&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "'This leader has perpetuated war': El-Sayed’s Obama criticism resurfaces ahead of US Midterm campaign rally")
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed's criticism of former US President Barack Obama has came into limelight after it was announced that Obama will campaign for him later this month. El-Sayed criticized Obama's presidency several times as a failure, saying it left the country no "better off." Former President Obama will campaign alongside El-Sayed in Detroit on Oct 24. Kamala Harris, former vice president, campaigned with El-Sayed last month. From 2012 to 2020, El-Sayed blamed Obama for war and termed his Affordable Care Act as ‘insufficient’. He went on to argue that Obama's incremental approach helped create the conditions for Donald Trump's rise. El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers in a tight Michigan Senate race that could help determine control of the chamber.
In a 2012 HuffPost essay written shortly after Obama won reelection, El-Sayed said he voted for him. But accused the president of failing to deliver the "hope and change" that defined his 2008 campaign. "This leader has perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people from our shores than any other president before him, and the list of his failures goes on," he wrote. El-Sayed opined that he had voted for Obama because it was the ‘lesser of two evils.’
In a now deleted tweet, El-Sayed said he could disagree with "many" of Obama's decisions and believed the country was "not better off" after his presidency while still viewing Obama as "competent, coherent, and committed to Americans." While running for governor of Michigan in 2020, El-Sayed again distanced himself from Obama in a 2017 interview with Vox titled 'Don't call this man 'the next Obama. El-Sayed said there were "a lot of things I disagree with President Obama on" in both domestic and foreign policy and described Obama's politics as “fairly centrist, middle-of-the-road Democratic policies.”
