For a guy who spent two terms in the White House and had multiple books written about him, it’s surprising how little we know and how incurious the media is about any of it.
This is a typical example.
“Mr. Obama left Harvard with a blueprint for remaking American democracy. Written with Robert Fisher, a friend and former economics professor, the 250-page manuscript had the working title of “Transformative Politics.”“Life after graduation proved busier than either Mr. Obama or Mr. Fisher anticipated, and they never found time to whip their draft into publishable shape. As Mr. Obama became one of the most scrutinized figures on the planet, many of the manuscript’s pages gathered dust in Mr. Fisher’s basement. News of the abandoned book came to light only in 2017 after the publication of “Rising Star,” the historian David J. Garrow’s mammoth biography of Mr. Obama. Buried inside more than 1,000 pages of densely packed text, Mr. Garrow’s discovery attracted little attention. When I reached out to Mr. Garrow in the summer of 2019 for help getting a copy of the text, he told me I was the first person to ask.”
I’m not surprised. Garrow’s biography was the only serious mainstream media investigative look at Obama’s background. And it attracted a series of awkward shrugs. If a Republican running for president had a 250-page draft manuscript about politics sitting around, it would have been scrutinized and any damning material from it excerpted 5 days later.
But the rules were stunningly different for Obama.
“Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher’s plan hinged on recruiting blue-collar whites back into a reborn version of the March on Washington coalition. According to Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher, these votes could be won over with a platform that appealed to both the values and the material interests of working people. That meant shifting away from race-based initiatives toward universal economic policies whose benefits would, in practice, tilt toward African Americans — in short, “use class as a proxy for race.”
There’s evidence that Obama was still playing off this. The most famous moment from his DNC speech was “there is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats.”
By the time he was running for reelection, he had so thoroughly lost the white working class that a prison inmate won 40% of the Democrat primary vote against him in West Virginia.
Obama’s two terms of racialized hatred and identity politics were key ingredients in reinventing the Republican Party as a working-class party. Trump’s coalition would likely not have existed without Obama. There’s a certain irony in Obama arguing for putting class warfare ahead of race to build a working-class coalition. It’s not a new argument. Most of the lefties skeptical of identity politics, the sorts of folks who will attack the 1619 Project or go on Tucker Carlson are some flavor of this kind of lefty.
So what happened?
1. Like a lot of lefties, Obama discovered that he might want to talk to the working class, but the people actually interested in his views were fellow upscale Ivy Leaguers. And they were interested in him because he presented as black.
2. Democratic coalition politics doomed any such project. The Democrats had built a coalition of upscale white lefties and black voters. Obama won by getting a lock on the former and then using racial allegiance to extend it to the latter. There was no future in courting the white working class. Instead, Obama worked to pander to his two bases. Biden is doing the same thing.
3. Obama genuinely hated America. But his identification with black people has always been suspect. The standard Marxist project to use class warfare couldn’t get past electoral politics. He didn’t have much to offer the white working class. Or any working class. Instead he lost the white working class and cemented the emerging “majority-minority” politics of the Dems.
That badly isolated the Democrats.
Brilliant analysis, Daniel. One other factor to consider… Once the Obamas got a taste of power and fame, they opted for the good life following politics,
That meant looking out for the interests of the liberal-left elite while in office, who would subsequently provide them with easy money-making opportunities and financial support for their post-White House “initiatives.”
Classic freeloaders. What have they ever actually earned other than contempt?
They never did a real job, that I know of.
He has achieved his dream of destroying race relations. He has set that back 100 years or more. It’s almost like it was intentional. lol 😆
We both know perfessor Robert Fisher wrote “Transformative Politiics” and Barely There Obama just signed his name to it. He’s no academic but he is lazy and opportunistic. His entire life seems to have been arranged and enriched by benefactors like Fisher.
Dirtbagocrats sure love racist economics and subversion.
And you’re right that Obama hates America and his identification with blacks has always been suspect. He doesn’t care about blacks, he just hates whitey. He if he cared about blacks he would’ve honored his campaign slogans and improved their lives around the world. Instead blacks in America had the lowest of education, employment and home ownership in American history and the black South Sudanese continue to be enslaved by the racially mixed (mostly white) islamic North.
Why a person like Obama, who’s more than fifty percent white, hates whitey is a question for mental health experts. I just know he’s a weird scumbag.
Well, he sure came from a weird background. Weird parents, growing up in Indonesia, smoking dope in Hawaii …
Weird Communist background.
Right, and Weatherman friends. I see him as a Manchurian Candidate.
Very much like Merkel, the witch.
Now we have a fake President who’s so addled by alzheimer’s that he didn’t even have to be brainwashed. His handlers are actually controllers and it’s easy to control a demented dotard.
I researched him in 2008. Anyone who didnt see the red flags on this guy was either blind or wasn’t looking.
Willfully blind in the case of the STUPID whites who put him in the Presidency just because they wanted a black President.
Will someone please explain to me how he got elected the first time. We’re race relations that bad in 2008? Because race I’d all this fraud-meister has ever talked about. He solved problems that didn’t exist!
I think his opponent was McCain, who ran a terrible race. Plus MSM was on OBummers side.
The Bathhouse Barack stuff is weird, too.
Obama’s maternal grandparents were fine stable people.
Can you grit your teeth and try to accept the simple fact that almost all Americans have trued cannabis in one form or another at least once?
His maternal grandparents were fringe leftists.
Can you grit your teeth and admit most Americans have never tried cocaine or hustled old white guys for it? In fact, the vast majority of Americans have never had a homosexual experience in their lives.
3 words: Frank Marshall Davis.
This yarn does not stand up to any examination at all.
Actually, it’s your comment that doesn’t stand up to any examination at all.
I tried to tell them what they needed to do when Obummer was first elected (such as invest in infrastructure) but they wouldn’t listen, as they had other plans, along the lines of Alinsky, which took me a long time to realize. Otherwise Obummer could have been a great President.
You mean the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” Obama put his name on didn’t revitalize our infrastructure and put millions to work on “shovel ready” jobs? He was just shoveling shit, as always? I feel violated.
Yeah, that was total BS.
I remember driving past a sign boasting of the act for YEARS on a major roadside in Omaha perpetually covered in weeds.
And D-Bag voters are still falling for outrageous fake promises. The Alzheimer Joe administration has wasted what, ten trillion dollars on pure pure bullshit? Eleven trillion?
F’ing idiots. Only morons and fanatics could support the D-Bags at this point.
He laughed about those shovel ready jobs.
Obama’s the greatest president in history if you hate America. People don’t really want to know Obama. What they want to know is what he could represent.
Cudda, wudda, shouldda. But he didn’t govern as he ran in 2008 and wasn’t a great President, just a weak and divisive one who allowed his ideologies to govern his policies and actions.
He was an ideologue long before he ran for President. Again, google his fath … uh, I mean “mentor.” See any resemblance? I mean ideologically, … of course.