The Patriot Post® · Obama Got Trounced in the 2024 Election
In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer. There wasn’t much detail in the idea; I didn’t know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where [Ronald] Reagan and his minions where carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That’s what I’ll do, I’ll organize black folks. —Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father
Oops.
If you think Kamala Harris was the biggest loser in last week’s electoral shellacking, think again.
Harris was always a loser, always a DEI hire, always a political lightweight. And even though her handlers and her hired guns from Hollywood nearly whisked her across the finish line before the American people got wise to the game, they ultimately failed.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, was supposed to be the A team. His presence on the campaign trail was meant to rally the Democrat base and dissuade those misguided young black men from doing the unthinkable, from voting for Donald Trump. Despite the fact that he was born in Hawaii and was raised by a white mom and never knew the real hardship of Black America, he was supposed to be able to scold “the bruthas” for not dutifully falling in line behind Harris. “We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all corners of our neighborhoods and communities,” he said, “as we saw when I was running.”
Oops.
As it turns out — once again, as it has numerous times before — Obama’s charisma and compelling rhetoric aren’t transferrable. They work for him but not other pols. This makes sense because, as president, his personal popularity always outpolled his leftist policies.
Somewhere along the way, Barack Obama passed his freshness date. He began spending too much time at his mansions in DC and Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii. He began thinking too much about his legacy and not enough about “community organizing” as he did in that passage from Bill Ayers’s ghostwritten Dreams From My Father. He got moldy. He jumped the shark.
As Josh Boswell writes in the UK’s Daily Mail: “Barack Obama and his wife Michelle have been slammed by his biographer for ‘talking down’ to voters in ‘tone-deaf and clueless’ preaching that harmed Kamala Harris’ ill-fated presidential campaign. The effect was so bad that — combined with Donald Trump’s victory — it is likely to reduce the 44th president’s political relevance to ‘Bill Clinton levels,’” said his 71-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, David Garrow.
“People do not want to be talked down to, no matter who they are,” Garrow added.
Barack Obama could always get away with condescension, could always do that Mussolini chin thing. But no more. Last Tuesday’s 312-226, three-million-vote thumping of Kamala Harris was the ultimate repudiation of Obama and the left-elitism he stands for.
“A Harris Victory Means a Fourth Obama Term,” went the headline of a piece from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board a week before the election. And who can argue? Obama had of late committed himself to the task, had taken to the stage with his vaunted rhetorical gifts to provide Harris with that extra oomph she needed for victory. The editors write:
Ms. Harris has presented herself as new based largely on her biography. But as far as policies and coalition go, she represents more of the same, and not merely of the last four years. Her candidacy is best understood as an attempt to continue the progressive political wave that began in 2006 with the GOP defeat in Congress and rolled ashore as a tsunami amid the financial panic of 2008. She is running for what essentially would be Barack Obama’s fourth progressive term.
Oops.
Wednesday afternoon, November 6, the day after the election, Barack and Michelle released a one-pager via X. “The results are in,” they wrote, “and we want to congratulate President Trump and Senator Vance on their victory. This is obviously not the outcome we had hoped for, given our profound disagreements with the Republican ticket on a whole host of issues. But living in a democracy is about recognizing that our point of view won’t always win out, and being willing to accept the peaceful transfer of power.”
They must’ve been gnashing their teeth.