Barack Obama is almost out of office. Thank God. When he leaves, he’ll be replaced by Donald Trump, a man who was improbably elected over the heavily favored Hillary Clinton.
How did that happen? Here’s Obama’s explanation, via Townhall:
Rolling Stone has finally published a post-election interview they did with President Obama the day after Donald Trump’s presidential victory. In his sit-down, Obama offered no self-accountability for the Democrats’ whopping loss in just about every level of government. He (briefly) acknowledged that Democrats did not effectively campaign in enough working class environments. Yet, he then quickly blamed the defeat on one of his favorite targets: Fox News.
“Part of it is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country, but part of it is also Democrats not working at a grassroots level, being in there, showing up, making arguments. That part of the critique of the Democratic Party is accurate. We spend a lot of time focused on international policy and national policy and less time being on the ground. And when we’re on the ground, we do well.”
Obama has taken numerous swipes at Fox News throughout his presidency, noting that if he watched the network regularly, he wouldn’t want to vote for himself either.
This is an absolutely laughable explanation. Fox News might be the highest grossing network, but as Matthew Sheffield has pointed out, conservatives overestimate its influence:
While it is true that Fox News Channel has dominated the cable news ratings for many years, the reality is that conservatives are extremely underrepresented in mass media, contrary to what wishful-thinking people on the Right and their Fox-hating left-wing counterparts imagine. Beyond that, it appears the reason Fox News is so dominant is that it has effectively cornered the market on Republican news television viewers, not because it is actually the most influential and respected TV news operation. In some ways, the literal reverse is true.
Table I below illustrates the disadvantage conservatives face on television by comparing the Nielsen Media Research ratings of the broadcast and cable morning news shows, the broadcast evening news shows, and the top-rated cable shows in the same time period.[1] The Left-leaning shows have more than 2.5 times the viewership of Right-leaning ones…
Sheffield goes on to point out how people who don’t watch Fox News find the network incredibly untrustworthy. So the long and the short of it is, the majority of Americans aren’t watching Fox News.
So where does the blame lie? With Obama of course. With his failed multibillion dollar economic stimulus and his decade long recession. With Obamacare, a failed government takeover of our healthcare system that’s devastated American healthcare, and with his radical use of executive power to persecute religious institutions and anyone who refused to accept his radical agenda on matters like abortion and transgender rights. These policies didn’t fail because American voters rejected Barack Obama’s prescriptions for the country- voters even gave him an improbable second chance in 2012- they failed because they were bad programs wrought with waste and built on faulty economic assumptions. Voters were alienated by a president who tried to attack their values, and who would demand that they violate the dictates of their conscience. When faced with choosing between Hillary Clinton pushing four more years of the same failed policies, and Donald Trump promising a return to the policies that made America prosperous in the first place, voters chose Trump.
