{UAH} OBAMA CAN'T CREDIBLY RACIALIZE HIS PARTY'S FAILURES

Obama can't credibly racialize his party's failures 

 November 22, 2020 12:00 AM

Former President Barack Obama continues to believe the world revolves around him.

In his new book, among other fanciful claims, he argues that the election of a black man shocked a thoroughly racist country and prompted it to react by electing a president who appealed to racial resentment.

“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” Obama writes. “For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”

Narcissism is Obama’s blind spot, and here, it clearly walks him into a crash.

First of all, this may come as a surprise, but Obama was reelected. Not that his defeat in 2012 would have vindicated his thesis here, but in the circumstance, he seems forced to take the ridiculous position that the nation’s racism was on at least a five-year delay. At some point in 2013, everyone presumably woke up and cried out at once, “Wait, what? The president’s been black all this time?”

This isn’t the only problem with Obama’s attempt to racialize the failures of his party and his legacy. For example, one can hardly blame voters’ racism for President Trump’s win when so many of the same voters who had backed Obama twice — particularly in Democratic areas of the Midwest — turned right around and voted for Trump in shocking, game-changing numbers. Were they shocked at their own votes to elect and reelect Obama? Or is Obama just wrong here?

Another convincing rebuttal of Obama's argument is his election history. The public actually liked Obama — the black guy — more than other Democrats, which explains why he persistently outperformed his party. And unfortunately for the thousands of (mostly white) Democrats in state and federal politics who lost elections between 2010 and 2016, the black president’s popularity never transferred to them or to the party agenda they shared.

Besides, it is much more likely that those voters’ support for Trump had less to do with Obama than it did with Trump’s opponent. Hillary Clinton was one of the nation’s most loathed politicians — a proven liar reeking of corruption. But it may not have been that complicated. Perhaps Clinton, like all other viable Democratic candidates, was just never going to inspire the same level of turnout among black voters that Obama had.

Go figure. Not everything is about Obama. But it is pathetic to see Obama embrace the leftist habit — a habit he had at least rhetorically rejected in The Audacity of Hope — of groundlessly attributing malice and bad faith to anyone who disagrees with his party or his ideology. During his presidency, the Left embraced race as its crutch that any disagreement with Obama is racism to the point that its thinking parts atrophied. But at least Obama seemed to stay above the fray.

No longer. A gray and newly irrelevant Obama has every reason to be bitter now. His personal triumph failed to transform the nation as he had promised. He left behind him a party, which was a dominant majority party in 2008, a withered husk from top to bottom, desiccated in every office, from Congress to state legislatures.

Democrats are already loath enough to admit that their ideology or party would lose favor with voters. But their brains simply cannot process the idea that the voters, many of them ancestral Democrats of long pedigree, would find them so distasteful as to prefer Trump.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
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                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
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