Barack Obama
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It doesn't just talk the talk.
And sometimes it's going to be uncomfortable.
Look, and I think that that's...
Um, you know, there's been a lot of post-mortem about Democrats and progressives and, you know, I saw, you know, your, your standup where you said, you know, uh, you know,
We figured out how to be so annoying.
Which cracked me up.
I wasn't as funny about saying this, but even four, five, six years ago, I'd say, you can't just be a scold all the time.
You can't constantly lecture people
without acknowledging that you've got some blind spots too and that life's messy.
And so the vulnerability, I think, comes in and saying, all right, I've got some core convictions.
I've got beliefs that I'm not going to compromise.
But I'm also not going to assert that I am so righteous and so pure that
And so insightful that there's not the possibility that maybe I'm wrong on this.
Or that other people, if they don't say things exactly the way I say them or see things exactly the way I do, that somehow they're bad people.
And so there was this weird – what I saw in –
and I think this was a fault of some progressive language, was almost asserting a holier-than-thou superiority that's not that different from what we used to joke about coming from the right and the moral majority and our way and a certain fundamentalism about how to think about stuff that I think was dangerous.