Obama’s Portrait of a Racist America

 From The Stream:

I don’t doubt for a moment that we still have race issues to address in America. And I don’t believe that, to date, we have fully overcome the legacy of hundreds of years of slavery and segregation in our history. At the same time, I do not accept former President Obama’s claim that the 2016 election of Donald Trump was, in part, a reaction to having a Black man in the White House.

In a widely reported excerpt from his forthcoming book Promised Land, Obama claims that “millions of Americans” were “spooked by a Black man in the White House.”

To quote him more fully, he argued that Trump “promised an elixir for the racial anxiety” of “millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House.”

These same Americans, we are told, were prey to “the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks.”

Yes, he writes, “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.”

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But the fact of the matter is that there were no anti-Black, White supremacist, race riots when Obama was elected, nor were there any protesting his presidency during his 8 years in office.

Not only so, but no one was boarding up stores in anticipation of his victory, which would surely have been the case had “millions of Americans” been “spooked” by his election and had his victory “triggered a deep sense of panic.”

Where, pray tell, was that panic? What evidence does the former president provide?

The reality is that in 2008, Obama received 43 percent of the White vote (compared with 55 percent for McCain), which hardly speaks of a racist nation in panic. In fact, going back to 1980, this tied for the highest percentage of White votes for a Democratic candidate.

Bill Clinton also received 43 percent of the White vote in 1996. Other than that, the percentage of White Democratic votes from 1980 to 2008 was: 1980, 36 percent; 1984, 35 percent; 1988, 40 percent; 1992, 39 percent; 2000, 42 percent; 2004, 41 percent.

And in 2012, despite fears that Obama would see a significant drop in White votership, the percentage only dropped from 43 percent to 39 percent.

The Washington Post even carried a November 8, 2012 headline reading, “President Obama and the white vote? No problem.” As the article noted, Obama “won a clear popular vote victory — with a majority of his total vote nationwide coming from white voters.”

Where was the deep sense of panic? Where was the extreme, racist reaction? Where were the many millions who were spooked by a Black man in the White House?

The reality in 2012, as in 2008, is that the majority of Obama’s total vote count came from White voters. That is a simple demographic fact. (Read more.)

Behind the scenes, Obama never left. From The Epoch Times:

The publication of Barack Obama’s new memoir was timed to carry the news cycle, regardless of the election’s outcome. The opinions expressed in “A Promised Land”—on America, race, Donald Trump, and so on—are more vivid than anything the Democratic candidate has said in his last year of campaigning.

And so, even after Joe Biden and the press corps have declared him president-elect, he continues to walk in the shadow of his former boss.

That’s intentional. Obama wants it understood that Biden is an avatar for a third Obama term. Now, he can complete the work of “fundamentally transforming America,” as he put it days before the 2008 election. Hillary Clinton was expected to at least protect what she inherited from Obama. But the victory of Trump, who had campaigned on undoing Obama’s domestic and foreign policy initiatives, left the outgoing president with only two options—watch his successor dismantle his legacy or stop him.

The coup is evidence of his choice. The senior U.S. officials, Democratic Party operatives, and media personalities who targeted the Trump circle for four years weren’t simply defending the privileges of the “Deep State.” These are bureaucrats, deputies, and courtiers who would not dare an attempt that bold unless it was OK’d from above.

The purpose of the coup was to block Trump from destroying Obama’s legacy until he could find an opening for him to return.

In a sense, Obama never left. He was the first president in a century to stay in Washington after the end of his term; Woodrow Wilson had suffered a stroke and couldn’t easily leave the capital. Obama explained that he and the first lady wanted their youngest daughter to graduate from her private high school before they moved on. Their child entered the University of Michigan last fall, but with the 2020 election cycle underway, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party wasn’t going anywhere.

In political circles, it was no secret that Obama had thrown his support behind Kamala Harris. She’s ambitious and appealing and, without any strong ideas or opinions of her own, poses no threat to him. She was Obama’s ideal heir, but primary voters found her fake and unlikeable, and she was out of the race in early December. He’d find a way to restore her, but, in the meantime, needed a horse to ride through the primaries.

His onetime vice president rambled incoherently, dropped lines, and finished fourth in the Iowa race. Nonetheless, in the first week of March, Obama’s establishment pushed out Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren to consolidate support behind Biden. In the age of coronavirus, a politician who was obviously disoriented reflected the state of the country.

A voluntary shut-in was the perfect role model for Americans forced to stay home. And Obama made sure they did.

In April, he told Democratic mayors on a conference call not to reopen their cities until coronavirus testing and monitoring were available nationwide. Shutting down the economic activity of major U.S. cities would put limits on any economic rebound and thereby hamper Trump’s reelection chances. COVID-19 also became the platform for the massive vote-by-mail campaign, which Obama promoted the same month in a succession of tweets that also alerted Democratic voters that his was the hand driving the Biden campaign.

When details of the coup started to seep through the media blockade, Obama played defense. In May, he leaked part of a phone call with Democratic officials in which he expressed dismay that the Justice Department had dropped charges against Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. He said that Flynn should be charged with perjury, a recommendation soon picked up by the judge in the Flynn case, who appointed a former prosecutor to make an argument for charging the retired three-star general with perjury.

Throughout the spring and summer, records were declassified that gave evidence of Obama’s direct role in the anti-Trump operation. They showed that in January 2017, he’d tasked James Comey to continue the FBI’s phony investigation of Flynn. They documented that John Brennan had told him in July 2016 that Clinton had greenlighted an operation to vilify Trump as a Russian agent. Months later, Obama directed Brennan to produce an intelligence community assessment replicating Clinton’s smear campaign that delegitimized not only Trump’s presidency but also an election.

“Russiagate” gave rise to the special counsel investigation, which transformed into impeachment, which was replaced by the Democrats’ weaponization of the coronavirus, and the subsequent razing and looting of U.S. cities. (Read more.)

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