The Token President:
Obama’s Hollow Legacy

4,403 words

President Barack Hussein Obama II, as he likes to emphasize, is the first Black(/White) President of the United States of America, with “a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya.” He is both a multiracial individual and a “third culture kid” (TCK) raised outside the U.S. mainland. This means, as I have recently written, that he has constantly suffered a certain amount of racial and cultural alienation, no matter who he is with or where he is. 

Obama has thought enormously about these problems and how to solve them. As he is clearly an intelligent and driven man, this makes his mediocre politics and bland rhetoric rather disappointing. Obama could be a thoughtful leader in working out America’s racial crisis, but he is not. 

For instance, Obama has thought about the merits of racial nationalism in solving the inevitable alienation and conflict of multiracial societies. In his lengthy memoir, Dreams from my Father, Obama explicitly affirms that achieving the well-being of the community through racial nationalism is more important than his well-being as a half-caste: 

Ever since the first time I’d picked up Malcolm X’s autobiography, I had tried to untangle the twin strands of black nationalism, arguing that nationalism’s affirm message – of solidarity and self-reliance, discipline and communal responsibility – need not depend on hatred of whites any more than it depended on white munificence. [. . .] 

If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.[1] 

This is what I would call a mature métis position, one which understands that the ego of aliens and half-castes is of infinitely less importance than the well-being of the community.[2] 

Obama, then, knows better. But he has chosen to be an American so-called “democratic politician” and, as Tocqueville eloquently wrote long ago, in American democracy the politicians, that is to say the government, are slaves of “public opinion.” In Tocqueville’s day, perhaps the People’s opinions were informed primarily by their life experience, their hard work and suffering, their churches, friends, and community, giving us a grand, pragmatic, and effective, if not very thoughtful, middlebrow bourgeois regime. 

Since at least the 1920s however, public opinion has been increasingly shaped by whichever ethnic and plutocratic elites control the mass media of news and entertainment. In America, the people do not rule. Rather, there is a slave-king, the president, and the kingmakers are those who control the media and finance political campaigns. 

Obama is in way out of his depth. He was a bright “international” kid who moved to America upon adulthood and was predictably alienated as a kind of foreigner and Black man who had never lived among Blacks (thanks notably to his deadbeat, alcoholic, polygamist, and Marxist absentee father, who died in his third drunk-driving accident). He claims to have consumed alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine to “push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.”[3] 

Obama then moved to a somewhat (only somewhat) more constructive reaction to his racial alienation: The rejection of White America/Europe and the embrace of Black America. Obama writes on touring Europe: “And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine.”[4] He admits to dumping a White girlfriend on racial grounds. Instead, he chose to meld into Black America, marry into a middle class Black family, move to Chicago, join a radical Black church, and spend a life agitating for the Black American race through “community organizing” and ethnic litigation. 

Obama in a sense chose Africa over Europe. He notes in Dreams the similarities between fatherless matriarchal Black households in Kenya and those on the South Side of Chicago . . . very mysterious. Personally, I don’t know how one could choose Europe over Africa (indeed, Obama’s also half-White half-brother in Kenya perhaps unsurprisingly identifies more with Whites). But to each his own. 

Obama’s Left-wing White mother apparently indoctrinated him while growing up with a romanticized image of Black America as synonymous with television’s presentation of the apparently orderly, thoughtful, and very pious suited-up Blacks of the ’60s civil rights movement. (Martin Luther King, Jr., that philandering socialist preacher – whom young Americans now rank higher in greatness than George Washington or Abraham Lincoln – surely is one of the greatest marketing coups of all time.) Obama curiously persevered in embracing Black America even when he learned it had nothing to do with the glamorous image of the civil rights movement. (Personally, I had a pang that something was amiss when seeing Martin Luther King’s descendants, who are not remotely as “presentable” for television.) If you want to know what the Black American id really is about, browse some World Star Hip Hop videos.[5] 

Obama learned that being a Black “community organizer” however is a tough hustle. You’re not working with very promising human capital, as they say. Instead, as a bright young man in the meritocratic American system, he naturally drifted to that which worked: Being a nice presentable “articulate” Black man for White liberals. And, by golly, do the liberals need more bright, “articulate” Blacks! 

