No phrase illustrates the irony of former President Barack Obama’s latest political pitch better than “right message, wrong messenger.” This week, Obama unveiled his new slogan ahead of the 2026 elections: “I’m tired of being divided.” The lack of self-awareness is astounding from the man who earned the nickname “divider-in-chief” during his two terms.
“I want friendship and neighborliness,” he told an Atlanta crowd. In Cleveland, he said, “I want to reach out and shake my neighbor’s hand.”
Disingenuous doesn’t even begin to describe Obama’s new rhetoric, which, in a vacuum, I completely agree with. This is the same president who came into office with race relations at a record high and turned that into a 20-year low. Instead of bringing the country together when opportunities arose during his presidency, he played a direct role in the deterioration of race relations, routinely opining before the facts came out and perpetuating the false narrative that black people are systemically oppressed by the police.
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Take the Trayvon Martin case, for example. George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, shot and killed the black teenager after being beaten to the ground on a concrete sidewalk. Obama was quick to make it a black-white issue, suggesting Martin “could have been me 35 years ago” and that if Martin were white, the outcome would have been different.
Former President Barack Obama speaks in support of Democratic candidates Sen. Jon Ossoff and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms during a rally on Oct. 28 in Morrow, Georgia. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
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Former President Barack Obama speaks in support of Democratic candidates Sen. Jon Ossoff and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms during a rally on Oct. 28 in Morrow, Georgia. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
Or consider the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., a black Harvard University professor who had to force his way into his house because his door was jammed, prompting a report of a break-in. Gates, of course, was not charged with a crime. However, Obama immediately threw the police under the bus, saying they “acted stupidly,” before eventually walking his comments back once the facts came out.
Perhaps worst of all was Obama’s response to the Michael Brown case, in which the 18-year-old black man robbed a convenience store, assaulted the clerk, beat up a police officer, and reached for the officer’s gun before being shot to death. The former president used the clear-cut case of justified force as an opportunity to preach about police brutality against minorities and alleged racial disparities in policing. This incident popularized the Black Lives Matter movement, which Obama publicly defended and which attempted to convince the country that black people face systemic oppression, especially from police.
As an impressionable teenager whose high school teachers pushed this agenda onto their students, I bought the lie, hook, line, and sinker. I finally woke up when confronted with the facts: The share of white people who experience police encounters is just 5 percentage points higher than the share of black people, yet white people are killed by police almost twice as often. As it turns out, black people, who have been given preferential treatment in scholarships, college admissions, hiring, and medicine, are not oppressed in the 21st century — by police or otherwise. But this lie, pushed by Obama and his comrades, pitted black and white against each other to a degree not seen since the O.J. Simpson trial.
And that’s just his racial division. Consider, too, the time he called working-class voters “bitter” clingers who hold on to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” as a way of explaining their frustrations. Or his 2012 campaign narrative accusing Republicans of waging a “war on women.” Or his persecution of religious groups such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, his IRS targeting of conservatives, his surveillance of journalists and political opponents, and his aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers, to name just a few more examples.
Obama showed some semblance of self-awareness during his 2016 State of the Union speech, delivered on my 17th birthday, when he said, “One of the few regrets of my presidency [is] that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide.”
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One might reasonably push back and point to President Donald Trump’s divisiveness — and I won’t argue with you there. I unequivocally support Trump, but I’m always honest about my criticism of the 45th and 47th president, and he’s absolutely been divisive. But Trump’s election in 2016 was a direct response to the radical, woke, and divisive agenda being pushed by Obama and his Democratic Party. Obama alienated enough of his own coalition that between 11% and 15% of Obama voters cast their ballots for Trump in 2016.
Trump’s presidency was created by, and was the inevitable response to, Obama’s divisiveness. So if you’re concerned about “anger and division” in Trump’s America, make like the 44th president when he had trouble dipping a cookie into milk and say, “Thanks, Obama.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
