After Obama

In 2024, Barack Obama was on the ballot. The two Democratic presidential nominees, one of whom he ousted, was his former VP and the other had made herself over in his image. The campaign and policy operations of both Kamala and Biden were staffed with Obamanites.

And it was Obama who really lost the 2024 election.

Not just Obama, but Obamacrats, a party that championed every leftist policy and that turned over its policymaking apparatus to radical donor-groups, a congressional delegation whose younger members, especially the Squad, embodied multicultural transgressive hipness, lost.

Democrats had given Obama a mortgage on the party and in 2024 it all went bust.

The Democrats went into the 2024 election, as they had with so many others, on the promise of Obama’s fundamental realignment which replaced the white working class with a multicultural college educated elite, only to be smashed in the face with a whole new realignment in 2024.

Democrats aren’t just reeling because they lost an election, but their entire mission statement and generational plan for taking over the country and securing a permanent majority. This was not just an electoral defeat, but the destruction of a grand unifying theory of American politics.

The promise of Obama had failed. And now the party no longer knows what it is, what to believe in and what to do next. Everything that Obama had done is suddenly open to being unwound.

Unlike other former presidents who left office and moved on, Obama had cultivated a mystique as the party’s elder statesman, appearing to sit out the primaries before swooping in at the last minute to forge a leftist unity deal, like the one that put Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders in charge of the Biden administration, and then appearing on the campaign trail to make the case for the candidate in terms of his own personal appeal and philosophy.

This time out the Obamas emerged to campaign for Kamala and helped cost her the election.

The man who once seemed able to hypnotize a nation with glib rhetoric struggled to win over not only Americans at large, but even triggered a backlash from black voters with his criticism.

Did Obama lose his touch? Or did the nation that Obama seduced no longer exist?

America before Obama, a nation where much of the voting bloc consisted of baby boomers still enthralled by the Kennedy mystique and that viewed the civil rights movement as foundational to the national identity, was remade into a balkanized country with a vanished history.

The average American today was a toddler when the Berlin Wall fell and a teenager on 9/11. Instead of entering a national history of opportunity, they were inducted into a caste system based on their sex, race and other immutable characteristics to atone for America’s shameful past.

Obama did that. And in doing so, he destroyed the America that was moved by his speeches.

America after Obama is marked by separation not unity, by a relentless skepticism in everything and a distrust of oratory. That is why Obama could no more get elected today than Kamala could while running an Obama Lite campaign under the tutelage of Obama’s old hands.

Obama was the final link in a ‘type’ of progressive politician innovated by JFK, youthful, hip and optimistic, who could rebrand socialism as in keeping with the best traditions of America, and who would make the negative outcomes of his radical policies seem inspiring and aspirational.

Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, was yet another and final copy of JFK who did not so much break the mold, as break America. JFK’s support for mass migration had brought Obama’s father to America and it was only fitting that Obama closed the circle by ending the legacy.

The core appeal of Obamanism, like that of JFK and Bill Clinton, had been the fusion of the leftist idea of the right side of history with American manifest destiny, but faith in destiny and other intangible ideas has never been lower. What people believe now is what they can touch. That’s why years of being told that the economy was wonderful was rejected out of hand.

Fake optimism no longer works.

During the Obama years, Americans underwent a fundamental change reflected in polls and surveys. In preceding eras, optimism about the future characterized Americans. Obama killed that hope. Polls and surveys show a country that no longer trusts its institutions, is not optimistic about the future and does not expect the next generation to be better off. The death of optimism also killed a certain rhetorical style that had dominated political speeches for generations.

Political rhetoric these days contains far less optimism, exceptionalism, and inspiration. And those speeches that do increasingly feel like holdovers from another age used by dated politicians or limited to small scale events by community groups rather than national addresses.

Much of that is due to Obama. And it also killed Obama’s abilities as a speaker. His recent attempts to deliver addresses on themes from the election to divisiveness fall flat because he remains a one-trick pony whose trick was overlaying American optimism over radical agendas. The Americanism and optimism ring false, as they always should have, and without them, there is only a small abrasive petty man who despite his past posturing can’t compete on insults.

Obama’s style was camouflage and it doesn’t work in the no filter era. Americans had let themselves believe too many times and after being burned, they prefer an abrasive authenticity to pretty words, conflict to hope, and are determined not to let themselves be fooled again.

There can’t be another Obama or JFK. America is all out of patience with slick college boys in blue shirts with haloes offering up quotes about “the better angels of our nature” to justify sticking it to the middle class even harder. Efforts by Beto O’Rourke or Pete Buttigieg to become the new JFK never even got off the ground. Kamala’s conviction that she was the new Obama led to a historic defeat. Camelot really has fallen for good this time and won’t come back.

What will come after Obama? Democrats muse about finding their own ‘Trump’ or “DeSantis’ or finding a new generational political talent and building a movement around him. But no such figure appears to be on the horizon. 41% of Democrats are willing to take another chance on Kamala while a significant minority are ready to give the nod to California’s Gov. Newsom.

Neither is likely to be the candidate but, even more significantly, neither has any kind of larger philosophy beyond excelling at Bay Area fundraising and agreeing with anything the Left says.

The hour may come when the Democrats become willing to embrace a true leftist insurgent candidacy, one that will openly make the case for dismantling America, and given the right social and economic conditions, they may even win. The new realignment is open to radical ideas and the worse things get, the more willing the public will be to open the Overton Window.

And that was always Obama’s real function.

Obama was never meant to be anything more than a transitional candidate from America to post-America, and while his legacy may be in tatters, his mission has been accomplished.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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