Obama won <Excellent VDH>

[DoD]

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of
America.

-Barack Obama, October 30, 2008

By traditional metrics, Barack Obama's presidency was mostly a failure. The
economy, in a new first, never hit annualized growth of 3 percent. His
signature domestic policy-Obamacare-caused chaos. Millions lost their
coverage and doctors, and paid far more in deductibles and premiums. The
stagnant recovery after the 2008 recession was the worst in 50 years.

Myriads of new regulations, higher taxes, and socialist jawboning vegetated
the economy. Scandals at the IRS, Department of Veterans Affairs, FBI, CIA,
National Security Agency, Justice Department, General Services
Administration, and National Security Council abounded. Obama weaponized the
federal government by punishing opponents through the IRS, monitoring
suspect reporters, scapegoating and jailing a video maker, and using the
deep state to exonerate Hillary Clinton from serial wrongdoing and to
sabotage the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.

Abroad, a diplomatic "reset" empowered Vladimir Putin's Russia from the
Crimea to the Middle East. The Iran deal legitimized Iran's ascendant Middle
East hegemony. Chinese trade cheating was of no concern. ISIS was but a "JV"
terrorist clique. North Korea freely pointed nuclear missiles at the West
Coast. Israel and the Gulf monarchies and Egypt were no longer close allies.
Outreach and deference instead were shown to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
"Lead from behind" bombing of Libya led to a disaster. Nonexistent "red
lines" in Syria, flexible nonproliferation "deadlines" issued to Iran, and
rhetorical "step-over" lines given Vladimir Putin all eroded U.S.
credibility. And on and on.

Yet in terms of culture, Obama clearly won.

"White Privilege" Goes Mainstream
He institutionalized radical cultural shifts by creating entirely new
rubrics of privileging race and gender. The old idea of due process and the
rule of law were subordinated to identity politics, whether in matters of
sanctuary cities and non-enforcement of immigration law or campus charges of
sexual assault. The larger culture made the necessary adjustments and
followed suit.

Before the Obama administration, the sloganeering about "white privilege"
was confined mostly to shrill and irrelevant university academic
departments. Indeed, race prior to 2009 was becoming less important a
half-century after the Civil Rights movement. Americans were increasingly
multiracial, and welcomed assimilation, given increasing intermarriage and
the frequent inability to calibrate race by superficial appearance.

Inasmuch as there were tens of millions of impoverished whites in rural and
rust-belt America, the notion that skin color ipso facto any longer denoted
privilege was a hard sell. Many ethnic groups enjoyed higher per capita
incomes than did those whites. Certainly, no one thought an out-of-work coal
miner in Appalachia had an edge on black NFL players, or that the children
of the Rust Belt were given preferences in college admissions.

By the same token, even radical feminism still operated within the realm of
Western jurisprudence. Charges of sexual assault, like all other allegations
of criminal behavior, were to be adjudicated by evidence, testimony, and
cross examination. What outraged the nation about the purported victims of
Bill Clinton's sexual assaults was not that Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones,
and Kathleen Willey were freed from citing evidence in pressing their
claims, but rather that the Clintons' (both Bill and Hillary) power and
influence had pruned the likelihood of Bill's victims ever obtaining a fair
hearing.

Yet most everything changed with the Obama election, and we have felt Obama's
legacy on matters of race and gender ever since. From the very beginning of
his tenure, Obama sought to fulfill his promise of fundamentally
transforming the country. On matters of race, he had easily defended-to
media indifference-his racist and Antisemitic personal pastor Jeremiah
Wright ("I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother. . . ").

Obama supporters never objected, even when Obama employed terms like
"typical white person" of his own grandmother who had sacrificed to ensure
that he could afford attending a tony prep school. In office, Obama quickly
injected himself into the Professor Henry Louis Gates psychodrama to brand
the police as inherently biased. His commentary on the Trayvon Martin case
was reduced to reminding Americans that the president and the late Martin
shared an African-American identity. His 2008 "clingers" speech was the
model for Hillary Clinton's later "deplorables" rant; "get in their faces"
and "bring a gun to a knife fight" boilerplate were welcomed as progressive
challenges to the old order.

