The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Obama: Republican filibuster obstruction in 2009 was unprecedented in US history
“At the time, there was no precedent for the kind of obstruction that we had seen from the Republican Party. There was no precedent for the use of the filibuster to literally block everything.”
Obama: Single-payer healthcare would have been economically disruptive and politically impossible
“Not only politically would it be impossible to start from scratch, but economically be wildly disruptive. A lot of people work for insurance companies and a lot of people work for hospitals under current arrangements and doctors get paid in certain ways and so…”
Obama: Economic inequality continued to grow throughout his presidency
“You saw some trends that unfortunately continued even through my presidency of growing inequality.”
Obama: Federal IT procurement is massively inefficient despite high-caliber talent
“The truth is, certainly at the highest levels of the federal government, people are just as smart and work just as hard, if not harder, than anybody in the private sector. But where there is massive inefficiency is technology and IT procurement. It's just mise…”
Obama: Administration's 2008 crisis decisions averted depression and drove record job streak
“The decisions we made at the time did not solve some of the broader underlying trends that I had actually campaigned on, like income and wealth inequality, but it did avert a great depression and stabilize the situation that would allow for painfully slow, but…”
Obama: Administration wanted a stimulus package twice as large as $800B Recovery Act
“As a consequence, we could not get enough votes to do more in the initial Recovery Act, as we called it, than eight hundred billion dollars. And I think Subsequently, people have said, ah, you know, you should have done twice as much. Well, yeah, we wanted to …”
Obama: Passing on an opportunity window means accepting it may never return
“Sometimes you don't choose the time chooses you. That doesn't mean you have to seize that moment, but it does mean you have to be comfortable with the possibility that the moment won't come again.”
Obama: Empowering 23-year-olds with decision-making power won the 2008 campaign
“That democratization of the campaign, even though we maintained a lot of discipline within it, combined with our innovations with social media and the internet, which again required us to give over power to a bunch of 23 and 25 and 27 year olds who understood …”
Obama: Federal procurement rules forced waterfall development instead of iterative scaling
“Because of the procurement rules, the way we bought software was this massive stack of specs and working with these huge contractors as opposed to an iterative process of buying software and problem solving and starting small and scaling up.”
Obama: Healthcare.gov rollout was his most frustrating self-inflicted presidential wound
“Bottom line is the thing didn't work on the first day. And then it didn't work on the second day or the first seven days, and it was a political nightmare. Probably the most frustrated, self-inflicted wound of my presidency.”
Obama: 2008 crisis differed from COVID-19 due to extreme systemic leverage
“What made it, I think, different than the current crisis that we've been going through with the pandemic was it was a financial crisis that involved enormous amounts of leverage. You had a crisis of confidence and a full blown panic in the financial markets, a…”
Obama: Early push against the filibuster would not have swayed Senate Democrats
“And so, even if I had warned my earlier self, you're not going to get any cooperation on anything, So you might as well start making the argument to blow through some of these Senate rules. I probably couldn't have persuaded a bunch of Democrats who'd been in …”
Obama: Administration lost early PR battle over Keynesian stimulus spending
“I think there was a failure to communicate, to quote a great movie, Cool Hand Luke, in Describing all the good things that were being done, and we ended up losing early on the PR battle around what was essentially Keynesian spending in response to a major cris…”
Obama: Passing healthcare reform was more satisfying than winning the presidency
“This is the reason why I said, even in the moment, I felt more satisfaction the night The healthcare bill passed than I did the night I won the presidency.”
Obama: Major US social programs typically launch smaller than needed and expand
“Most big social programs in America, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as is true in other countries, typically start off smaller than they probably should in terms of overall need. That's why I call this starter house, and then you build from it, b…”
Obama: Transitioning to the presidency is like a startup taking over GM
“When you move from the presidential campaign to the actual presidency, the analogy is not you're a startup and then you become a big company. It's actually you're a successful startup that then suddenly is taking over, you know, General Motors.”
Obama: The 2008 economy contracted faster than in 1929, losing 800k jobs monthly
“In fact, the economy was contracting faster than it had after the Wall Street collapse in 1929. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month.”
Obama: Social change requires execution and preparation, not just inspiration
“Politics, like everything else, requires attention to detail and execution, and that a lot of times we think of politics and social change generally as a matter of vision and inspiration, but a lot of it ends up being preparation and perspiration.”
Obama: The 2008 presidential campaign scaled exactly like a successful startup
“It did end up being this strange process where, like a successful startup, what began with a credible campaign, but not a juggernaut, by the time we are finished with the primary into the general, we really have built a national juggernaut.”
Obama: As president, I strictly blocked out 6:30 PM for family dinner
“That's why I used to say I was very strict about blocking out 6:30 for dinner with my family. And I just listened to my daughters and answer their questions and then help them with their homework or read to them and then tuck them in. And then I'd go back to w…”
Obama: Daily family dinners renewed my mission and made me better
“It made me a better president because each time I sat at that dinner table and I listened to them, I was reminded about what's important. I was reminded about why I was doing what I was doing. It renewed and refreshed that sense of mission and focus that kept …”