Thanks, Obama!

About

“Thanks, Obama!” is a sarcastic expression used by critics of President Barack Obama to blame personal troubles and inconveniences on public policies supported or enacted by the administration. The phrase is often used to caption animated GIFs in which the subject appears to be struggling with a rather simple task, satirizing those who scapegoat Obama as the cause of problems for which he has little or no influence.

Origin

On December 17th, 2009, the conservative political blog Authentic Connecticut Republican^[1] published a post highlighting a demotivational poster of a young girl making a “middle finger” gesture with the caption “Thanks, Obama” (shown below).

Spread

On March 10th, 2011, YouTuber SecretAgentBob uploaded a video in which a woman threatens a man’s life with a knife, to which he sarcastically responds “Thanks, Obama!” (shown below). The video received over 390,000 views and 2,400 comments within the next two years.

On August 23rd, the “Everything is Barack Obama’s Fault” Quickmeme^[8] page was created, featuring a photo of a sullen-looking President Obama with captions listing petty grievances, followed by “Thanks Obama” (shown below).

On November 20th, 2012, Redditor ronaldo95 submitted a post^[7] featuring an animated infomercial FAILGIF of a man dropping several items from a food tray and the caption reading “Thanks, Obama” (shown below). Within three months, the post garnered more than 3,600 up votes and 100 comments, as well as inspiring dozens of derivative instances based on other infomercial GIFs from the /r/wheredidthesodego^[6] subreddit.

On December 5th, Redditor filmisbone submitted a post titled “Lately, Republicans blame everything on Obama” to the /r/gifs^[4] subreddit, featuring an animated GIF of a man knocking over a snack food bowl. Within two months, the post received over 7,000 up votes and 265 comments. The same day, Redditor kvachon submitted the first post^[5] to the /r/ThanksObama^[3] subreddit, featuring an animated GIF of a woman having a difficult time using plastic wrap (shown below, right).

Within two months of creation, the /r/ThanksObama subreddit accumulated over 14,500 subscribers and 250 submissions. On December 6th, the “Thanks Obama” Tumblr^[2] blog was launched, which highlighted over 60 notable examples from the /r/ThanksObama subreddit over the next seven weeks. On January 11th, 2013, the International Business Times^[9] reported that Twitter users were expressing outrage toward Obama’s tax increases on the middle class by tweeting sarcastic comments with the phrase “Thanks Obama.”