In Trump, some Obama backers see a new champion of hope and change

By Marc Fisher August 5 at 9:35 PM

Eight years ago, they voted for the outsider, the excitingly different candidate who dared to say that the system wasn’t working, the man who spoke of hope and change. This year, they’re voting for the outsider, the excitingly different candidate who dares to say that the system isn’t working, the man who promises to make America great again.

They are Obama-Trump voters, and though the concept strikes many people in both parties as kind of weird, the people making those choices say they’re being quite consistent. In 2008, they wanted someone to shake things up, put the focus back on the middle class, reverse the country’s depressing sense of decline and stick it to the powers that be. This year, they still want the same things.

When a silver-tongued young senator from Illinois electrified huge crowds at rallies across the country in 2008, Lynette Anderson, a high school teacher watching from home in Kenosha, Wis., thought: “This is a guy who can move mountains, especially on race relations. He wasn’t entrenched, and I felt he had nothing to lose. As the first black president, and someone pretty new to the Washington political game, I thought he would take care of stuff, break some china.”

But President Obama disappointed Anderson, who is now a guidance counselor at a pre-engineering high school. “He turned out to be the same old same old,” she said. The candidate who spoke eloquently on behalf of people who had been left behind by technological and economic change, who pledged to unite a polarized nation, turned out to be just another politician who couldn’t push through the paralysis in Washington, Anderson said.

-snip-

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-trump-some-obama-backers-see-a-new-champion-of-hope-and-change/2016/08/05/6ba433b8-5986-11e6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html