Ex-President Barack Obama weighed in recently on Kamala Harris’s flailing campaign with his usual, wrongheaded, identity politics. Our nation’s first Black president, who should have been, as he promised, a great uniter, left America firmly on the divided path we have suffered through over the past two decades. And last week, we got more of the same from him.
For good reason, Obama has come under sharp criticism, even in the mainstream media, for his bad take on Harris’s lack of support among American Black voters.
Extensive polling for several weeks now relentlessly shows that Kamala Harris electorally underperforms significantly among Black men. Obama waded into this breach in Pennsylvania on October 10 according to a CNN news report. He excoriated Black male voters who are “thinking of sitting out” this election. “That’s not acceptable,” Obama thundered. The report explicitly said that “Obama wondered whether the reticence of some ‘brothers’ to support the Democratic nominee came down to sexism.”
That is patent nonsense. There are plenty of good reasons not to support Harris unrelated to her gender, racial identity, or any other identifying personal characteristic. Frankly, she really is the vapid, uninformed, unaccomplished, mandarin she plays on television — when she deigns to go on television — despite softball interviews, deceptive “60 Minutes” editing, and friendly beer swilling contests. (Speaking of which, does drinking beer with Stephen Colbert demonstrate good judgment when the candidate’s sobriety has been questioned even by “Saturday Night Live”?)
By her own admission, Kamala Harris explicitly offers no substantive policy improvement over the last failed almost four years of the Biden-Harris administration. She said so on “The View.” And it is precisely those policies which leave many voters, including Black men — to Obama’s chagrin — unwilling to support an uninspired, more of the same, presidential campaign.
Specifically, inflation has ravaged American families, especially burdening the middle and lower economic classes, those least able to weather ever climbing grocery and energy prices.
Rampant crime, especially in Democratic-controlled cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Seattle, leaves Americans feeling increasingly less safe. But the Biden-Harris Administration offers no serious relief. Indeed, Harris raised money to bail out violent Antifa protestors and her running mate, Tim Walz, reveled in the burning of Minneapolis by Antifa, incredibly enough, despite serving as the governor of Minnesota.
Harris glories in her supposedly tough prosecutor persona, when, in fact, she is credibly accused of being especially and unfairly harsh on Black males caught up in the justice system.
The Biden-Harris ruinous foreign policy, including the Afghanistan disaster, failed deterrence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an ebbing of American respect internationally, refusal to full-throatily back America’s staunchest Middle East ally in the face of Hamas brutality, an ascendant Iran and its terrorist clients, all falls heavily on the American underclass, including Black American males who increasingly make up membership in the military.
The Biden-Harris Administration bowed to COVID lockdown extremists like Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ union, damaging millions of young, inner city kids who already face education challenges consigned to underperforming inner city schools. The Democratic Administration, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, also thoroughly disrupted the American economy with its misguided fiscal policies just as the economy was recovering from the COVID lockdowns.
“The economy in January 2021 was fast recovering from the pandemic,” said the Journal. “By the end of the first quarter [of 2021], real GDP had returned to its pre-pandemic high. All Mr. Biden had to do was let the recovery unfold.” Instead, the Biden-Harris Administration strangled the recovery and jump started the debilitating inflation we all thereafter suffered under.
In the face of Harris’s manifest policy deficiencies, Obama could offer no serious explanation as to why Black male voters should support the empty suited, same as Biden, Democrat standard bearer. So, he resorted to identity politics.
Of course, identity politics is nothing new to the woke left, and the Obamas in particular. Michelle Obama famously said that she was proud of America for the first time only after it elected her husband president, not for instance during the Civil Rights movement against despicable Jim Crow laws.
During said presidency, Trayvon Martin was shot (not by a white guy, for what it’s worth as long as Obama is playing racial politics) and Obama falsely pretended the same thing could just as easily have happened to his own daughters. (It couldn’t; they’re law abiding, wonderful young women by all accounts and, in any event, white criminals are much more likely statistically to be shot by police than are Blacks.) Harvard professor and racial provocateur Henry Gates caught Obama’s attention and sympathy with trumped up racial charges that even Obama had to back away from eventually with his infamous beer summit at the White House. Only space restraints limit the further examples one can give of Obama’s racial pandering.
It is the same thing on the woke left, where DEI is all the rage. Efforts to defund the police continue apace, even sadly in Orange County. Identity politics pits groups against each other rather than uniting Americans.
Obama insults Black voters to suggest that sexism explains Harris’s problems. Black voters, like all voters, want safe streets and neighborhoods, schools that educate their children, an opportunity to work and raise a family in pursuit of the American dream.
Precisely those desires are threatened by the Kamala Harris candidacy. And that, not sexism, explains the trouble with her cobbled together campaign promising more of the same Biden-Harris failures.
Don Wagner serves on the Orange County Board of Supervisors.