So Obama was the first Black president of Harvard Law Review and received ample coverage for this little accomplishment. Oh sure, he’s only half-Black, and he’s a fresh-off-the-boat African and not an African-American descendant of slaves, and he was exclusively raised by his White family. But he’s technically Black™![6] 

Thus the Democratic Party and the media masters promoted the young Obama to be President of the United States of America. He had two assets: He had no accomplishments or power base whatsoever, and he was Black. Perfect. The inexperienced Illinois state senator (that does not mean much) was abruptly put in the spotlight at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to downplay his previous Black identity and project a glorious image of “post-racial America.” 

Oh yes, that was brilliant. Finally White liberals would be absolved of the guilt of Black America’s failure. Only the incredibly stubborn persistence of White racism, after all, could explain Blacks’ continued inability to do well in schools since the ’60s integration program or Blacks’ committing of half of murders in America. And, as even the CIA noted,[7] having a First Black President would allow the United States acquire a moralistic veneer to its continued imperialistic wars in the Middle East, its torture of Muslims and mass surveillance on American citizens,[8] and its destruction of Arab nations in support of Israel. The antiwar movement is dead, the wars continue, the fallout from the “financial crisis” is contained. Oh yes, the “First Black President,” it was brilliant! Brilliant! 

This is why superficial liberals – so hysterically opposed to George W. Bush, so happy to tolerate Obama’s imperial crimes and impotence in the face of plutocracy, and again frothing at the mouth at Donald Trump – are contemptible. 

Before you knew it, Obama was elected to office. Sure, he had to publicly tar-and-feather his poor dying White grandmother as a “racist” in order to redeem himself from association with his radical Black pastor Jeremiah Wright.[9] The White House is worth a grandma, n’est-ce-pas? 

Of course, Obama was dependent on the kingmakers in the mass media, Big Business, and the DC political class who had manufactured him. Well, you know who controls our mass media of news and entertainment. 

Here are Obama’s top 10 donors of 2008:[10]

1. University of California: $1,799,460
2. Goldman Sachs: $1,034,615
3. Harvard University: $900,909
4. Microsoft Corp: $854,717
5. JPMorgan Chase & Co: $847,895
6. Google Inc: $817,855
7. Citigroup Inc: $755,057
8. US Government [sic]: $638,335
9. Time Warner: $617,844
10. Sidney Austin LLP: $606,260 

To summarize: Obama is the creature of the metastasized academic-industrial complex of liberal indoctrination and day-care of twentysomething man-children, Wall Street (organized financial speculation and skimming of the American economy), tech (a new power factor), the media, etc., a representative slice of the American oligarchy. 

Really buying off a politician is quite cheap and, relative to the plutocrats’ growing concentration of wealth, is getting cheaper. 

Academia, news media, print media, and tech companies overwhelmingly donate to the political Left and according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency “Jewish donors provide between one-third and two-thirds of the [Democratic] party’s money.”[11] 

Without belaboring the point, Obama’s numerous handlers include David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, Jack Lew, and a bunch of minorities and White liberals who don’t matter. He appointed Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court and Janet Yellen as Chairman of the Federal Reserve (third in a row!). He even sent Stanley Fischer – after having rationalized the plunder of the Russian economy by his kinsmen in the 1990s and fresh from being president of the Central Bank of Israel [sic] – to help Yellen out as vice-chair.

Oh yes, tell us how Obama was going to shut down Wall Street, end the wars in the Middle East, and undo racism in America. The clever Levantines around Obama know all about racism: It’s good bidness, very good bidness. It’s amazing that the Paul Krugmans, the Jon Stewart Liebowitzes,[12] and all the other Social Democratic hucksters[13] of this world can still get the ever-smug, ever-fashionable, ever-ignorant White college students and the nice liberal cat ladies (who inevitably get ever-more bigoted with age) excited about Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – even as the same ethno-plutocratic elites command backstage through media control and campaign donations.

