“There is an element of, at some point, you age out,” the former president said.
Former President Barack Obama is urging the Democratic Party to invest in younger candidates if it wants to come out victorious in the 2026 midterm elections and, eventually, the 2028 presidential election.
In an interview with YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen that was published Saturday, the 64-year-old said part of the reason his own elections were so successful was because he was young at the time.
“I’m a pretty healthy 64, feel great, but the truth is, half of the references that my daughters make about social media, TikTok and such, I don’t know who they’re talking about,” he said. “There is an element of, at some point, you age out. You’re not connected directly to the immediate struggles that folks are going through.”
No, it is because the Democrats haven’t represented the working class in decades.
Neither have the Republicans but that hasn’t stopped them.
Por qué no los dos? In all seriousness, most Democrats are happy with capitalism and capitalism is waiting to grind you into grist.
this might be Obama being a friend to AOC. Laying in the foundations for her rise in the party.
America vote a woman, latina, and young? Hilarious.
Pale male and stale wins.
You’re talking about the guy who orchestrated the rat fucking of Bernie in 2020 for Biden. Obama is neither a friend to progressives/leftists; nor an opponent of the geriatric Democratic leadership.
It all depends on how far AOC is willing to bend over for the establishment. She has been making weird moves over the last years.
Or you know could have something to do with unending support for billionaires and their anti-labor, pro fossil fuels, pro war agenda?
No, it couldn’t be that, it must be the voter’s fault.
The longer you’re in politics, the more “connections” you make. So there may be some relationship between these things.
It’s not like the “connections” don’t reach out to the politicians.
Sure, I’m not saying anything about who initiates it. Just that over time they accumulate, so older politicians are likely to have more.
This is actually a bad reason to have age limits.
you can find unscrupulous people in all walks of life. That’s the primary issue with this, not how old they are.
The reason to get old people out of politics is actually quite simple. most of them will be dead in 20 years. There’s no reason for them to make plans more than five years, because they’ll probably be dead in five years.
I disgree with the sub-point about plan-making. I’m 50, but thanks to health issues[1] I’m not likely to last another decade[2]. But while I do think about my probable looming death somewhat, I don’t fail to make any plans because of it. As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to live forever - until I don’t. I mean, that’s what my brain thinks.
But I don’t think most of them probably think about death until they get ill.
I’m not so worried about old people in politics - I think there should be a mix of young and old. You need strong young voices pushing for progress, and you need old experienced voices who have seen all this shit before and know how to deal with it.
What we don’t need in politics is control by our oligarchs, which is what we have now that’s broken our democracy.
…and you need old experienced voices who have seen all this shit before and know how to deal with it.
The problem with this is that the majority of Biden’s experience, just as an example, is of a world that no longer exists. Most of his life literally predates the internet.
His experience doesn’t include crippling college debt. It doesn’t include wage slaving at poverty levels.
It doesn’t include a time when you couldn’t afford a house if you had a job- any job.
Doesn’t include a time where you needed a 4 year degree to be an intern in the copy room.
Doesn’t include a time when loyalty to a company wasn’t repaid with more exploitation.
Doesn’t include a time where the us government could be the fascist bastards we are today.
And that’s part of how we got here.
Not only is the lived experience of most people in their 80’s fundamentally irrelevant to the modern world- it’s actively hurting us. Never forget that people like Biden allowed the oligarchs to exist, allowed the closet fascist party to fester into the openly fascist party.
If I don’t trust you to drive, or to not click on stupid popups, then I don’t trust you to run an office-- let alone THE office that’s supposed to facilitate this country’s actions.
I don’t trust the current “administration” to run a side of the road fruit stand, let alone the country…
By young, they mean not geriatric. Some of the candidate running in open or challenge seats. And we need more.
Nikki Foster (D) Age: 38 | Race: U.S. Senate (OH) | Background: Labor organizer and 2022 Senate candidate; running against incumbent J.D. Vance in an open-seat scenario.
Adam Gray (D) Age: 42 | Race: U.S. House (CA-13) | Background: State Assemblymember challenging Republican incumbent John Duarte in a Central Valley swing district.
Mia Janecka (D) Age: 38 | Race: U.S. House (TX-23) | Background: El Paso County prosecutor; running against Republican Tony Gonzales in a border district with shifting demographics.
Syler Roberts (D) Age: 34 | Race: U.S. House (OR-06) | Background: Climate policy advisor and Gen Z activist challenging Republican Andrea Salinas in a Portland suburbs district.
Compared to your Senate those are young.
Bernie is old af and he seems to understand shit.
The man is a unicorn, unfortunately.
oldEntrenched
Serving their corporate masters
Playing power games to keep their jobs
Losing so the republicans win
“Old” is a symptom of being good at the above, not the actual problem.
A part of me wonders if Obama really wanted to say that. But then again, Obama is also part of the corporate machine.
He’s not going to bite the hands that come to his expensive speaking event dinners.
“Huh, we just can’t seem to connect with the yonges. Clearly it’s because we don’t use TikTok enough and don’t get their slang”
No, it’s because the platforms you keep running people on are totally divorced from the interests of the constituencies you want to mobilize, and party leadership continuously torpedoes policy that is actually popular. Communicating a platform perfectly, getting the message seen by every potential voter, won’t do a thing if they don’t want what you’re promising.
Not sidelining and running hit pieces against your most energizing grassroots candidates, then trying to substitute hand picked party insiders for them would be a good start. You can win elections or you can enforce party orthodoxy, not both.
Isn’t that what he’s referring to with this quote.
“There is an element of, at some point, you age out. You’re not connected directly to the immediate struggles that folks are going through.”
His entire point wasn’t that older candidates aren’t in on the latest tech trends. His point is that older candidates are out of touch with "the immediate struggles that folks are going through.”
