It seems only fitting that Barack Obama would end his relevant political career the way he began it: peddling racial hoaxes.
On the final day of early voting in Wisconsin, Obama made a speech there that was less about praising Kamala Harris than it was about slandering Donald Trump.
As a sign of some desperation, Obama relied on tropes that had not just been debunked. They had been slam-debunked, even by fact checkers on his own side.
Donald Trump, Obama told the anxious crowd, suggested “any Mexican crossing the border is a criminal and a rapist.” Trump “instituted a so-called Muslim ban.” And yes, that oldie but goodie, Trump “said that there were ‘very fine people on both sides’ of a white supremacist rally.”
As Michelle Obama opined on Facebook just two years ago, “I never could have imagined that the phrase ‘when they go low, we go high’ would become synonymous with my name.”
“For a long time,” Michelle added, “‘going high’ was a simple mantra that Barack and I used to encourage each other. … Tell the truth, do your best by others, keep perspective, and find a way to stay tough through it all.”
Hogwash. For the last 30 years, this pair of grifters has advanced their careers by lying about who they were and how the world treated them.
In 1994, to help him launch his political career as an Illinois state senator, the Obamas turned to friend and neighbor terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers.
Obama would later lie about their relationship, but at the time he needed Ayers’ editorial help with the memoir that would forever define his persona, “Dreams from My Father.”
Whether it was Ayers’ idea or Obama’s to – in the words of friendly biographer David Remnick – “darken the canvas” or “heighten whatever opportunity arises” to score a racial point, the deed was done.
At exactly the wrong moment, Ayers crawled into Obama’s head and shielded his charge from his better angels.
Ayers had the chance to help Obama establish himself as his own man, but instead he insisted that, to be authentic, a black man must rage at the machine.
If Obama argued for redemption through self-help, his core supporters, black and white, would deny him his authenticity. For someone who had struggled so long and hard to establish a racial identity, that denial was scarier than electoral defeat.
As a result, throughout the book and throughout his political career, Obama would “darken the canvas” whenever necessary to convince genuine African Americans that their struggle was his.
In July 2009, Obama had a chance to ease racial stress in America as he had implicitly promised on the campaign trail, but he did quite the opposite.
Returning to his home after a trip to China, Obama friend and Harvard professor Louis Henry Gates had to force open the back door of his house to gain entry. Trying to be a good neighbor, a woman called Cambridge Police to report a potential break-in.
When Officer James Crowley arrived at the scene he explained he was investigating a report of a break-in in progress. Gates shot back, “Why, because I am a black man in America?”
When Crowley asked Gates to speak with him outside, Gates shot back, “I’ll speak with your mama outside.” Gates kept at it and was arrested for disorderly conduct.
Upon hearing of the arrest, and knowing none of the details, Obama insisted that the Cambridge police had acted “stupidly.” In explaining why he instinctively sided with Gates, Obama did a “quick inventory” of his own grievances.
In his second memoir, “A Promised Land,” Obama talks of “unmerited traffic stops,” of being followed by store security, and of hearing “the sound of car locks clicking as I walked across a street, dressed in a suit and tie, in the middle of the day.”
I’ll buy the unmerited stops. Just about every time the police have pulled me over it was unmerited. At least I thought so. As to the clicking car locks, with that claim Obama imagined a Chicago very nearly as fantastic as Jussie Smollett’s.
After the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, in March 2012, Obama had another opportunity to ease racial tension.
Again, he did just the opposite, lending his imprimatur to one of the most destructive racial hoaxes in recent American history.
In an election year like 2012, in a battleground state like Florida, the message of black victimization, repeated endlessly, worked much better in a stagnant economy than did hope and change.
With Obama’s help, the media turned a violent 6-foot-tall mixed martial artist into a little boy and an Hispanic Obama supporter and civil rights activist into a crazed white supremacist.
The day after George Zimmerman’s rightful acquittal in the self-defense death of Trayvon, Black Lives Matter was formed. Obama said nothing to discourage the mayhem BLM would wreak on black America.
That’s how things have worked in Obama’s America. Those days, happily, have come to an end.
