Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power talk about their experiences on election night, when they had assembled a large group of other liberals and Obama officials to watch the returns and joyously celebrate Hillary Clinton’s election to the presidency. To top it all off, the event was recorded, and it seems that this documentary will someday be available to the public (I’m not completely sure about that last part—but it was filmed by HBO, and so my guess is that it will be aired).
I predict that more conservatives will want to see it than Democrats, just to savor the deliciouds schadenfreude.
But strangely enough, I’m more into identifying with Rhodes and Power. No, not with their politics, but with their stunned disbelief. If you’d had a camera on me that night, it would have recorded a strange sight indeed. I don’t remember exactly—I was in a kind of fog of shock—but there was a lot of pacing around, shaking my head, startled exclamations that I couldn’t f-ing believe it, phone calls to various people, and staring at the TV in disbelief, all interspersed with a slowly dawning joy that Hillary Clinton would never be president, which balanced with my fear of the unknown with Trump.
So I can identify with a portion of what Ben Rhodes says here, strangely enough, although other parts are the opposite of my feelings that election night. I’ve bolded the places where he describes what I felt, too:
As people who know me know, probably to a fault, I am usually not without thoughts and words. But you know, I think””I kept trying””beginning to say something, and the film shows that basically I can’t speak, because anything I was going to say was just going to be kind of a lame rationalization.
And when, in reality, you know, sometimes things are just terrible. And I think that that two layers of feelings that I had after the election, one is just on a very personal level, you know, we just spent ten years””you’re watching the film, it’s like watching yourself run the 26-mile marathon, and to just feel””and President Obama used to describe it as we’re going to hand off the baton. And it’s like you could see someone reaching back to take the baton, and suddenly nobody is there.
Because, personally, you’re feeling like, ”˜well, all these things I worked on, what’s going to happen to them?’ And this sense of, you know, you put all this time and effort and caring into different things that are now going to be threatened or attacked or undermined in some ways, it was powerful. But then, more broadly, I think, beyond just me personally was the sense of the unknown.
I mean, that’s why I didn’t have anything to say. Like, if Jeb Bush was elected president, or even Marco Rubio, you know, I wouldn’t have liked that, but I could have foreseen what was going to happen, and what that was going to look like.
What’s more, what Rhodes says about watching his work being undone is exactly and precisely what conservatives felt during the Obama era. Hey Ben, I feel your pain—actually, I felt your pain, and someday I may feel it again at the next election, depending on how it goes. I’m sure that people who actually worked on these things—for example, many of the military members who fought to secure Iraq or those who helped them—felt even worse than I did when they watched Obama give them away. The message is that what’s done can be undone.
One difference, of course, is that Democrats thought they not only had this one in the bag and that the baton would be handed off safely and easily to relay runner Hillary, but they thought they had established supreme dominance in the presidential electoral race and would never again be defeated by the upstart GOP, and that the least likely person in the world to accomplish that defeat would be Donald Trump. So their shock was doubled, tripled, quadrupled by their arrogance.
There are parts of the interview where Rhodes and Power seem to me to be sincerely self-deluded (as opposed to just spinning, which they’re also fully capable of) in their perception of what happened during the Obama administration and what has happened during Trump’s tenure so far in the international arena:
Well, I think that there’s something very, very different about President Obama investing in alliances, building a hyper-charged different kind of relationship with China and with India, and then drawing on that political capital to get them to do more in the international system, than holding our allies in contempt, ripping up international treaties, showing our word means nothing, and then demanding that people do what we say.
Or maybe the difference that when Obama “held our allies in contempt, ripped up international treaties, and showed our word meant nothing,” he didn’t “demand that people do what we say.” In fact, the “holding our allies in contempt and ripping up treaties” part was so commonplace for Obama that it received a name pretty early on in his presidency: the Obama doctrine.
And by the way, I’m curious: which allies does Trump hold in contempt? And which treaties has he ripped up?
See this. And the Paris climate agreement, which he did pull out of, was no treaty. Trump hasn’t even pulled out of the Iran deal yet, which also isn’t a treaty, and which was entered into by Obama without a majority in Congress approving.