As Dieudonné once joked: “Talk to me about Obama! Make me dream!” 

Obama’s assuming office was definitely anti-climactic. I distinctly remember, during his inaugural speech, him having a look of “mission accomplished.” As though mere election of a Black man was the point, which was indeed the case. 

One of the biggest harms Obama has done to the Black American community, and indeed all Americanized Blacks everywhere, is to have eliminated the possibility of First-Black-President jokes. Blacks used to be able to lick their inevitably wounded racial egos with the idea that their failings were purely due to exclusion due to White racism. The more racism is shown not be the problem through achievements like Obama’s, the more Black pride is hurt. 

Before Obama, Blacks could fantasize about the days when there would be the First Black President and how, by this magical event, they would finally be free to act upon their whims and particularities. Richard Prior for instance performed an amusing skit as the First Black President in 1977[14] in which featured:

• Solemnly declaring MLK-style: “I think it’s time that Black people went to space.”[15]
• Beethoven would be replaced with Miles Davis.
• Huey Newton was appointed head of the FBI.
• Blacks would start becoming football quarterbacks, coaches, and owners, as opposed to just players (of course, four decades later, there has been no progress in this area).
• The First Black President slowly turns into a Black preacher.
• Public humiliation of an aroused White woman and a White Southern journalist.
• The First Black President philanders with White women, prompting “ooohs” of disapproval from Black women for his racial disloyalty. 

Good stuff. Black humor is good humor insofar as Blacks only find it funny if their lived truth is included (White liberals in contrast laugh at racial stereotypes on the assumption the unfashionable prejudice of the stereotypes is what is being mocked . . .).[16] 

Obama, in contrast, is pretty damn boring for a First Black President. Obama’s first public appearances as President were unbelievably stilted. He cannot fake interest and is easily bored. Only race and himself interest him. On every other topic, his every sentence is punctuated with copious “uhms,” “uhs,” and so on, visibly trying to remember the banal talking points he doesn’t care or even care to pretend to care about. In 2010, Big Business rallied and White America panicked at electing an agnostic post-Muslim/pseudo-Christian/post-Marxoid/post-Black Nationalist whozawutsit to the White House, hence putting the Republicans back in charge of Congress. 

It’s a tough grind. 

We are almost at the end of Obama’s second term in office. What has he accomplished? 

Firstly, Obama, as a Black man, had the courage (stop sniggering!) to present himself for election and win in the dark Bush years, thus proving the American people are not wholly racist. This is why the Norwegians gave him a Nobel Prize even before he had done anything, making for the first Affirmative Action Nobel as well as the first Affirmative Action President. 

Secondly, Obama passed the middle class tax shift and Obamacare, which are not without their merits. The tax shift undermined (gentile?) Big Business. Obamacare (the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”) enormously empowered the Federal Government, being effectively granted authority over the bloated regulatory chaos of state healthcare legislation and the Big Pharma/Big Insurance cartels, one sixth of the U.S. economy. There are few things as complex than a modern state-economy nexus and actually it is quite hard to gauge these sorts of things which, in a Weberian way, are much bigger than any individual like Obama (even Adolf Hitler was rather overwhelmed by the superstate and associated bureaucracies he created). The aim was clear however: A medical security net for the 47 million (or whatever) uninsured, among other things a transfer of resources from White America to Black America. Obamacare was also another milestone in the long march towards Social Democracy and the globalists’ dream of destroying the particularistic work of the Founding Fathers (other major milestones will include the de facto abolition of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, abolition of the First Amendment’s right to free speech, and the introduction of the metric system; America is to be “Europeanized,” which is fine if the government is indeed a solidary European one, as opposed to one whose “progressivism” is motivated by alien hostility). Obama’s supposed regulation of Wall Street and action on “climate change” also fall under the same category, of the inexhorable “statification” of the American economy. 

Thirdly, Obama was reelected as the First Black President, redeeming his tribe’s wounded pride forever. Don’t believe me? Look at him bawling in front of his campaign staff in 2012.[17] There again, “mission accomplished.” 

