It was always obvious that any first term of Biden would be Obama’s third
Last May, a recording was “leaked” (purposely, that is) of Obama on a call rallying the troops. In it, he said this:
So I am hoping that all of you feel the same sense of urgency that I do. Whenever I campaign, I’ve always said, “Ah, this is the most important election.” Especially obviously when I was on the ballot, that always feels like it’s the most important election. This one — I’m not on the ballot — but I am pretty darn invested. We got to make this [a Democratic victory] happen.
To me, “pretty darn invested” meant running the show from behind the scenes. Unlike other ex-presidents, who absented themselves, Mr. Fundamental Tramsformation himself was still organizing ye old American community into the community he envisioned. At a certain point during the 2020 campaign, Obama realized that Bernie Sanders was in danger of scaring off enough voters that it would be hard to engineer a Democrat win by any means, and that strangely enough of the remaining group it was Biden who would be positioned best as a supposed “moderate” to get the job done.
“Pretty darn invested” – well, that’s certainly an understatement. He’s “pretty darn invested” indeed; seeking not just to protect his legacy, to be able to tell President Joe Biden what to do, to have Biden choose as aides and cabinet members the old Obama crew and implementing the old Obama agenda (only carrying it further than Obama ever had time for), but also to protect himself from further revelations at the hands of Barr and Trump.
Not rocket science.
The names thus far put forward by the senile Biden (choices no doubt made for him by his handlers) prove beyond any reasonable doubt the truth of this assertion. They are a ghastly assortment of neoliberal/interventionist globalists; in order to appease The Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse and the leftist activists in the base, the Kamala/Biden administration (should the dismal Dystopian Duo actually be sworn into office next month) will be certain to have a great deal of superficial “diversity” (race, ethnicity, gender, etc.), all very pleasing to the purveyors of what Dinesh D’Souza calls “identity socialism”, even if there is less actual socialism than they might desire.
What I am still trying to come to intellectual grips with, is the anti Trump woke hysteria which seems to have possessed so many middle class suburban Americans, who should have been able to look around them at the facts on the ground, and acknowledge what should have read as huge positives, even for traditional working class Democrats.
But they did not care. And according to some of their parents here, they don’t even care to discuss it.
Could Critical Theory [ thanks again Hubert] have made such inroads into the minds of the bureau dwelling and institutional sinecure receiving populations of the U.S., that somehow, despite the ostensible demands their positions make on them for ratiocinative activity, they have nonetheless shrugged off any allegiance to reason and objectivity when it comes to culture and politics?
How can people live in that much of a bubble? How couud they rank ‘mean tweets’, and hysterical jibberish about attitudinal cruelty, above a return of manufacturing employment, our being on the road to virtual energy independence, all time employment records, normalization of Arab/Jewish relations in the Middle East and on and on ?
Even, a reader of the New York Times could not have missed those stories.
So what I am saying here, is that these people are obviously not simply victims of life in an information bubble, but rather, they are expressing personal preferences as they deploy their information intake filters, and assemble their hierarchy of concerns.
I would implore Neo once again, just as I would anyone else having ardent progressive friends, to try and get a ditect answer to the hypothetical: “Would it really matter to you enough to reject a Biden administration, if he were elected as a result of ballot fraud?” Or would they think it worth the price …
DNW, or, “Would it really matter to you if he and Hunter sold out to the Chinese?”
Dapper Barry’s currently auditioning to play Sporting Life.
He’s crooning “It Ain’t Necessarily So” to the clingers, Evangelical Latinos, and “Macho” Blacks (Barry takes great pride in his disdain for Machismo).
Michelle can play Bess. Elliot Page will star as Porgy.
DNW,
Critical Theory is a belief system, like religion. As someone who works in higher ed–part of the “institutional sinecure receiving” economy–I can assure you that adherence to it confers very tangible social and career benefits. Conversely, bucking or questioning it entails equally tangible penalties. That’s why ambitious, savvy professionals who aspire to join the ruling class sign on to it. Just like joining the party in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Or (for that matter) the “right church” in mid-century America. It’s better for business. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” (Upton Sinclair).
As is his wont, Angelo Codevilla nailed it years ago, in his 2010 essay “America’s Ruling Class–and the Perils of Revolution”:
https://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=4725
DNW:
I do plan to ask that question, and planned to do so even before I read that you had suggested it. The thing is, I haven’t had a political discussion (or in some cases, much of a discussion at all) with any of my Democrat friends and relatives for quite some time. I have to gird my loins for each such discussion, and be careful about when and how I bring politics up and how often. I do plan to ask, and I’m afraid an honest answer from most people would be that they really truly believe there was no fraud and that anyone who suggests there was is deluded or lying or both, and also if there was fraud they don’t care because Trump is evil and he had to be gotten rid of.
