There was a reason they used to call President Obama “No drama Obama.” He never seemed to get worked up about anything. It was one of the things people liked about him. He seemed to take everything in stride and the rigors of the job never overwhelmed him.
This recent interview with Anderson Cooper didn’t show him hysterical or anything but it sure seemed to me that this is what passes for Obama with his hair on fire:
“All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. It happens in a series of steps,” Obama told Anderson Cooper during an interview that aired on CNN on Monday evening.
Asked by Cooper if the January 6 insurrection and Republicans’ effort to delegitimize elections has led him to believe that our democracy is in crisis, Obama said he’s concerned.
“I think we have to worry when one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago,” he said.
In an exchange with Cooper, Obama pointed out that democracy has fallen at the ballot box in other countries.
COOPER: Democracy does not always die in a military coup.
OBAMA: Yes.
COOPER: Democracy dies at the ballot box.
OBAMA: That’s exactly right.
And Vladimir Putin gets elected with a majority of Russian voters, but none of us would claim that that’s the kind of democracy that we want.
These comments, coming from a former president, should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who thought Donald Trump’s departure from the White House in January ended the existential threat to American democracy that crested with the January 6 insurrection.
“When you look at some of the laws that are being passed at the state legislative level, where legislators are basically saying, we’re going to take away the certification of election processes from civil servants, you know, secretaries of state, people who are just counting ballots, and we’re going to put it in the hands of partisan legislatures, who may or may not decide that a state’s electoral votes should go to one person or another, and when that’s all done against the backdrop of large numbers of Republicans having been convinced, wrongly, that there was something fishy about the last election, we’ve got a problem,” he said.