Tulsi Gabbard: belief

Transcript context

…… on many fronts. But to me, that guy did really good. Maybe some people say just rhetoric, but I think rhetoric matters in your president. I think he was out of all the presidents we had as probably the most effective uniter of the people. Would that be fair to say? During his 2008 campaign, yes. I think that his message resonated with so many people across generations and across different views, different backgrounds to where people cried on the night that he was elected because they felt so hopeful. I talked to people, and I know people who set aside their entire lives to work on his campaign to be a part of this hope and change mission that he laid out that would bring us together. Some of the people that I know personally, they gave up their lives during the campaign, and after he won, they went to Washington, DC, because they wanted to be able to do the work that they had that he had laid out and continue to be a part of this mission that they expected would extend beyond the campaign. And they’ve expressed to me personally how heartbroken they were because so quickly after he was elected, instead of bringing in a new generation of fresh leadership that was not a part of the Washington establishment, he instead immediately chose to surround himself with people who were more of the same old, same old. Who were essentially part of the problem. And many of his actions after that proved that fear and that brokenheartedness that they felt to be true. I’ll mention one example related to civil liberties that we talked about. He was someone as a US senator who gave some pretty powerful speeches on the Senate floor about his concerns with the Patriot Act, his concerns with surveillance from the NSA, his concerns with a violation of our Fourth Amendment Rights and civil liberties. But when, as president, he was confronted with leaked information about this surveillance occurring under those authorities in his presidency, he sided… he took the side of the national security state and did not take action to right the wrongs that he correctly pointed out as senator and during his campaign for the presidency, which is unfortunate because he really did build this unifying momentum throughout his campaign. What do you think that is? Why is it so hard as a president to kind of act on the promises of the campaign? But also just, I mean, his speech is basically anti-war speech that really resonated to me. The fact that he was against the war in Iraq early on.…

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