“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.”
this might be Obama being a friend to AOC. Laying in the foundations for her rise in the party.
No, it is because the Democrats haven’t represented the working class in decades.
Por qué no los dos? In all seriousness, most Democrats are happy with capitalism and capitalism is waiting to grind you into grist.
If you want younger people in office at the national level, you need to be supporting younger people at the local level. It’s not a 100% pipeline, but that’s a huge part of the current. And it’s not just about voting for them, you need to be out there actively canvassing, campaigning, donating, and continuing that support after they get elected, if they get elected.
One problem: Younger people in many parts of the country literally cannot afford to or aren’t able to make it work out. You end up with a lot of retired people in those elected positions because they have the time to run a campaign and then do the job, and the non-livable wages that these positions pay out (if they pay out at all) are just icing on the retirement income cake. But even candidates that aren’t retired often have to put special effort into appealing to the retiree crowd, because those are the folks who have the most time to help support the campaign and/or money to donate.
Another issue: Young voters are, super generally speaking, not reliable voters especially when it comes to mid-terms and primaries. You can say they don’t vote and don’t help out with campaigns because nobody/the party doesn’t appeal to them, but it’s a chicken and egg issue.
Anecdotally speaking for my general area, the younger folks who run often seem to lack appeal to older folks (who do vote), have a hard time communicating their platform, and/or their platform has little to do with the position they are running for. Simply speaking, they aren’t electable, either.
You can argue the older folks also aren’t electable, but that doesn’t change the truth. Somebody running for town council with a platform to vaguely support Palestine and regulate AI comes across as out of touch with local politics and what they could reasonably achieve compared to the older folks who want to stick to milquetoast agenda items such as to approve funding for new classrooms and expand pedestrian walkways on main street.
Huh, look at that.
I wonder if the people that attack Obama from the left but also buy into the ageism that seems to be all the rage now (I mean, surely it’s not a plot from the Epstein Class to have everyone infighting at the bottom level and not look up, right? Divvying people up even further by generations and microgenerations resulting in even more atomization than we have already creates lots and lots of solidarity, right? ) will have any epiphany here.
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.
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…
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.
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 bot going to bite the hands that come to his expensive speaking event dinners.
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.
“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.
Bernie is old af and he seems to understand shit.
The man is a unicorn, unfortunately.
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. 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 woth 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.
The person you are replying to is talking about her current pandering that’s happened in the last month
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…)
There were also the two obvious things that actually mattered to the outcome of that election that you just didn’t menton at all?
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.
Or you know could have something to do with unending support for billionaires and their anti-labor, pro fossil fuels, pro war agenda?
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.
No, it couldn’t be that, it must be the voter’s fault.
I mean… it’s mainly corruption but I do think a 75 year old guy will struggle to understand the needs of current teens and prepare the country to serve them well as they try to find their place in it.