I grew up very poor, and that helps me be able to sympathize with the struggles of folk under the boot of a rigged system. I was also able to fight my way out of poverty and I have not had to live with those struggles for decades. Just because I can sympathize doesn’t mean that I truly understand. I’m out of touch. The same applies to old, establishment, politicians who are decades removed from the days they struggled to help their communities.
You don’t need to be “connected directly to the immediate struggles” to understand polling, such as that a resounding number of Democrats and Independents condemned Israel’s genocide in Palestine or that a resounding number of Democrats (idk about Independents) support abolishing ICE.
They are owned by Zionists, and they are owned by private prison oligarchs. It’s not because they were too old to understand. It’s because they’re compromised by foreign agents and moneyed interests.
You’re making Obama’s point while pretending that he missed it.
One can understand someone’s point and expand further on it.
You missed it entirely and are now covering for that.
I didn’t miss anything. I wasn’t the one who made the comment.
It is partly age, but is also the general establishment, I think that the party overall has become too set in their ways. They are playing a completely different game than the Republicans are, at the most of the Dem leadership is. They didn’t seem to understand that the GOP is playing for keeps, these plans have been in the works for decades and now that they are out in the open they seem caught unaware for some reason.
Age has nothing to do with it, it’s their neoliberal politics. Gavin Newsom sounds exactly like Chuck Schumer.
Gavin newsome is only six years younger than Obama
Not to undermine your point just to make a joke or anything, but… “" sounds exactly like "” presents itself and you don’t choose “Shapiro sounds exactly like Obama” ? 🙃
It certainly has nothing to do with the utter complacency of the party at large.
For longer than I’ve been alive, the dems have done little to stop what’s come. This was decades in the making.
Even if you don’t want to go that far back, the stuff in the Epstein files was known during Clinton and bush and Obama and Trump and Biden.
So yeah. On that one topic… both parties are literally the same.
The commonality is corruption by our oligarchs throwing money into politics to control most of our politicians.
There’s still a difference between the parties, but it’s our oligarchs that have corrupted and broken our democracy, and it won’t get better until we start with them.
I didn’t say there was no difference.
I said on the one topic of Epstein- neither party has done anything meaningful.
There’s still differences. Like one party has better hygiene.
You focus on one phrase I wrote (to support my statement) at the expense of everything else I said. I assume because it sounded like I was disagreeing with you, when I was jumping off your comment to make a broader point about oligarchs being the cause. :)
The primary problem is that we have allowed our oligarchs to take control of our country. The oligarchs keep these older politicians around because they tend to serve them well, but it’s not really about age. It’s about the corruption. Follow the money. And the money flows from the oligarchs to the politicians who take that money and then serve the oligarchs.
Do we need to fix our broken democracy? Yes, yes we do. And the first step is to break out the guillotines and handle the oligarch problem. Then sweep out all of those corrupt politicians. There’s a few that I’d keep - I think folks like AOC are not taking that money. And maybe there’s a Republican or two who might be the same, but I sure don’t know of any, but if there are, fine, keep them if they don’t support fasicsm. But sweet everyone else out. Time for a new Constitution with more protections, although you can’t fully protect the people from themselves. But we need to make sure nobody can get rich enough to control the government. Make it so people can get rich, fine, just not SUPER rich. Roll out social safety nets - universal health care, univeral basic income. Protect our rights.
Can we do it? Well, maybe not. It’ll take a LOT. But that’s what we need to do, and the more of us that realize it and talk about it, the closer we get to any possibility of accomplishing it.
The oligarchs keep these older politicians around because they tend to serve them well, but it’s not really about age. It’s about the corruption.
Idk man, I agree corruption is the core issue, but from Dianne Feinstein to Joe Biden to Mitch McConnel to probably Donald Trump, I think it’s almost the opposite end of the “boy king” phenomenon. Boy kings could be controlled by their advisors because they were immature and unexperienced. Senile politicians can be controlled by their advisors (who are controlled by moneyed interests) because they aren’t fully lucid.
It’s AIPAC
And the consequences of Citizens United and the recent Supreme Court decision (Snyder v. United States) that legalized bribery even further.
Along with a host of other foreign and domestic donors paying our representatives to represent corporations and investment bankers and the like.
Just too old, and just too sold.
Too old? But didn’t you see Kamala Harris launched Project 6-7 or whatever the other day. She probably even smelled a jazz cigarette!
She started her campaign really late. It was basically half over when Biden got out of the race and she got started. Not only did it look bad but, by then, she couldn’t really get the forces moving. Dems really stumbled on the mid-game change out, and she couldn’t seperate herself from the stuttering (made him seem senile)—especially after working under it for 4 years. He should have stuck with being one term and gone out to pasture with the rest of the ancients.
Thats all on top of her making the age-old mistake that all dems make: they start out appealing to the left, but then they run to the right. On such a short click, she had no discernible platform. The “I’m not Trump” platform was top notch, but it wasn’t enough to get people to show up at the poles.
It doesn’t help that the oligarchs control our media, so Republicans get pass after pass after pass, but Democrats get put under the microscope. (And it doesn’t help that our oligarchs have corrupted most politicians even on “both sides”, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a difference between the parties, just that we need to clean house on both sides…)
The person you are replying to is talking about her current pandering that’s happened in the last month
There were also the two obvious things that actually mattered to the outcome of that election that you just didn’t menton at all?
yeah because trump would win against biden because he was a few months younger yet kamala the much younger canidate still lost to him. Granted though. Everyone over 50 should be handing over stuff to younger folks and take on more advisory roles if anything and hard cap step away at 60. 65 is a joke and part of the reason not enough younger folks have enough opportunities.