I just had a thought.
After Biden is replaced by Harris, she could select Obama for the VP position. He could take over after the 2 year mark (I’m assuming that he could out-maneuver Harris, with the complicity of his team).
Linda S. Fox:
No need for that on Obama’s part. He wouldn’t do anything so obviously transgressive. He’s content at this point to pull the strings, preferably without alarming too many people and remaining behind the scenes.
By the way, SCOTUS might rule he couldn’t run for VP, although it’s very unclear:
I have to quit using a tablet with tiny font and the spell check function disabled. Or, beg your indulgence.
Thanks. I know that you know, that I am not trying to hector you. I personally don’t know anyone who admits to voting for Biden. Even my brother’s dyed in the wool Democrat wife who has a good deal of that old fashioned built-in cultural antagonism toward Republicans, voted for Trump and remarked on the obvious bias of the media.
It’s just that it is critically important as a gauge of where it is that we as a political culture, really are; and what can be done about it.
Especially, with regard to this: ” … and also if there was fraud they don’t care because Trump is evil and he had to be gotten rid of.”
Good call in early May, Neo. Although I cannot prove it, I believe Obama also orchestrated not only the Russian collusion investigation (his knowledge and approval is well documented) but also the impeachment, by calling upon loyalists like Vindman and Yovanovitch. They were effectively Obama sleeper-cells waiting to be called into action. Maybe you already wrote about this as well.
If war comes, it will be useful that the most fanatical have come out into the light and gathered together.
DNW,
Of course they wouldn’t care and of course they’d rationalize it in a manner that defies all reason.
Feelings don’t need to be justified, they have a right to their feelings! How dare you or anyone else call into question their validity.
Yes, of course they have a right to their feelings. But their feelings don’t have a right to me.
If they could just get that small point through their damned heads, then perhaps we could all get, more or less, along … or alongside at least.
But, their “feelings” have convinced them that, as Codevilla and others have said, they are an evolutionary vanguard both destined and entitled to rule without “let or hindrance”, as the old phrase runs. They know this, apparently, because the associates they have gravitated to, have assured them that this is so.
I guess when you are inaugurating The Kingdom, you imagine that every knee, everywhere, at every moment, must bend … to you … or else.
@ Hubert
Quite an article. Covers a lot of ground. In tracing the development of a ruling class attitude among a set of self-regarding and self-dealing Americans who have become convinced that manipulating others is a divine right [bestowed upon them by the god of evolution] he reminds of us much we have tended to forget, and some things we may never have known. [For example of Woodrow Wilson’s 1885 book ]
So, given those assumptions, as they see it: what’s to even discuss, eh?
Ben Jacobs:
I wish I could find it but so far I haven’t been able to locate it again, but right around the time Obama was leaving office I saw an interview with him in which he said he was still going to work on grassroots Democratic organizing and the like. It rang a warning bell with me, and I thought then and there that he was going to be very active behind the scenes in order to guard his “legacy” and make sure his fundamental transformation of American continued. Lots of other people said no, he’s lazy, he wants to retire to the Vineyard and rest on his laurels, amass money and live the high life. They tended to be the same people who felt he wasn’t calling the shots during his presidency and/or wasn’t very smart. I always have said (and written on this blog) – at least since close to his 2008 election – that Obama is a dedicated leftist ideologue, that he is smart and not at all lazy, that he is duplicitous and hidden about his intentions but his intentions are that the left takes and holds power and he is very intent on succeeding in that endeavor, and that although he isn’t working alone he nevertheless is very much in charge of what he does.
One of the reasons I have felt that way about Obama almost from the beginning was his treatment of Alice Palmer and his other primary opponents back in his Chicago days at the start of his political career.
One Big Ass Mistake America. He seemed to be such a nice man. (sarc) But he made us all feel better about ourselves. (sarc^2)
Obama played the role well when he campaigned. I confess, I voted for him twice. When he campaigned for Hilary, his facade started unraveling and the true Obama has revealed himself. I thought the Clinton’s were bad with their power grab. Obama is over the top in corruption. Now every time he and Michelle open’s their mouth’s they demonise’s yet another swath of Americans; Trump voters, blah, blah, spooked ‘white’ voters, Evangelical Hispanics, etc. When you insult more than half of American voters, fraud is the only way to appear to have won.
It is very telling of Obama that he spends most of his time on Martha’s Vineyard, one of the whitest areas in America, rather than Chicago. The city that gave him the boost to the Senate and could really use his help. Sir, go off into the sunset.
Biden was also preferred to Bernie because he is personally involved in the whole “Russiagate” conspiracy. To protect the Democrat elites who engineered that coup attempt, one of their own must become president.