Those of you familiar with my work know that I’ve written two political books — The Revivalist Manifesto, which was a treatise of sorts on how conservatism needs to undergo a bit of a rebranding and learn to develop an uptempo political offense, and Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama.
I made the argument, surrounding the latter title, that it wasn’t a history book. I said that Barack Obama was the most consequential figure in American politics, and had been since 2008.
Greatly to our detriment as a country, without a doubt.
But now, after the results of Tuesday night, I think that can finally change.
I think my Obama book might be historical after all. Finally.
In yesterday’s column, I said that Trump’s reelection signaled Obama’s denouement, and upon reflection, I think that’s going to prove true.
There are a number of data points that suggest this. One of which was a story that popped Thursday morning at Politico about how Joe Biden’s people and Obama’s people are at each other’s throats over Kamala Harris’ loss. You might have to push aside your gloating in order to drill down on this one, but:
But the momentum advisers insisted she’d built [during her convention] failed to materialize. She never sufficiently buried Biden’s ghost, severely hamstringing her ability to sell voters on the idea that hers was the turn-the-page candidacy.
It happened, simply, because Harris refused to make a clean break from the last four years when voters indicated that’s what they wanted. Worse, she hesitated to draw any daylight between herself and her boss on Biden’s biggest vulnerability — his stewardship over the economy — nor identify any specific way her presidency would be different from his tenure beyond naming a Republican to her Cabinet.
The thing to understand is that Kamala Harris’ team was Obama’s team. Biden’s team was mostly Obama veterans, but those were the guys left behind when Obama and Nancy Pelosi engineered the coup that got rid of Biden from the Democrats’ ticket.
The whole thing is hilarious, really, because it was Joe Biden who, in his dying political breath after Obama and Pelosi had killed his reelection hopes, endorsed Harris and thus stuck them with her.
And Biden then repeatedly sabotaged Harris’ campaign with gaffes and more, er, purposeful actions.
Would Team Obama have opted for Harris as their puppet of choice had Biden not saddled them with a cackling nincompoop San Francisco communist who’d slept her way to the middle and DEI’ed her way to the top? It’s possible, but one can’t help but harbor doubts. There were rumblings that Obama liked Mark Kelly, the ex-astronaut Arizona senator, better as a front man for their operation.
But Democrats have a lot of trouble telling a black woman no at this point. That’s part of what Obama brought to the table, and it’s part of why the Team Obama project has collapsed into a steaming heap.
Kamala Harris wasn’t qualified to be president, for crying out loud. She wasn’t qualified to be vice president either. She spent four years proving that, and then they launched an utterly ridiculous campaign so contemptuous of the rubes they think the American people are that it was breathtaking to watch.
This runaway DEI train was Obama’s creation. It’s hilarious that it has resulted in the loss of key chunks of the Democrats’ traditional base. Black men turned out to have less affinity for Harris than leftist white women did.
The Harris campaign tried to sum itself up as the campaign of “joy,” which was reminiscent of the saccharine “hope and change” slogan Obama subjected us to. They tried to sell us on a “vibe” and made Harris into a cultural figure more than a political one.
That fell utterly and completely flat. Especially when Harris wasn’t able to acquit herself even at a state level as a candidate in softball interviews and people quickly realized what a joke this entire enterprise was.
Tabbing the rather implausible and very much “off” Tim Walz as the vice presidential pick is being recognized as a fatal mistake that was supposedly Harris’ call. But those blaming that decision for Harris’ loss are missing the forest for the trees. She picked Walz instead of Josh Shapiro because that’s who she is.
Kamala Harris is an idiot. She makes idiotic decisions accordingly. Yes, Walz was an idiotic decision, but that’s what Harris was capable of.
And it wouldn’t have gone much better with Shapiro anyway. Could he have carried Pennsylvania? Maybe, but without Michigan and Wisconsin, that wouldn’t have mattered.
