Posted on 07/30/2024 8:42:01 AM PDT by MtnClimber
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!”
He’s the bastard son of that other Stalinist, Frank Marshall Davis.
A great read and evaluation.
If Iran gets the bomb, immediate and permanent game-changer. I cannot believe the Israelis will allow it.
Isreal will NEVER allow them to get the bomb!!!
That whole Incident just mysteriously went down the memory hole. And weren’t Sasquatch and Malaria there that weekend?!
Many Jews in the US left their religion for all intents and purposes and became very secular. But they were / are what we would say left -wing and they channeled that set-free religious energy into social justice. And saw the Dem Party as the means to achieve it. And still do despite all evidence to the contrary. A couple of years ago I got into a big argument with my Jewish BIL - totally secular BTW, he and my sister do the family Easter dinner - over the anti-Semitism of the Dem Party and that anti-Zionism is just a disguise for anti-Semitism. He wasn’t having any of that.
Elected to four terms actually - 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. Died April 1945.
I hope you’re right.
JMHO BTW...
Like him, Harris is ... physically attractive,
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Wut?
It was conveniently ended.
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