In what might otherwise be a slow news week with all the jackals on vacation, Barack Obama is out there trying to set the stage for his "shadow government" by trying to claim that he is relevant enough. His protestation this week was that he would have won had he been eligible to run again, which thankfully the Constitution now prevents. Quoth Obama:
"In my travels around the country, talking to people .... Even people who disagreed with me thought that our vision was the right one."
Now, we don't know whether or not Obama would have indeed won a third term. He ran twice against Republicans who would not actually take him on -- McCain never made the case that no one knew squat about the guy, while Romney declined, even with the last word in the last debate, to rip Obama apart over Benghazi, at a time when well-rehearsed words would have really helped.
Donald Trump would not have held back in 2016 no matter what color Obama's father was -- and you know that Obama doesn't even get nominated in 2008 if he wasn't half-black, certainly not against Hillary's machine. Trump spent half his criticism time on the stump ripping everything Obama did, when he wasn't ripping everything Hillary did.
But we'll never know what would have been the case had a third term been legal, of course.
What I do think is that Obama's answer is a bit bizarre. I mean, how many of those ordinary Americans do you think ever talked to Barack Obama in his "travels around the country"? When exactly was that, that he talked to Americans, by the way? On the golf course?
Who were the people who "disagreed with him" that he actually talked to about the direction of the country? Caddies? Oops, no, he used a cart. No, Obama wouldn't even allow people who disagreed with him within a mile of the White House, and their opinions were clearly not welcome, which is why there was a flood of generals and admirals retiring during his administration, rather than work for an autocrat who "knew better" than they.
You have to take statements like Obama's apart before they get any traction. Barack Obama never talked to anyone who "disagreed with him, but thought he was going in the right direction", because there aren't any, and it doesn't make sense that there are. Obama is a dogmatic ideologue, so that opposition to him is not on methodology but on ideology. You disagree with him because he's aiming in the wrong direction.
The existence of such people who do not exist, is the premise for Obama claiming that he would have been re-reelected. The claim that he would have been the election winner is, in his plan, the premise for his shadow government -- "The people wanted me still to be president, so I should set up a parallel government to represent them."
Look, I don't know if Obama would have won the election. Trump won, electorally, because he carried states he had to, plus some states like Michigan and Pennsylvania where black voters didn't show up at the polls for Hillary. They might have shown up for Obama, and they might have not done so. The ones in New York and California wouldn't have mattered.
Had Trump been facing Obama, he might very well have pressed the fact that Obama was absolutely horrible for black Americans, even harder than he appealed to them against Hillary with pretty much that message.
Just know this -- Obama is trying to stay relevant. He is an ideologue, and cannot just go away to some professorship, in some leftist university environment, to teach and be adored. He has to poke his nose in, and there will always be those who, because of his race, will try to press his relevance.
America knows better, we can certainly hope.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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