Was Obama The Architect Of The Democrats' 2024 Defeat?
[H]ow did America get to the point where Republicans, once the country club white shoe party of the Bush family, could begin to wrestle with Democrats for the votes of the working class, minorities and women? How did the Republicans win so decisively?
It was Trump. What he did in remaking the Republican Party is simply astounding. But first he had to politically eviscerate the Bush family political dynasty that controlled the GOP. And so he relentlessly attacked Jeb!, then the standard bearer of the Bush clan for the disastrous war in Iraq, which slaughtered thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis while wasting trillions of American dollars on this and other endless neo-con forever wars.
With that, the Bush GOP panicked and whined, but the Bush era was mercifully over. Eventually, working class whites, blacks, Latinos and young people turned their backs on the Democrat Party that had betrayed them.
On this, I agree completely, but he says it all before he even begins to talk about Obama, which he finally does about halfway down:
To win in the future, the Democrats must tear down Obama just as Trump tore down the Bushes. A new Democrat faith must emerge to launch a frontal assault on Obama’s keep in Martha’s Vineyard, sacking it and salting the earth. It must reject the cynical use of race to generate ugly tribalism.
Remember that Obama–who just the other day in a speech in Chicago talked about compromise and turning away from identity politics in order to save democracy–orchestrated two separate coup attempts against sitting American presidents. The first against Donald Trump damaged Trump from the outset and left his administration open to the depredations of the Obama Deep State including corrupt FBI and Intelligence officials, and later there was the Obama coup against Biden, which humiliated the senile old man and ended Biden’s presidency in all but name last summer.
Kass neglects the other figure I've been looking at here, Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi as Speaker was the one who controlled the impeachment valve, and before Obama was on the scene, she was the one who decided not to use it against Dubya:
In May 2006, with an eye on the upcoming midterm elections—which offered the possibility of Democrats taking back control of the House for the first time since 1994—Pelosi told colleagues that, while the Democrats would conduct vigorous oversight of Bush administration policy, an impeachment investigation was "off the table". A week earlier, she had told The Washington Post that although Democrats would not set out to impeach Bush, "you never know where" investigations might lead.
After becoming speaker in 2007, Pelosi held firm against impeachment, notwithstanding strong support for it among her constituents. In the 2008 election, she withstood a challenge for her seat by antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, who ran as an independent primarily because of Pelosi's refusal to pursue impeachment.
Whatever Obama may or may not have wanted to do, Pelosi, as Speaker, was the one who could bring it about. In 2007, she said no, but in 2019, with Obama retired, she said yes:
On September 29, 2019, Pelosi announced the launch of an impeachment inquiry against Trump. On December 5, 2019, after the inquiry had taken place, Pelosi authorized the Judiciary Committee to begin drafting articles of impeachment. After hearings were held, two articles of impeachment were announced on December 10. The House of Representatives approved both articles on December 18, thereby formally impeaching Trump.
This simply wouldn't have happened if Obama were simply urging it from the sidelines. If Pelosi had said no, as she did in 2007, it would have died. Or take Obama's effort to rally the sexist young African-American men of Pennsylvania to vote for Kamala. Kass says,
Remember just weeks ago when Obama was lecturing young black men who weren’t enthralled with the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris. Bitter and angry, he harangued them on what he could only understand as the sexism of the great unwashed.
. . . Yet those young men who he tried to shame didn’t live among the elites of Martha’s Vineyard or the Gold Coast of Chicago. And they weren’t insulated from the poor economy and pressure from the illegals. Instead, Obama was revealed by his own mouth to be be a complete and utter phony. You could almost hear regular people, those who had been Democrats, shouting “F You Barack” from every corner in every swing state.
So by Kass's own argument, Obama is past his sell-by date. Pelosi, while semi-retired as Speaker, seems still to be one of those in control of the Democrat party. Last July, whatever Obama may have wanted, Pelosi was the one who spoke to Biden:
Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race and endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him is, from one angle, the final political act of an octogenarian who realizes that his power is coming to an end and who is sagely passing the torch to a younger politician in a last-ditch effort to save his party and his country from authoritarian defeat. But from another vantage point, the real story is one of a different octogenarian—one who has wielded power more effectively than just about any politician in the past half-century—who used her decades of accrued experience and authority to do what no one else apparently could: get a dug-in presidential candidate to drop out and give his party a fighting chance.
. . . “Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” one Democrat anonymously told Politico. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”
Pelosi is still in the House and has filed papers to run for re-election in 2026. And it's worth pointing out that, although retired as Speaker, she was the one figure who could prevail on Biden to drop out of the race, for whatever that was worth -- it's beginning to look like Harris never had any realistic chance of turning things around.Both Pelosi and Obama are out of touch -- Pelosi was doing little more than flailing in a last-ditch effort to turn the election around -- but Pelosi is the one who's still in some sort of position to do damage.
SomeDemocrats are standing up to Pelosi,but she's the one that still needs to be taken down:
Several Democratic lawmakers complained anonymously to Axios about the former speaker.
'She needs to take a seat,' said one senior Democrat.
. . . Some lawmakers think the 84-year-old is having trouble letting go of her previous power. She elected to stay in Congress as a regular lawmaker instead of fully retiring.
'I understand that this is a difficult transition for her, not being the leader, but she is not,' the member of the Congressional Black Caucus told Axios.
'She needs to understand what her new role is.'
But it's basically Trump who's going to do this, not any Democrat.