Perhaps I am being too harsh. Obama is no different from Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. They all answer to the same masters, though their emphasis may differ. There hasn’t been a U.S. president with any real character since probably Richard Nixon, hence his comments on Jews. 

President Clinton, an enthusiastic post-’60s nihilist, celebrated and prophesied the end of White America for the first time from the Executive bully-pulpit, rejoicing in European-Americans reduction to a vulnerable physical minority in the land founded by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. 

President Bush, a very good goy, thought himself mandated by God after 9/11 to wage a Crusade against radical Islam and “the Axis of Evil” [sic] (David Frum’s expression . . .), thus massively expanding the military-industrial complex and Surveillance State, and destroying Iraq, the then-leading enemy of Israel. The New York Times and rest of the controlled media were happy to egg Bush on initially and, as soon as the “mission accomplished” banner was up and things turned sour, was unceremoniously dumped by them. This was symbolized his humiliation at the 2006 White House correspondents’ dinner by Stephen Colbert, another very good goy.[18] Of course, the real architects of America’s pro-Israel foreign policy and military-plutocratic empire, the oligarchic masters of the politicians and the controlled media, were safely backstage . . . 

Bush too advocated White minorityhood and suicide in America. Immigration is good for bidness (in the short run, anyway), as he had learned as Governor of Texas. Besides, aren’t his nephews beautiful Mestizos? He advocated loans to make minorities homeowners regardless of their actual income or creditworthiness, paving the way for the financial crisis. “Conservative values are anti-racist!” Bush the “conservative” even approved of chaotic semi-centralization and bureaucratization of American education with “No Child Left Behind.” 

Yes, the Bushes are members of that often beautiful WASP patrician class, the closest thing America has had to an aristocracy since the Civil War, often worldly and multilingual, but which ultimately has always bent with the wind (hence grand-pappy Bush’s flirting with Hitler . . .) and has since completely degenerated. 

Then we come to Obama. Clinton and Bush have never claimed to stand up for the interests of White people. Obama too has never claimed to defend Whites, but he has claimed to defend Blacks and indeed has entertained outright Black Nationalism. 

But many Blacks have been asking Obama: “What have you done for me lately?”[19] That is a good question. 

Obama is actually far more than the First Black President. He is the first Cosmic President, the first truly post-American and global president, a, in his own words, half-caste “mutt” with no upbringing in the mainland United States.[20] That is his empty glory, his gloriole. His actions in office as an empty suit – an amiable figurehead for far, far greater ethnic, plutocratic, bureaucratic, and imperial forces – are irrelevant. He has already been given his supreme reward: Lifetime membership in that most select global club, which even Clinton does not have access to, let alone Bush. 

Yes, Obama is but one of the leading members of the Cosmic Aristocracy[21] manufactured by the media masters to condition the public for the emerging ethnic chaos and plutocratic domination of post-nationhood. That they associate raceless chaos with feel-good nonsense and a big deceptive smile, rather than the Balkanization, ethnic tensions, inequality, and destruction of everything we hold dear which is the reality of our ever-more “multicultural” societies. That the masses believe their television sets and radio stations and films – with which our people have spent many hours every single day since the 1960s – rather than own lying eyes. Not to mention the Marxist professors. 

Obama has much more to do with Beyoncé and Jay Z, Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian, or Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga, than with Abraham Lincoln or Malcolm X. “Lady Di” and the Kennedys are in the same genre. 

The point is, if Bush was a “cuckservative” (no surprise that he idolized Churchill above all), then Obama is an Uncle Tom. 

Hence, finally, his fourth set of accomplishments:

• The unconstitutional (even the courts are upset), indeed treasonous post facto legalization through Executive amnesty of the Mexican invasion.
• The egging on of so-called “Black Lives Matter” rioters in burning down their own neighborhoods in defense of Black criminals, and of shrill activists in wrecking their own universities.
• The softening of sentences against Black criminals and their release en masse from prison onto the streets.
• Forced racial integration of American suburbs (i.e. moving inner city Blacks away from gentrifying areas to powerless, innocent suburban White areas).

All of this is obviously deadly to White Americans, but does it help Black people either? Obviously not.

