‘US Democratic Party in shambles; 2 terms enough to judge Obama’s failed policies’

Barack Obama would lose against Trump worse than Clinton, says Dr.Jack Rasmus. He has stratified the nation more than ever, adds John Hajjar of the American Mideast Coalition for Trump. But Dr. James Lark suggests Obama could have won a third term.

Outgoing US President Barack Obama claims if he had been legally able to run for a third term, he would have been backed by the majority of voters and beaten Donald Trump.

“I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Obama told his former adviser, David Axelrod on Monday’s Axe Files podcast.

His successor, Donald Trump, took to Twitter to reject the idea he would have lost, saying his success came from Democrat failures during Obama's time in office.

Commenting on Obama’s statement, Dr.Jack Rasmus, professor of political economy at St. Mary's College in California, said that “Obama may have lost even worse than Hillary in the election here.”

“If you look back at 2008 - who put Obama in office? It was the industrial working class and unions in the Great Lakes area and also youth under 30 and minorities, particularly Latinos and African-Americans. He didn’t deliver anything for them in the first term, and they gave him one more chance. What did they get? The industrial working class in the Great Lakes area got more free trade and more jobs lost with nothing being done about it,” he continued.

“Youth under 30 – they got a lot of low-paid jobs. Forty percent of youth now have to live with their families because they can’t make enough money in order to sustain themselves. And what did the Latinos get? They got the biggest deportation wave in US economic history,” he added.

In Rasmus’s opinion, “the American people were fed up with Obama policies. Hillary was associated with those policies but they were Obama’s policies and I think that the voters would have turned against him as well.”

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John Hajjar, Co-Chair of American Mideast Coalition for Trump, argues that the result of the American election was “a repudiation of Barack Obama’s eight years in office.”

“His policies and everything he stood for was repudiated in this election. He was a very popular person personally, but his policies were very unpopular. He moved the country way far to the left, and the huge victory that was won by Trump is proof of that,” he told RT.

Obama, he said, is leaving the Democratic Party “in a shambles” not only at the federal level but at the state and local levels as well.

“Obama did tremendous damage to his party by veering so far to the left,” John Hajjar said.

“America is a central-right nation. And politically, socially, culturally Obama moved the US way-way far. And this election in November of this year was a reaction to these failed policies. After two terms we had enough time to judge the efficacy of his policies…That is a record number of people who are not employed in a workforce. The poor have gotten poorer, and the wealthy have gotten wealthier. He has stratified his nation more than any other time in history,” he added.

On the contrary, James Lark, Adjunct Professor at the University of Virginia and former Chair of the Libertarian Party, said that “Obama would have had a pretty good chance.”

“President Obama has demonstrated that when he runs for office, he can mobilize large segments of the American population,” Lark told RT. “It would have been a very close race. I think that Mr. Trump’s assertion that there is no way that President Obama would have won a race against Mr. Trump is a bit of bluster. Obama would have had a very good chance of winning both the popular vote and the Electoral College.”

“I think that many people who would have supported President Obama would not and did not support Hillary Clinton," Lark added.