Hillary Clinton's name may be on the ballot, but liberal ideals and progress on health care, climate change, Wall Street reform and more are truly up for a vote Tuesday, according to President Barack Obama.
The president sat down with Bill Maher this week for a taped interview that aired on the comic's long-running HBO series, "Real Time With Bill Maher." After very public lobbying, the outspoken stand-up landed his sitdown with Obama and used the opportunity to ask about drug law reform, Donald Trump, food safety, media coverage and more.
Obama believes a vote for Trump "would be badly damaging to this country, and it would be damaging to the world." He has little patience for third-party voters or those intending to sit out the election, explaining that doing so "is a vote for Trump." In many ways, Obama's personal legacy is on the line Tuesday.
"The choice in this election should be really clear," the president said. "Listen, all of the progress we've made on climate change, the Paris agreement, the HFC (hydrofluorocarbons) agreement, aviation agreement, the 20 million people that have health care now that didn't have it before...all of the progress that we've made in trying to check the excesses of Wall Street...Any chance of immigration reform. Every single issue we've made progress on in the last eight years is going to be on the ballot in the form of this choice," Obama told Maher.
The president doesn't have patience for criticism of Hillary Clinton as insufficiently progressive to the voters who fueled Senator Bernie Sanders' rise.
"Hillary is someone who cares about these issues, she does her homework, she cares deeply about ordinary folks. Her policies are aligned with yours and mine. Yes, she's someone who believes in compromise...but you know what, that is the way this democracy works. Anyone sitting on the sidelines now or deciding to engage in a protest vote? That's a vote for Trump."
Maher, an outspoken marijuana legalization advocate, asked the president about his seeming reluctance to fight to end the drug war, at least toward marijuana, which is on the ballot this week in several states. Obama admitted that the dangers of smoking gives him pause, but he does believe the nation should treat drugs "as a public health problem.
"There is this enormous public health effort to get kids to not start smoking. And make sure the parents felt guilty if they were passing on that habit with their kids. So that's where I think we need to go with pot, alcohol. So I don't think legalization is a panacea but I think that we're going to need to have a more serious conversation about how we're treating marijuana and our drug laws generally," Obama said.
Maher and Obama also spoke about the current media landscape and how the proliferation of partisan media contributes to a lack of understanding or "baseline of facts" among many voters.
"When I leave here, one of the things I'm most concerned about is the balkanization of the media...People have difficulty now sorting out what's true and what's not. And if you don't have some common baseline of facts...it's very hard to figure out how we move the democracy forward.
"If I watched Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me either. You've got this screen, this fun-house mirror through which people are receiving information. How to break through that is a big challenge," Obama said.
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