VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Evaporation Of The Obama Mystique 1/2
Dec. 13, 2024
Former President Barack Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Joe Biden nomination —and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years.
As such he and his coterie proved the virtual architects of the Biden administration, one of the most unpopular and failed presidencies in American history.
Recall earlier that after a flailing candidate Biden lost the first three 2020 primaries and caucuses, his inert campaign was headed nowhere.
Obama and fellowDemocratic insiders abruptly engineered the withdrawal of his rival 2020 presidential candidates: hard left but likely sure-loser candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg.
The Obamas ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia.
Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation asworkingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third-term, “phone it in” administration. Or as wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term — “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in.”
The Obamaites then gottheir wish for four years of enacted hard-left directivesthat they could only have dreamed of while in actual power.
But their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation — hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/Woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare, and weaponization of the government.
And the ruling radicalism beneath the Biden facade eventually cost the Democrats nearly everything — the presidency, the House, and the Senate.
An inert Biden is departing office with a 36 percent favorability rating in a recent Emerson poll. His Democratic nominee replacement, losing presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, also has virtually vacated her office with 40 days left of her tenure.
Failed candidate Harris has been roundly faulted by staffers and donors for blowing through some $2 billion in assorted 2024 campaign money.
She ended up doing worse against Trump than Biden himself had in 2020.
Many Democrats believe that they might have done just as well had Biden stayed on the ticket even in his vastly diminished state.
The Obamas were further blasted for nullifying the wishes of 14 million primary voters by forcing Biden off the ticket— ironically in the same backroom, anti-democratic manner they had cleared the way for him in 2020.
Obama emerged from his comfortable retirementto hit the 2024 campaign trail, schooling the country that President-emeritus Donald Trump was a dictator, a fascist, a tyrant, and, of course, a “racist.”
The more Trump polled even with, or ahead of, Kamala Harris, the more an exasperated and ignored Obama talked down to supposedly low-information voters.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/12/13/victor-davis-hanson-evaporation-barack-obama-mystique-joe-biden-feud-rumors/