Barack Obama: ‘Everybody needs to chill out about the candidates’

Former President Barack Obama said Thursday that Democrats need to “chill out” with analyzing every difference between the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates and focus more on rallying behind “whoever emerges” as the star.

Speaking to a crowd of tech billionaires in Los Altos Hills, California, the former president said Democrats needed to support whoever the party chooses as its nominee, even if he or she is not “your perfect candidate,” Vox reported.

“I don’t care,” Mr. Obama said.

“Everybody needs to chill out about the candidates,” he said. “But gin up about the prospect of rallying behind whoever emerges from this process and making sure that we’re hitting the ground running.”

“We will not win just by increasing the turnout of the people who already agree with us completely on everything,” he added, the Associated Press reported. “Which is why I am always suspicious of purity tests during elections. Because, you know what, the country is complicated.”

Mr. Obama said that “the truth of the matter” is that every Democratic hopeful wants health care, education, and climate change reform.

“The choice is so stark and the stakes are so high that you cannot afford to be ambivalent in this race,” he said. “I want us to make sure that we keep in mind, relative to the ultimate goal — which is to defeat a president and a party that has I think taken a sharp turn away from a lot of the core traditions and values and institutional commitments that built this country — compared to that goal, the differences we’re having right now are relatively minor.”