My latest column appeared in The Hill this morning. You can read the full thing here.
With just over a week to go until the midterm elections, former President Obama joined the campaign trail to remind us of just how smug and condescending he can be. It was echt Obama: He made fun of the tastes of middle-class Americans, getting into hot water over a joke about how tacky the Cheesecake Factory is. He also bemoaned how divisive our politics has gotten — while of course slamming his political opposition as utterly indecent.
What’s more, he reverted to his trademark gaslighting. It’s almost as if we were all back in 2012.
The comments came over the weekend at campaign stops in Ohio and later in Michigan, where the Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, is struggling with Black voters. El-Sayed’s efforts to court this traditionally stalwart Democratic bloc have fallen flat; a recent poll had former House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate, picking up an unprecedented 33 percent of the Black vote.
Hence Obama’s appearance — a Hail Mary attempt to revive El-Sayed’s support with Black voters.
At the rally, Obama compared questions about El-Sayed’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood to the Birther movement — the racist conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the U.S.
But here’s the difference between the racist Birther movement and the questions about El Sayed: The claim that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. was false, whereas the claim that Abdul El-Sayed has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood is true.
Obama the president who marginalized the American Jewish community because they opposed the Iran deal and who paved the way for the DSA takeover of the Democratic Party with disastrous policies such as Obamacare and who was the architect of Russiagate should be sitting in jail for his abuse of power and did nothing except pay the race card against anyone who disagreed with his policies truly is a gaslighter if the worst variety
While the birther movement claiming Obama eas not born in the US was wrong, it's hard to characterize it as "racist" just because it claimed that one specific Black individual was not US born. Maybe if it claimed most Blacks were not born in the US or something similar that applied to large numbers of people because of their race.
This was Obama playing the race card that any criticism of him is rooted in his race, not his ideas. Justice Clarence Thomas was fortunate to avoid that fate.