WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING

The Democrats who want to be president can’t quite figure out how to talk about the most popular figure in their party. Former President Barack Obama casts a long shadow over the 2020 primary campaign: Preserving Obama’s legacy is the heart of former Vice President Joe Biden’s pitch to voters — which has allowed his rivals to mark him as complacent. More left-leaning candidates, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), say the next president needs to do more to push for health care reforms and combat income inequality …

To the dismay of many on the left, and to the continuing disbelief of many on the right, Obama never dramatically departed from the approach of presidents who came before him.

There’s a simple reason: Barack Obama is a conservative.

The difficulty Democratic candidates have in grappling with Obama reflects the dissonance he’s generated for a decade: The center-left adores him, but to the far left, he’s a sellout. He’s being rethought on the center-right, but he remains the bete noire of the far right, which morphed from the (putatively) government-hating tea party wing to a strongman-loving core.

It’s largely due to an enduring misunderstanding of what Obama represented. Notwithstanding the “Change we can believe in” slogan that propelled his rise, his aim was never to turn things upside down. … That has forced Democrats to sort out who they are — and how to fuse Obama’s appeal with an agenda that reaches further than he ever tried, or intended, to go.

David Swerdlick, The Washington Post