And Harris and Shapiro would likely have been in open disagreement, because unlike Kamala Harris, Josh Shapiro is not an idiot.
He’s also not a puppet.
It’s fun to pick apart the clownish disaster that was the Harris campaign, a disaster that was engineered by Team Obama from the beginning. But what we’re actually discussing is the end of Team Obama, and so we should give that the attention it’s due.
I’ve written that Harris is a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of Obama. She’s a very poor imitation of him. While Obama may have had soaring rhetoric light on substance, Harris spoke in muddled word slaws from which no meaning whatsoever was discernible. While Obama came off as cool, Harris came off as trifling. Obama promised a “fundamental transformation” of America, and accomplished it much to the public’s displeasure, while Harris boasted “We’re not going back.”
It was warmed-over Obamunism, complete with a host of radical woke policy proposals the country has always rejected.
Let’s remember that Obama left the country far worse off than he found it. Because of course he did. All of his policies were malign, born of a profound hatred for America as founded that pervades the mind of every Obama Democrat who thinks slaves built America on stolen Indian land.
And now that Harris has lost, we get the completely predictable scoldings from the Left’s favored media shills and others about racism and sexism. Interestingly enough, those attacks aren’t just on straight white males anymore. Now it’s Latino and black men being upbraided for their insufficient wokeness in failing to turn out for Kamala.
You can’t get more Obamunist than that, can you? Pushing radicalism and leftist cultural, economic, and political aggressions nobody really asked for while denouncing detractors as racists, sexists, and bigots of other stripes was perhaps the leading hallmark of Obama politics. What they’ve found, though, is that after 16 years, people are sick of it.
I’ve also written that Trumpism is the cure for Obamunism, just as Obamunism was the antidote to Bush Republicanism. Obama came along with an obnoxious, hyper-aggressive “punch harder” style of Chicago politics, never waiting for consensus to form when he could push leftist fetishes like socialized medicine, unlimited abortion, climate change nonsense, and the like. And the old GOP “Washington Generals” aristocracy, who just wanted a belly rub from the Washington Post and gave not a fig for the interests of the voters back home, had no answer for it.
But Trump actually does care about the voters back home, and he’s made a sizable production of that fact. And in his first term Trump acted on that, which created a base of Republican votes more loyal to him than any GOP politician since Reagan.
Could Trump beat Obama in a head-to-head race? It’s probably not a fair question, seeing as though they’re products of slightly different eras. But Obamunism doesn’t hold up well to the kind of pressure Trump puts on Democrats, and that’s why Trump has now beaten two of Obama’s surrogates, with that anomalous 81 million votes Biden saw delivered to his basement in 2020 looking ever more suspicious.
And now the Democrats’ civil war begins, as their overdue time in the wilderness will sort out what comes next in their party. Regardless of who becomes their leading figure, it won’t be Barack Obama calling their shots, because Obama’s bench of puppets is empty. Kamala proved that. The others, like Shapiro and maybe Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer, all have egos far too large than to serve as a packhorse for Obamunism.
It’s over. And no, J.B. Pritzker isn’t waddling forth to save it.
Oh, the Democrats will be back. There’s far too much money in those PACs and NGOs that the Soros networks will deploy to let them die on the vine. Something else will be constructed to combat Trump’s second term, and it’ll almost certainly be as fearsome as it is loathsome.
But the Obama style is played out. The public is exhausted with being censored, name-called, canceled, and propagandized by the same old crew, and it doesn’t work anymore.
And with Obama shunted off to his Martha’s Vineyard exile and the Democrats forced to suffer through an ugly internecine knife fight, a real revival can begin.
Welcome to the golden age. And say goodbye to Obama, whose time of consequence is over.
READ MORE:
A Dozen Thoughts on a Historic Election
The Bullet We Dodged, the Miracles We Experienced, the Idiot We Faced
The post It’s the End of the Obama Era in America. Good Riddance. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
