By james art Former President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign rally in support of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024, in North Las Vegas, Nev. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Former President Barack Obama recently influenced Kamala Harris’ failed campaign with his usual misguided identity politics. Our nation’s first black president, who was supposed to be, as he promised, a great unifier, left America firmly on the divisive path we have suffered for the past two decades. And last week we got more of the same from him.
With good reason, Obama has come under fire, even in the mainstream media, for his poor handling of Harris’ lack of support among black American voters.
Extensive research over the past few weeks has relentlessly shown that Kamala Harris is significantly underperforming among black men. Obama intervened in that breakthrough in Pennsylvania on Oct. 10, according to a CNN report. He denounced black voters who were “thinking about opting out” of this election. “This is not acceptable,” Obama thundered. The report specifically states that “Obama wonders if the reluctance of some ‘brethren’ to support the Democratic nominee amounts to sexism.”
This is patent nonsense. There are plenty of good reasons not to root for Harris, regardless of her gender, racial identity, or other identifying personal characteristic. Honestly, she really is the vacuous, uninformed, unfinished, mandarin who plays on TV – when she deigns to go on TV – despite softball interviews, 60 Minutes cheating editing and friendly beer-drinking contests. (Speaking of which, does having a beer with Stephen Colbert show good judgment when a candidate’s sobriety is questioned even by “Saturday Night Live”?)
By her own admission, Kamala Harris has expressly offered no substantive policy improvement over the last failed nearly four years of the Biden-Harris administration. She said this on “The View.” And it’s these policies that leave many voters, including black men — to Obama’s chagrin — unwilling to support an uninspired, more of the same, presidential campaign.
In particular, inflation has ravaged American families, particularly burdening the middle and lower economic classes, those least able to withstand rising food and energy prices.
Rampant crime, especially in Democratic-controlled cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Seattle, is making Americans feel less and less safe. But the Biden-Harris administration is not offering serious relief. Indeed, Harris raised money to rescue violent Antifa protesters, and her VP, Tim Waltz, reveled in Antifa’s burning of Minneapolis, incredibly enough, even though he was governor of Minnesota.
Harris flaunts her supposed tough persona as a prosecutor, when in fact she is credibly accused of being particularly and unfairly harsh on black men who end up in the justice system.
The disastrous Biden-Harris foreign policy, including the disaster in Afghanistan, failing to deter the Russian invasion of Ukraine, diminishing American respectability internationally, refusing to firmly support America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East in the face of the brutality of Hamas, rising Iran and its terrorist clients, all fall heavily on the American underclass, including black Americans who increasingly make up members of the military.
The Biden-Harris administration kowtowed to COVID-blocking extremists like Randy Weingarten and the teachers union, harming millions of young inner-city kids who already face educational challenges handed over to underperforming inner-city schools. The Democratic administration, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, has also completely disrupted the US economy with its misguided fiscal policies just as the economy was recovering from the COVID lockdown.
“The economy in January 2021 was rapidly recovering from the pandemic,” the Journal said. “By the end of the first quarter [of 2021]real GDP has returned to its highest level since before the pandemic. All Mr. Biden had to do was let the recovery unfold.” Instead, the Biden-Harris administration stifled the recovery, and the spike started the crippling inflation we all suffered from afterward.
In the face of Harris’s glaring policy flaws, Obama couldn’t offer a serious explanation for why black male voters should support the same-color blanks as Biden, the Democratic standard-bearer. So he resorted to identity politics.
Of course, identity politics is nothing new for the awakened left, and for Obama in particular. Famously, Michelle Obama said she was proud of America for the first time only after she elected her husband as president, and not, for example, during the civil rights movement against the despicable Jim Crow laws.
During said presidency, Trayvon Martin was shot (not by a white man, for what it’s worth while Obama plays racial politics) and Obama falsely pretended that the same thing could just as easily happen to his own daughters. (It can’t; they’re law-abiding, lovely young women by all accounts, and, in any case, white criminals are statistically far more likely to be shot by the police than blacks.) Harvard professor and racial provocateur Henry Gates caught Obama’s eye and a sympathy with trumped-up racial accusations that even Obama had to eventually back away from with his infamous White House beer summit. Only space limitations limit the further examples that can be given of Obama’s racial pandering.
It’s the same in the vigilante left where DEI is all the rage. Efforts to defund the police continue apace, unfortunately even in Orange County. Identity politics pits groups against each other instead of uniting Americans.
Obama insults black voters to suggest sexism explains Harris’ problems. Black voters, like all voters, want safe streets and neighborhoods, schools where their children are educated, the opportunity to work and raise a family in pursuit of the American dream.
It is these desires that are threatened by the candidacy of Kamala Harris. And that, not sexism, explains the problem with her cobblestoned campaign promising more of the same Biden-Harris failures.
Don Wagner is a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors.