Former President Barack Obama is regarded by his adoring fans in the “news” media as the ultimate surrogate for their shared political party. He’s the “Closer.” Never mind that Obama has amassed a very dodgy record of actually delivering electoral success for any Democrat not named “Barack Obama.”
During his presidency, Republicans gained 63 House seats in the 2010 midterm elections, then netted a whopping nine Senate seats four years later. He couldn’t drag Hillary Clinton over the finish line at the tail end of his Oval Office tenure. His hectoring of young black men on behalf of Kamala Harris in 2024 fell flat, or even backfired.
Though the party faithful invariably swoon every time he emerges from his rarefied bubble to involve himself in politics, which is often, Obama’s track record as a Closer is decidedly mixed, which is arguably a generous descriptor of his overall body of work.
Nevertheless, his services were recently requested in the closing days of the 2026 campaign, as Abdul el Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan seeks to solidify black support in Detroit. El Sayed struggled to win over this skeptical demographic in the Democratic primary this summer, losing it to his more moderate opponent by a wide margin. This dynamic contributed to shifting what polls projected would be a fairly easy victory into a very tight nail-biter.
Republican Mike Rogers has been working hard in urban areas to peel away black voters by focusing on issues like education. Some Democrats are conceding that Rogers’ effort is paying dividends. A number of polling data points suggest that el Sayed is still lagging with the black electorate, which could prove fatal to his ambitions. Enter Obama.
Dogged by an evidence-based controversy regarding his ties to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, and attacks on his left-wing extremism, el Sayed has found a defender and kindred spirit in Obama. The Michigan Democrat invited the former president to campaign alongside him, just as he’d done with Hasan “America Deserved 9/11” Piker on several occasions during the primary. Obama showed up and proclaimed his “shared values” with el Sayed.
This actually rings true, just not in the way Obama likely meant it. Obama ran to Hillary Clinton’s left in 2008, but didn’t publicly embrace full-blown leftism for strategic reasons. The Democratic Party’s hardcore base has since lurched dramatically leftward, producing candidates like el Sayed, who would have been relegated to fringe also-ran status not long ago.
His socialism and obsessive hostility to Israel represent the sort of campaign Obama wishes he could have run — and would have, if he thought it were viable at the time. Obama’s supposed moderate toggles toward the center were rather transparently electoral gambits, not changes of heart.
There’s a reason the 44th president’s trusted “mind meld” foreign policy advisor’s incandescent hatred of the Jewish state ran so hot that it earned him the nickname “Hamas” from administration colleagues. Obama is living vicariously through el Sayed’s campaign, which is being boosted by the sort of vile, naked bigotry the candidate has fostered and welcomed. The former president swooped in to offer a gloss of mainstream respectability, while attempting to help with potentially soft black support.
Obama thrilled his fellow partisans, including journalists, by ridiculing the Trump administration during his Detroit diatribe. He mocked the Secretary of War’s vanity, which was interesting coming from someone whose prodigious self-regard is the stuff of legend. He skewered the current president’s admittedly tacky decor aesthetics, describing Trump’s White House design choices as what one would expect if “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” an amusing line that drew loud laughter and bolted around social media.
A few days later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent trolled back, dining at a Cheesecake Factory, jabbing at Obama’s elitism, and questioning the value of architectural pointers from a man whose presidential library resembles “Darth Vader’s tomb.”
Obama is notorious for pretending to float above the fray, feigning earnest pragmatism, while habitually slipping into low-rent demagoguery. He is shamelessly hypocritical on any number of fronts, presenting a facade of principle that crumbles the nanosecond his agenda or aspirations demand ‘evolution.’ On policy substance, Obama stumped for el Sayed, highlighting healthcare and the conflict in Iran — fascinating and audacious choices, given Obama’s record on each issue.
“Abdul shares my values of wanting everybody to get healthcare,” he thundered, gliding past the abysmal results of his signature domestic “accomplishment.”
The so-called Affordable Care Act, Obama repeatedly told voters, would not deprive any Americans of their preferred and existing healthcare arrangements, would bend the nation’s overall healthcare cost curve downward, and would dramatically reduce premiums.
In reality, millions of people lost their plans and doctors (exposing a “lie of the year,” which even a Democrat-aligned ‘fact checker’ could no longer spin), the cost curve has marched ever higher, and premiums keep going up, not down. The bloated and ineffective program is also beset with serious fraud. Virtually all of the law’s central promises were false.
In that sense, perhaps, Obama is correct in saying he “shares values” with el Sayed, who is also lying about his healthcare plan. El Sayed supports a full “government takeover,” his exact words, of the healthcare sector, ripping private plans away from upwards of 200 million Americans.
He wants to replace all of this with a system exclusively run by inept, wasteful, rationing government bureaucrats. He’s said this many times, but in order to try to get himself elected, he’s started pretending that he’d allow private coverage (which he’s said “offers no value”) to remain intact. When it comes to deceiving voters about healthcare, Obama and el Sayed are a match.
On Iran, the ex-Commander-in-Chief upbraided the Trump administration for its military campaign to deprive the regime in Tehran of its illicit nuclear program. Obama’s disastrous Iran policy, of course, involved cajoling, flattering, and enriching the “death to America” regime, including with pallets of cash flown in by jumbo jet.
It was a failed policy, wrapped up in the self-congratulatory language of alleged progress. It effectively enshrined Iran’s nuclear program, merely pausing certain sinister elements with temporary moratoriums. Several of its scandalous restriction expirations would have already sunsetted, had Trump not extricated the United States from Obama’s terrible non-treaty years ago. One can be critical of components of Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury without descending into the ludicrous “analysis” Obama spouted in Detroit:
“Iran now has veto power over the Strait of Hormuz where oil goes through to get to the world,” Obama claimed, employing a dubious and outdated talking point. To the extent that this fleeting “veto power” ever existed, it’s been gone for some time, thanks to the remarkable work of the American military. Obama ought to know this, but he’s happy to make an inaccurate point to pummel Trump, even if it means snubbing our men and women in uniform of a hard-fought achievement.
“They’re in a stronger strategic position now than before the war started,” Obama continued.
An insulting assertion. Iran’s nuclear program has been crippled. Its economy is in tatters. Inflation is spiraling. Its revenue is being strangled by the American blockade and punishing sanctions. Its air force is grounded, and its navy sunk. American and Israeli aircraft have flown over its airspace with near-total impunity. Many of its senior leaders and nuclear scientists have been liquidated. Its long-suffering people despise the regime, which has slaughtered tens of thousands of dissenters in the streets.
None of this was even hinted at by Obama, whose definition of a “stronger strategic position” is embarrassing.
The current conflict “was a decision this administration made, Obama said, “and that is the reason that the price of oil is up, and the price for diesel is up. And the price of just about everything is up.”
As we’ve written previously, Democrats would be fools to pass up the opportunity to score points on this, but that doesn’t change the reality that their stated policies would further increase energy prices. As one prominent member of the party once said in an on-the-record interview, his “green” policies, including expensive mandates and subsidies, would cause Americans’ energy costs to “necessarily skyrocket.” That would be a feature, not a bug.
OBAMA MAKES THE CASE FOR EL SAYED AND A DEMOCRATIC PARTY THAT CAN DISAGREE
The prominent Democrat’s name was Barack Obama. On this, el Sayed and his Closer also ‘share values.’ El Sayed has likened cars to cigarettes, aggressively pushed the ruinous “Green New Deal,” and has professed various stances that would make the current pain at the pump feel like child’s play.
In light of Obama’s track record on healthcare and Iran, specifically, a more self-aware man might studiously refrain from lecturing voters on such matters ever again. But that’s not Obama, who sees an ideological protege in el Sayed.
Continue reading...
[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
