The people
have spoken, and last week former President Barack Obama called Vice President
Kamala Harris to tell her. His endorsement of her run for the presidency was
captured in a short video documenting the candidate’s reaction. “Although you
called for an open process,” said Obama, “and you know, Democrats have, have
put in place an open process, it appears that people feel very strongly that
you need to be our nominee.”
But without
a primary, without a popular referendum, without even the open convention that
Obama was rumored to favor, how did the people make their will known, and strongly?
Was it social media influencers? Mass rallies across the country? Media
chronicling the excitement surrounding a Harris candidacy? No, it was nothing
like that. Obama is the people. The people are Obama.
The
endorsement was more than five years in the making. Obama had long wanted her
in that spot. Their families are old friends. Like him, Harris is progressive,
multiracial, physically attractive, nominally hip, a child of academics—in
other words, according to Obama-friendly media, she’s a “female
Barack Obama.” He directed donors to support her 2020 presidential campaign,
Capitol Hill sources told me at the time. More billionaires, 47, backed her
campaign than any other candidate’s—with Obama strongholds in Hollywood (Steven
Spielberg and George Lucas) and Big Tech (Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs,
Craig Newmark, etc.) leading the way.
Obama got
her the vice presidential nod even when she was forced to drop out of the
primary race after hitting just 3 percent in the polls. Jill Biden
objected—Harris had called her husband a racist! The First Lady’s reported
recent tantrums show that even after four years, she never fully grasped the
arrangement the party had made with her husband. Biden was just an imperfect
placeholder for Obama, and it was only a matter of time before the superior
avatar would be slotted in.
The question
is when, exactly, did it become clear to Obama that it was time for Harris to
finally replace Biden? Was it after Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald
Trump? After the attempted assassination of Trump? No, it seems the countdown
officially began Oct. 7. The Palestinians’ murderous assault on communities in
southern Israel exposed Biden’s limited ability to represent the interests of
the party he was tapped to temporarily preside over. It didn’t require an
especially refined moral sensibility to be appalled and terrified by the
carnivalesque depravity of Oct. 7—but to give Biden credit, he evidently was.
And that was the signal his time was up.
He‘s no John
Fetterman. Biden is not a particularly courageous friend of the Jewish state,
nor does he appear to much value the strategic importance of an ally that
lessens America’s burden in a region vital to U.S. interests. When it comes to
Israel, the 81-year-old president is just a normal late-20th-century Democrat
who likes the country well enough, recognizes Jews as an important albeit small
voting bloc and a crucial source of campaign funds, and performs ritualistic
contempt for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
But last
Wednesday’s pro-Hamas riots in Washington, D.C.—in which domestic left-wing
extremists linked arms with Middle East terror supporters and other foreigners
to burn the American flag, deface monuments, and brawl with police, all in the
name of protesting Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress—was
only the latest evidence that the crux of Biden’s Oct. 7 problem was not that
Michigan and Minnesota’s voter rolls are swollen with advocates of Muslim and
Arab terror.
The issue
was not a party constituency at all, but rather the party itself and its
leader. Barack Obama fundamentally reshaped the party when he struck the 2015
deal legalizing the nuclear weapons program of Hamas’ sponsor, Iran. By
legitimizing the apocalyptic foreign policy aims of the world power that
embodies Jew hatred, Obama sidelined the Jews and other centrists and made the
progressive, anti-Israel faction the party’s new center of gravity.
The media
did yeoman’s work obscuring the details and purpose of the agreement, but the
fact is, by putting Iran’s bomb under a protective American umbrella, Obama was
arming an American adversary to make it his own ally. The Iran deal was the
first clear sign that Obama was not a normal U.S. commander in chief. When
Biden extended even half-hearted, halting support to Israel’s response to Oct.
7, he crossed the only real red line Obama has ever had. Harris—who, unlike
Biden, has no foreign policy beliefs or instincts of her own—never will.
Like
friends, our favored allies reflect back to us the qualities we are flattered
to find in ourselves. For instance, when Netanyahu spoke of the lions of the
IDF, the elected representatives of the American people were stirred not only
by the thought of Israeli boys and girls on the front lines but also—in fact,
primarily—by the image he implicitly evoked: the image of our best and
brightest, our lions, risking their lives to serve America. When he spoke of
the God of Israel, the Americans might as well have struck their chests like
patriarchs and shouted, “That’s us, too, brother—America also has a covenant
and with the same God!”
How did
aligning with Iran, a threshold nuclear power that threatens to destroy Israel,
change the Democratic Party? It means, for instance, that political analysts
speak openly on TV about how Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Jewishness makes
him a problematic number two pick for Harris. Nominating a Jew, the media
reports, will split the party. And what partnership with an anti-American
regime means for America as a whole was illustrated when violent rioters pulled
down the American flag in the U.S. capital and replaced it with the banner of a
terror enclave that has been holding American hostages for more than nine
months.
