Even Barack Obama knows that the Age of Obama is over, though he just can’t quite acknowledge it. That’s my take from a podcast interview with the former president making the rounds this week.
Obama spoke to podcaster Marc Maron in the final episode of the comedian’s show released Monday. It came at a fitting time as President Donald Trump was finalizing a deal to end the war between Israel and Hamas by in part entirely repudiating the Obama doctrine in the Middle East.
The interview was filled with all kinds of Obama-isms. His “above it all†persona was on full display as he lamented “division†in America.
As always, Obama presents himself as Mr. Reasonable, the norm defender who merely asks Americans to try to be half as good as his lofty ideals. This while completely ignoring or glossing over his own ruthless and catastrophic departures from our constitutional and political norms.
Without a bit of irony, Obama lamented the politicization of the FBI and DOJ as if he didn’t have an instrumental role in their corruption.
What was remarkable about this interview besides the usual obnoxious holier than thou attitude is how defeated Obama seemed. This man—for the Millennial generation that put him in office—was peak “cool.†He would fix all the mistakes of his predecessors, bring in “smart†people to government, stop climate change, end war, defeat racism, and make all your dreams come true.
Now he sits on a couch looking slightly miserable, wondering how it is that the country embraced Trump, a man who set out to undo everything he’d done.
Obama even lashed out at voters.
Maybe now, deep down Obama understands the reality he is now stuck with. Despite once being lauded as a transcendent figure in American politics, despite the perpetual media accolades, the unmerited awards, the 44th president’s legacy is being almost entirely eclipsed by his Republican successor. And for very good reasons.
Trump’s counterrevolution is a repudiation of not just Obama the man, but all the careful, and wholly toxic institution building Obama did during and after his time in office.
It was Obama who merged the functions of the progressive state with nongovernmental organizations and Big Business. He was the one who used federal bureaucracy to strong arm the country into adopting left-wing social views, a style of governance eagerly adopted by the those who ran the executive branch under his successor stand-in, President Joe Biden.
Most presidents leave Washington when their time in office is through to avoid the impression that they are trying to control their successors. Obama abandoned that precedent. It couldn’t be clearer that Obama and his advisers would be pulling the strings of future administrations from the moment he officially left office.
It was Obama who unleashed supposedly nonpartisan intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice on political foes.
And it was Obama who unleashed the DEI madness on the United States, a contagion that spilled over into much of the Western world.
It’s little remembered now, but Obama issued an executive order to establish a “Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce†way back in 2011. The order came down at almost exactly the moment legacy, corporate media began racializing literally everything under the sun.
Whether this cultural transformation happened more because of Obama’s outsized influence over media and politics at the time or larger historical forces could be a matter of debate.
The Left has certainly long sought to “remake†American culture, which it always found to be unacceptably resistant to their larger cultural and political goals. But there is little doubt in my mind that the former president had a massive role to play in the emergence of the Great Awokening.
That’s all crashing down now after the excesses of the Biden years, which are now looking like the middle stage, “Empire Strikes Back†portion of the Trump trilogy. The Age of Obama was not a time of transition to the supposedly sunlit uplands of liberal, technocratic dominance, a permanent majority borne of the diversification of America.
Instead, it looks like Obama’s legacy is one of failure. The final act of a century-old Progressive movement that collapsed under its own contradictions, failed promises, and increasing lack of connection to reality.
The post America Is Over Obama and Even He Knows It appeared first on The Daily Signal.