The former president has been contradicting himself. He must think radicalism is now a winning strategy.
It is often said that the Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left since the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, which might explain why Mr. Obama’s remarks at John Lewis’s funeral service last week sounded like an attempt to stay relevant.
It wasn’t long ago that the former president was trying to steer Democrats in a more moderate direction. Back in 2018, amid calls for “sanctuary cities” and the abolition of immigration-enforcement agencies, Mr. Obama insisted that “national borders matter” and that “laws need to be followed.” He also urged fellow liberals to cool it with the identity politics. We have to “engage with people not only who look different but who hold different views,” he said. “And you can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponents have to say from the start. And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you—because they’re white or because they’re male—that somehow . . . they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”
Alas, we heard a very different Barack Obama last Thursday in Atlanta, where he turned a eulogy for a civil-rights hero into a stump speech and offered his blessing to any number of progressive causes. Among other things, he now wants the Senate to ditch the filibuster—which he supported and employed as a senator—and grant statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, two liberal bastions that could be counted on to elect more Democrats.
And then there was Mr. Obama’s change of tone on racial controversies. “Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans,” said Mr. Obama. “We may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to cast a ballot. But even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting—by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.”
Mr. Obama was elected president twice in a county where blacks are only about 13% of the population, yet he invokes segregation-era figures like Connor, who was Birmingham, Ala.’s commissioner of public safety, to suggest that little has changed for blacks since the 1960s. Mr. Obama’s own accomplishments undermine his rhetoric, as does the fact that in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died in police custody earlier this year, the police chief is black.
John McWhorter of Columbia University has documented that white suspects in police custody have died under similar circumstances. Those events don’t receive the media attention that Floyd’s death garnered because they don’t fit the prevailing racial narrative, which Mr. Obama is advancing. But absent any evidence that Floyd was killed because of his race, the responsible course would be to avoid such conjecture. And if Mr. Obama is concerned about the disproportionate number of blacks who die at the hands of law enforcement, he ought to be talking about the disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by blacks, not conjuring the spirit of Jim Crow to score political points.
Mr. Obama’s claims that Republicans limit minority voting today “with surgical precision” could also use more scrutiny. The black voter-turnout rate began rising steadily in the 1990s, and in 2012 it exceeded the white rate, even as more states passed voter-ID laws that improve ballot integrity. Moreover, polls show that a majority of blacks support these voting requirements, which suggests that any decline in black voter turnout in 2016 had more to do with the Democratic nominee than with lack of access to the polls. A Census Bureau report on turnout in the 2018 midterm elections showed an increase from 2014 of about 27% among blacks and roughly 50% among Hispanics. If Republicans are trying to suppress the minority vote, their efforts are having the opposite effect.
Whether Mr. Obama believes what he’s saying today or what he’s said in the past isn’t important. Politicians tend to be more interested in winning votes than in facts, logic and consistency. This is an election year, and the most popular Democrat in the country has determined that taking these progressive positions, and doing so in the tones we heard last week, will help his party prevail in November.
Perhaps he’s right, but the strategy is not without risks. Joe Biden prevailed in the primaries not because he’s an ideologue like Bernie Sanders or a firebrand like Elizabeth Warren. He did so because he’s neither and has resisted—with mixed success—efforts to pull him further left. Mr. Obama’s new endorsement of progressive brass tacks will please the base, but it also makes it harder for Mr. Biden to appeal to the moderate and independent voters he’ll need on Election Day.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal