only correct response to a Trump supporter is “suck it up”. It’s not prohibited by any laws or regulations, and Obama has every right to express his own free speech under 1st Amendment.
Obama has no choice. He swore an oath to protect the United States from all threats, foreign and domestic.
And Chachi. Don’t forget Chachi.
The word “thinks” does not apply to this case.
It’s not, not sure why anyone thinks that.
I would argue that there are basically three factors in having a sitting president stump for you as their successor:
In the post-FDR world, this appears to be the first election where all three factors are strongly in favor of the president doing intense campaigning. The three elections most similar to this one are probably 1960, 1988, and 2000. In 1960, Eisenhower would probably have campaigned more strongly for Nixon except that his health was failing and he physically couldn’t. I think Reagan’s health wasn’t all that great in 1988, and as we know in 2000 Gore was ambivalent about having Clinton campaign for him.
Another unprecedented factor here is that Trump is explicitly running on undoing everything Obama has achieved during his term. This isn’t the usual campaign tactic for someone attempting to replace a fairly popular incumbent, and it makes sense that Obama would react to it.
If you didn’t see GWB doing this very much, that’s probably because he was so unpopular that his endorsement didn’t help
It’s not unusual for a sitting president to publicly support his would be successor of the same party. And the quantity and visibility of that effort tends to be related to the sitting president’s popularity, either in general or with particular targeted groups of voters.
However IMO one could separate the tone of President Obama’s statements actually both with regard to his opposite party predecessor and now wrt Trump from what other modern sitting presidents generally deemed fitting for either type of target. Lots of people think that’s fine because they feel Bush was a worse predecessor and Trump a worse would be successor than previous presidents dealt with, and Obama is just ‘telling it like it is’. But that’s where IMO one might reasonably point to a difference in Obama, not the fact he’s positively campaigning for the person he’d rather have succeed him, nor counting up campaign appearances, etc.
In general it’s not unprecedented, as others have said. In specific, there are some things unique about Obama’s stumping–but there have only been 56 Presidential elections, a much smaller number in modern times, obviously. So each election is going to be distinct in many ways from all others–56 isn’t that many data points, and Presidential elections were qualitatively different even in the 30s and 40s than they are now (but still somewhat recognizable–go back to the early 1900s and it gets less so, go back to the mid-19th century and it’s a system we wouldn’t recognize at all.)
The big thing is most outgoing Presidents have suffered late term popularity “dips” which mitigate their value being really prominent on the campaign trail. Obama on the other hand seems to be having slightly better popularity now than he did a couple years ago, and he also has a historically unprecedented and strong loyal voter base among a segment of the population (black voters) that is unique and gives his party something to exploit that most outgoing Presidents haven’t had.
Really in the modern era the only outgoing President who had the popularity to justify this level of aggressive campaigning was Clinton, but largely the Gore campaign took a mixed view on Clinton. One of the digs on Gore was that as the sitting Vice President he wasn’t his “own man” and would just be a third Clinton term. So using Clinton too heavily could negatively impact his messaging. Additionally, Gore was a Southern Democrat who wanted to compete with Bush in Southern “swing” states like Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia etc, and while Clinton was broadly popular nationally Gore feared his marital infidelities could make Clinton less helpful in the bible belt where Gore perceived his toughest contests in swing states with Bush would occur.
Incidentally Gore lost Tennessee by less than 4%, and Arkansas by about 7%, it’s of course unclear if a shift in campaigning could have changed that, but in 2000 at least Clinton was still wildly popular in Arkansas (by 2016, the Clintons really don’t have that favorite-couple support and HRC isn’t expected to be competitive there) so using Bill more heavily very likely could’ve moved the needle there. Bill was also strangely popular in places his wife is hated, like West Virginia (which in 2000 was actually a consistently blue state, that went red for GWB and has never looked back); so there’s a decent argument that using Bill more heavily could’ve helped the campaign. Campaigning personally in Tennessee more could’ve helped as well, but Gore as a former Senator from Tennessee, favored political son and etc felt campaigning heavily in his home state would be embarrassing and he was just banking on being from there and the Gore name carrying him to victory (it didn’t.)
I bet this guy also though Obama was the first president to appoint “czars”,
Czar! me hearties, czar! Czar!
Those Obamas! They are just SO darn uppity.
Well, he sure did screw up that whole cancel-the-election-and-declare-himself-President-For-Life thing, so, maybe there isn’t.
This. This more than anything at all.
However, it should also be pointed out that there are only five people alive today in the entire world who know what it is like to be President of the United States. Three are Democrats and two are Republican (and closely related to each other). All five have spoken against the Trump candidacy.
Tell him: “Bullshit. EVERYONE should attack Trump over and over again. Hell, if you had any sense, YOU’D attack Trump over and over again.”
What have you been telling him instead, btw?
Thanks for calling out the OP’s friend on his blatant racism.
:golf clap: