Sorry, but Obama was never running the show
The Newsweek headline – “Democrat Trashes Barack Obama for Not Endorsing Kamala Harris: ‘Truly Sad,'” – shows just how wrong conventional wisdom has been on Obama’s role in the Biden ascendancy.
The Clintons and Alex Soros, newly engaged to Hillary’s BFF Huma Abedin, badly outmaneuvered the former president. They likely knew Biden was quitting the race before Biden did and signaled their endorsement of Harris before Obama could slip on his Baja’s.
The best Obama could come up with in reply was a lame, “We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead. But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.”
As Joel Gilbert has argued in his convincing film and book, “Michelle Obama 2024,” Barack and his cronies had been laying the groundwork for a Michelle candidacy since her keynote speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, if not before.
To resurrect Michelle at this stage, Obama will have to make some tsunami-sized waves in these uncharted waters. It is not in his nature to do so, but in their gender-fluid household, it may be in hers.
During Biden’s tenure, I argued that Obama had neither the will nor the temperament to be Biden’s puppet master. Although I had no backstage pass to White House shenanigans, I had written four books on Obama, most notably 2011’s “Deconstructing Obama” and 2020’s “Unmasking Obama.”
In hindsight, it is remarkable how much ink has been spilled about a man the media – left and right – understood so little.
Jack Cashill’s new book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” is now available in all formats.
They failed to understand the reality of the Obama presidency in part because of their failure to understand the political transformation that occurred during Obama’s tenure in the White House.
“Liberalism,” as understood in the post-war era, died on Obama’s watch. Replacing it was “progressivism.” This was much more than a casual rebranding. If liberals could envision a harmonious future, benign and paternal, orderly and safe, progressives could not.
“Progressive,” in fact, represents the rare bit of leftist nomenclature not cushioned by euphemism. At the risk of tautology, progressives “progress.”
Like the sharks of our imagination, the newly “woke” move forward or they die. If liberals are to have any relevance, they follow, however uneasily, in the shark’s wake. Obama was always a follower, never a leader.
In the post-Soviet era, with no one hand-guiding the international left, American progressives have moved forward on numerous fronts: black, brown, green, feminist, LGBT, Islamic, globalist, and socialist.
Despite all the talk of external manipulation from the likes, say, of a George Soros, the evolution of these movements has been largely organic with the civil rights movement serving as paradigm.
If Obama led none of the left’s movements, he enabled them all. A bi-racial, quasi-Muslim, quasi-Marxist dissembler of dubious sexuality, he almost perfectly fronted his party’s embrace of identity politics.
Obama learned from leftist mentors throughout his life and sampled a wide range of socialist causes before finding himself, like a turtle on a fence post, keynoting the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Obama’s bourgeois lifestyle and cool demeanor made him all the more effective as a front man for a movement that had grown increasingly strident, even punitive. He was prepared to sell what he lacked the stomach to lead.
For eight years, he would serve as the nation’s conscience-in-chief, assigning liberal doses of shame to those who defied America’s promised transformation, and encouragement to those who promoted it.
But a front man is all Obama would ever be. Although immersed in leftist causes since childhood, he never left the shallow end of the pool. A puppet himself, he could never be the puppet master.
His people may have wanted a Michelle presidency, but they lacked the muscle to make it happen. They brought pepper spray to a coup in progress, unaware the Clintons got there first with the guns.
When the curtain falls, we may never know who the grand puppet master actually is, but for now, at least, we know who it’s not.
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