I would guess Obama, who is conscious of being a sell-out, is using what Executive power he has to do a little symbolic coddling of the Black community. This is unpardonable, because Obama – knowing the Black community inside and out, so to speak – is more than smart enough to know that that is not what it needs to reach its highest potential. Presumably he is doing it out of the self-destructive, instinctive kind of racial feeling which has made Black Nationalism an absolute disaster in Haiti, Liberia, and Zimbabwe. Or perhaps out of a more feminine instinct.

(Hysterical racial nationalism, a natural reaction of “purging” and refounding of the national body in times of crisis, does lead to chaos in the short-term. Mao’s China was a pretty horrible place. But notice that the Chinese, being a talented people, have since been lifting themselves up with astonishing speed. In contrast, Sub-Saharan African and African diaspora countries seem to at best maintain, precariously, the limited civilization they receive from the West, but that this can easily fall back into tribal chaos and a vicious cycle of permanent barbarism, which they have very, very great difficulty in overcoming.)

Already, Obama’s softening of disciplines on the Black community and the cultivation of their illusions has led to sharp increase in the murder rate in many cities, mostly of Blacks killing other Blacks.[22] How is that good for Blacks?

The young Obama wrote eloquently on the power of nationalism. He is intelligent and experienced enough his policies are destructive even of his own community. Every people reaches its highest potential only through solidarity: The solidarity of an elite willingly refraining from abusing their power with regard to the people, the solidarity of a people in respecting the elite’s disciplines in service of the public good, the solidarity of people with each other in promoting social justice, welfare, education, and so on, the solidarity of a loyal political minority in bowing before government policy, the solidarity of lessers respecting their betters, of betters acknowledging their responsibility to their lessers, etc.

That is the road to salvation, the source of the historic power and well-being of the great nation-states: a France, an America, a Germany, or even a Sweden (the Nordic country which Sanders, Krugman, and the other Social Democrats claim to love so much . . . I can think of least one prominent Austrian politician who had a far more credible plan to make the world more like Sweden[23]).

That is, the solidarity and selflessness of love of family, not the faux-solidarity of grievance-mongering and narcissism promoted by the Marxists (including the Social Democrats).

Every people, whatever their political system or condition, needs a certain enlightened, benevolent paternalism.

Obama’s collaboration in the steady destruction of the historic American nation is no different than that of Clinton or Bush’s. His destructive coddling of Black America and, indeed, legitimizing of a Hispanic invasion which also undermines Blacks is not fundamentally different in significance. Obama is perhaps, as a “mutt,” even more temperamentally suited to the idea of America Cósmico than his predecessors. As he told the self-styled explainer Jews at Vox: “[O]ver the long term, I’m pretty optimistic, and the reason is because this country just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks.”[24]

What a bunch of hogwash. Obama knows that’s BS and the liberal Zionists (paging Paul Krugman) know that’s BS. If universal miscegenation were a solution, Mexico and Brazil would be well-adjusted métis nations, not violent, unequal, semi-Balkanized mongrel hells. If Krugman were not a disingenuous fraud in his advocacy of “equality,” his kin would not so unbelievably “privileged” in the United States and elsewhere, that is to say, so superior in economic, cultural, and political power. If miscegenation were the solution, liberals Jews would not be so strangely tolerant of their Hassidic brethren or of the Zionist project’s excesses. (If Binyamin Netayahu’s Israel is their “insurance policy,” what’s ours?)

The point is, Obama is a non-thing. He’s just gone along with and put a little ribbon on the long-term project of destroying the œuvre of the Founding Fathers with the full statification of the American socio-economy, a permanent military-industrial, surveillance, and imperial state to destroy independent European nations and the enemies of Israel, and ultimately the final liquidation of the historic American nation through mass immigration.

Americans are to be turned into raceless, soulless, docile, frightened, effeminate hamsters, shuffling back and forth from the office (or simply passively receiving welfare), and consuming garbage (both at fast-food outlets and on television), ad infinitum. Only then will the state and the “international community” be safe. Rather like the Wachowsky brothers’ inspired vision, or logical deduction, of humans-as-battery-pods in The Matrix.

President Barack Hussein Obama II: the Cosmic Puppet who knew better, loyal neither to his Bantu nor Aryan forefathers.

He’s no Dieudonné, that’s for sure.

Notes

1. Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York City: Three Rivers Press, 2004, first published 1995), 198-200. On reading Obama’s memoir in plain English, see Steve Sailer, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance” (VDARE, 2008).

2. Obama rejected Black Nationalism only insofar as he considered, basically correctly, that it was economically unworkable, at least without foreign assistance.

3. “Obama gets blunt with N.H. Students,” Boston Globe, November 21, 2007. http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2007/11/21/obama_gets_blunt_with_nh_students/

4. Obama, Dreams, 301-302.

5. http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/

6. See: One-drop-rule.

7. Glenn Greenwald, “The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters,” Salon, March 27, 2010. http://www.salon.com/2010/03/27/wikileaks/

8. Curiously, Edward Snowden has in some circles acquired a saint-like status today not unlike that enjoyed by Obama in 2008.

9. Ben Shapiro, “Barack Obama Throws Grandma Under the Bus,” Town Hall, March 26, 2008. http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2008/03/26/barack_obama_throws_grandma_under_the_bus/page/full

10. Top Contributors to Barack Obama, 2008 cycle, Open Secrets. http://www.opensecrets.org/PRES08/contrib.php?cid=N00009638

11. Guillaume Durocher, “White Nationalism Explained in Charts, Part III: Jewish Privilege,” North American New Right, December 3, 2015. https://counter-currents.com/2015/12/white-nationalism-explained-with-charts-part-iii-jewish-privilege/

12. Liebowitz himself has been replaced by a South African Cosmic Mixling at The Daily Show, but ratings have suffered, presumably the former viewers were racists.

13. The liberal Jews (Krugman) argue that if people like Bill de Blasio and Bernie Sanders are elected, then racial inequality and tensions in America will disappear. De Blasio, however, will obviously not significantly reduce New York City’s residential and school segregation, which is the worst in the country. Chairman Sanders’ Marxian socialism will obviously not increase Black school performance, reduce that of Asians, or even mention his own people’s role in the plutocratic/Wall Street elites he loves to condemn.

14. Richard Pryor, “The First Black President,” 1977. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaXxl5Pc6As

15. Mohammed Ali was very, very proud of riding in an African airplane in Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaïre. The Zaïrois nuclear program, not to speak of the space program, has run into some kinks however.

16. Black comedians often provide the most staggeringly politically-incorrect material, such as Richard Pryor on Black criminals, Dave Chapelle on welfare and reparations for Blacks, Chris Rock on instinctive Black racial pride, or Aaron McGruder’s entire œuvre, from commentary on Black violence (“nigga moments”) and the paradoxes of combined-and-uneven development between high technology and dysgenics (“nigga tech”)

17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pB6vqb2fnY Of course, the First Black President’s reelection campaign staff were “almost uniformly White.” Mytheos Holt, “‘Almost Uniformly White’: How Diverse Is Obama’s Campaign Staff, Really?,” The Blaze, April 9, 2012. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/04/09/almost-uniformly-white-how-diverse-is-obamas-campaign-staff-really/

18. John Oliver, another Liebowitz spawnling, is another nauseatingly disgusting good goy.

19. For example this Jamaican newspaper columnist: George Garwood, “What has Barack Obama done for black people?,” Jamaica Observer, December 16, 2014.

20. Matt Parrot, “Cosmic America,” North American New Right, December 13, 2010. https://counter-currents.com/2010/12/cosmic-america/

21. Supposing I have not desecrated the word by using it in this manner.

22. Monica Davey and Mitch Smith, “Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities,” New York Times, August 31, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/us/murder-rates-rising-sharply-in-many-us-cities.html

23. Not to mention quite a few 1920s American immigration restrictionists.

24. Ezra Klein, “Obama: The Vox Conversation,” Vox, February 9, 2015. http://www.vox.com/a/barack-obama-interview-vox-conversation/obama-domestic-policy-transcript