What we saw
outside Union Station is Obama’s faction. Local, state, and federal
bureaucrats, as well as minorities, single women, academics, labor unions, and
even Jews are all still welcome to vote Democrat. But the party’s vanguard, its
true believers, its street fighters and enforcers, are allied with the terror
gang that broadcast its campaign of rape, torture, and murder on Oct. 7.
Mainstreaming the psychological modalities and media techniques of the Manson
family is not normal in America. These are not normal times in America. But
then again, as Obama’s Pulitzer-winning biographer David Garrow explained,
“He’s not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.”
Proof that
the mob outside Union Station is protected is that the few who were arrested
were swiftly released—even those who assaulted police officers. The opposition
was quick to compare law enforcement’s treatment of the death-cult auxiliaries
who marched on the Capitol to Jan. 6 defendants, thousands of whom were rounded
up, detained for months, charged, and convicted with sentencing enhancements
that will keep some, like Proud Boys’ leader Enrique Tarrio, behind bars for
two decades.
It’s a
two-tier system of justice, say Trump supporters: We get jail time and they
have get-out-of-jail-free cards. But that’s not accurate. A two-tier system of
justice is one in which Black teenagers can’t afford the legal representation
available to white kids with wealthy parents. The current system is rather one
in which law is an instrument the regime uses to punish political opponents. In
the current system, everything is licit for the ruling party. That is, the
current system is lawless.
The end of
normalcy in American politics has left Americans in a daze, unable to
accurately grasp the new reality or to recognize its alien features. Some say
Biden was toppled in a coup, but that’s wrong. It was never truly his
presidency in the first place. He was serving in a ceremonial role on behalf of
a politburo, and thus his executive authority owed less to his total 81 million
votes, 58 percent of which were mail-in ballots harvested on his behalf, than
to his former boss who saw him as the most plausible vehicle through which to
exercise power. But Oct. 7 and the aftermath showed that Biden couldn’t be
trusted to balance the appearance of normalcy with the psychopathy of the
faction’s priestly warrior class. So his time was up.
It was
Obama’s voice you heard when Harris spoke after her meeting with Netanyahu. One
day after pro-Hamas mobs desecrated the American flag, Harris lectured
Americans on the dangers of “Islamophobia.” But what does that mean? No one is
going to the streets to beat up Muslims or burn Palestinian flags or celebrate
the slaughter of Arab infants. “Islamophobia” is a made-up concept, designed to
give cover to the terror adjuncts laying waste to American cities and college
campuses. Criticize them or their historic cause—i.e., murdering Jews—and
you’re Islamophobic. And that, as Obama likes to say, is not who we are as
Americans.
Harris’
speech was filled with Obamaisms: pairing antisemitism with Islamophobia and
“hate of any kind,” foisting responsibility for “Palestinian
self-determination” on Israel, and urging Americans not to see the war in Gaza
as a “binary issue.” That is, Americans should forsake the moral clarity that
comes naturally to them because, as Obama said in November, we have to “admit”
that “nobody’s hands are clean.” Americans have to take in “the whole truth.”
See, it’s nonbinary.
Harris is
ridiculed for her vacuous rhetorical style, but Biden was never a good stand-in
for Obama’s gaseous speechifying, and the dissonance has long unnerved the new
Democratic base. Never mind the habits and ticks that stuck to the old man
after nearly half a century in Washington; by 2020, he could barely string two
sentences together no matter who typed his speeches into the teleprompter. With
Harris, however, Obama has an ideal instrument through which he can speak
directly and in his preferred prose. She’s an empty vessel. What listeners hear
in her is the immediacy of Obama, which is precisely what the party—the
people—crave.
The
opposition, meanwhile, is struggling to recognize the contours of the new
political anatomy. Those who can are often hesitant to call it what it is, for
fear of being called a bigot for recognizing that normalcy in American politics
came to an end with Barack Obama, who happened to also be the country’s first
Black president. Discretion is laudable, up to a point. But when Obama
lieutenants leak to the media that Obama is calling the shots, as they have
been since the debate, it’s clear that fear of being called a racist has
nothing to do with it. The failure to frankly identify the source of our
political abnormality is a cause for concern.
We are now
in the second decade of a phenomenon previously unknown in American politics.
Instead of identifying it, dissidents have devised formulations to avoid naming
it, like the deep state or wokeness or DEI, etc. But these are just the
adornments of a deracinated regime, and to cast an amorphous leviathan in the
role of adversary is to commit to a never-ending and ultimately unwinnable
struggle. It is in this space where people lose hope, for it’s a vacuum that
engenders the culture of the conspiracy theory—elaborate and colorful accounts
of despair explaining that we have no control over our lives, our fate, the
future of our families, communities, or our country because of hidden forces
that are too big and too entrenched.
The truth is
that an American political faction is employing third-world
tactics—surveillance, censorship, election interference, political prosecution,
and political violence—to put the United States under the thumb of a single
party led by a man who in his mind has become the people.