Is Obama’s Kingmaker Era Over?
Editor's Note
That we have moved beyond the realm of normal politics into a cold civil war between two competing regimes is becoming increasingly apparent. Yet how we got here is often as puzzling a question as where we go next. Peachy Keenan suggests that the Obama era must be understood as the decisive moment in the rise of the destructive Left and, consequently, that Obama’s efforts to influence the 2024 election could be decisive in whether the new regime succeeds or conservatives, led by President Trump, are willing and able to fight successfully against it.
Last week, Barack Obama plaintively wailed at a rally for Kamala Harris, “I don’t understand how we got so toxic and just divided.” Who was this mystery culprit who injected so much hate into the national discourse? We must track down the man who did this to us!
I wanted to hand him a mirror.
Obama spent eight years in office tearing up American race relations, which we stupidly assumed had been solved when citizens of every race voted for him as president. But no: that was the start of a long national backslide — thanks to Obama himself.
As a loyal Alinskyite, Obama knew that division and full-blown race riots were the tried-and-true path to electoral victory for the Left, and he did not disappoint. He reignited animosities that had largely been sublimated, turned illegal immigration into a machete to use against American citizens’ sovereign rights, and, perhaps most cruelly, weaponized the federal government more brazenly against his political opponents than any previous president.
This election, the stakes are high for Obama: If Kamala loses, it will be the end of his pernicious shadow presidency once and for all.
Even worse, Democrats may finally realize who the prime architect of the catastrophe is: Obama himself. For he is the key figure responsible for the current predicament the Democrats find themselves in, hamstrung with a sputtering candidate and her bumbling running mate, handpicked for her by Eric Holder, longtime Obama confidant.
In 2020, Obama used all his considerable clout in the party to shut down all of Joe Biden’s primary opponents. He knew that in a race full of liberal women and Pete Buttigieg, only Joe could hang on to what remained of the Obama-Biden coalition and win. Plus, with Joe in the White House, Obama could keep running things from his estate on Martha’s Vineyard.
In 2020, Joe Biden was already nearing the end of his shelf life. The Hunter stuff was bad, but they could bury that. But how to hide Joe’s obvious decline? Ignore it and hope he could be dragged across the finish line.
When the 2024 debate disaster happened, Obama immediately posted on X that Joe just “had a bad night.” Incredibly, Kamala doubled down on Obama’s “bad night” excuse during her recent interview on NBC when a reporter pressed her on when she first saw the signs of Biden’s decline.
To date, Obama has never explained why one “bad night” was enough to end Biden’s campaign, but he was clearly desperate to protect his investment. He was betting that Joe was the only hope the Democrats had to win on their abysmal record. He still believed he needed Joe to stick around to be the “moderate” rust-belt face on his radical progressive agenda.
Because Obama knew Biden’s dopey-but-reassuring persona been the key to his political success for so many years in the Senate and again in 2020, he also must have known that Kamala, a wild-eyed radical way over her skis, who couldn’t speak coherently and was hated by her staffers, was going to be a long shot. That’s why Gavin Newsom was meeting with Obama in 2023, and touring the South, including Selma, Alabama, on his children’s spring break. Obama had Newsom do the Civil Rights pilgrimage in obvious preparation for a 2024 run.
When the Biden-Harris switch happened, the Obamas were silent. It took them three days to congratulate and endorse the new presumptive nominee. Imagine the panic in their mansion that weekend! Another four years of powerful influence blocked!? Trump — again?
I imagine holes being punched in walls of a tastefully decorated beige living room.
As the wheels come off their campaign, Obama is going to get extremely angry. We saw a glimpse of this a few weeks ago at his now-infamous campaign appearance in Pittsburgh where he shouted, grim faced, eyes full of rage, at the audience. Then he went backstage and chided Kamala’s black male campaign volunteers for their failures: “We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running, and it seems to be more pronounced with the brothers. Part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”
They are a sad couple, the Obamas. They achieved more than their wildest dreams and are richer than all but a few humans have ever been. But it’s not enough for them, and it never will be. To utopia-seeking radicals like Barack Obama, the beau ideal statesman of the destructive Left, no one can rest until they reach their ultimate goal — what Obama himself called for as early as 2008: “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
Perhaps at last Obama is seeing his empire collapse, mere days from his final triumph. The lawfare he helped engineer failed, just like the bugging of Trump Tower and the long campaign of Russia hoaxes failed. He is Wile E. Coyote and Trump is the Roadrunner he can’t catch, despite his many schemes.
Of course, one could argue that Obama himself is just a cog in the Machine, albeit a big cog, but he was the most effective front man the criminal enterprise in D.C ever had. He was the DEI-approved face of the blob, and they could operate with impunity under the cloak his transcendent “hope and change” popularity gave them.
There is no length Obama and his cabal will not go to prevent a second Trump presidency. Thus, the last-second effort to throw a Heil Mary pass at the buzzer and proclaim yet again that Trump will usher in the Orange Reich.
The writing is on the wall. What other lines will they cross now to stop it, and how much of his swiftly withering reputation is Obama willing to sacrifice?