Obama invited to the White House rappers whose lyrics were often patently
racist and misogynist. His favorite, Kendrick Lamar, had just released an
album cover that displayed a dead white judge with his eyes crossed out, as
rappers toasted his corpse on the White House lawn. Kendrick's lyrics often
expressed hatred for the police ("And we hate the popo").

Attorney General Eric Holder referred to African-Americans as "my people"
(the sort of a racially chauvinist reference that would have gotten any
other Attorney General fired) and intoned: "in things racial we have always
been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of
cowards." (I supposed Holder was including in his "always been" and "nation
of cowards" the 1.5 million who died, were wounded, or were missing in the
Civil War, especially the 600,000 Northerners who were casualties of a war
to end Confederate slavery.) The racist and Antisemite Al Sharpton was a
regular visitor to the White House. And a 2005 photo of Obama posing with
the abject racist and Antisemite Louis Farrakhan was suppressed until after
the Obama presidency.

"Diversity" and Division
Yet the main racial legacy of the Obama Administration was the
institutionalization of a new binary that had transcended past notions of
affirmative action aimed at rectifying the historical discrimination of
African Americans.

What replaced the construct of affirmative action became known as
"diversity." In reductionist terms, that mean "white" and "non-white,"
rather than "white" and "black," and, more importantly, it made irrelevant
all prior notions of class or real historical grievance.

Suddenly, one could cross the border illegally from Oaxaca and instantly
become a "minority," simply by reason of an antithesis to the "white"
majority, with all the resulting grievances and reparations that accrued.
Immigrants from India, the Arab world, or Latin America, regardless of their
wealth, appearance, and status, likewise were lumped together under the
doctrine of "diversity." Immigration itself was weaponized. Notions of
legality, meritocracy and diversity in adjudicating immigration gave way to
welcoming in as many as possible who might empower the Obama political
agenda of ethnic tribalization.

Salad-bowl immigration policies also fueled polarization, as a new bond of
being "nonwhite" brought together Asians, Latino, Arabs, blacks, and almost
anyone who could claim to be "nonwhite," again regardless of the
circumstances of their birth, their own experiences in America, their actual
racial ancestry, or their wealth and class.

Instead, the necessary slogan "white privilege" justified the new divide: a
wealthy immigrant from Paraguay "counted" as a minority deserving of special
consideration in a way the son of a white Youngstown, Ohio clerk did not.
The facts surrounding the individual cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Trayvon Martin in Miami Gardens, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore were
irrelevant-given all three deaths were leveraged for wider grievances
against the so-called white majority community. (Had the half-Peruvian
defendant George Zimmerman just ethnicized his name and adopted his maternal
surname, and thus reinvented himself as Jorge Mesa, the case would have
incurred little media attention).

Race and, to a lesser extent, gender now replaced class, as the grievance to
govern almost everything in America from NFL pregame National Anthems to the
speeches at the Emmys and Oscars.

The New Ideal
By 2016 actors, celebrities, and politicians felt no hesitation in using the
word "white" in an almost exclusively derogatory fashion, especially given
the new recalibration of "demography is destiny" and the increasing
alienation, self-destruction, and pathologies of impoverished and
lower-middle class whites in the deindustrialized heartland.

Dividing the country by white and nonwhite made sense to the Obama
Administration, because the divide promulgated the idea that Obama had been
elected by a record non-white bloc voting (in fact, Obama in 2008 would get
a higher percentage of the white vote than had John Kerry in 2004). Obama's
model for other Democrats was that, in the future, immigration, tribal
voting and demography changes would only accentuate that trend. The Obama
paradigm would become the new electoral legacy of the Democratic Party, to
be intensified as it was successfully passed down to each new generation of
progressives.

Blue-state, and overwhelmingly leftwing, California became the new ideal of
what was now possible. California's non-white population was heralded as the
new majority, given both massive illegal and legal immigration, along with
the infusion of trillions of dollars of global profits and investment into
progressive Silicon Valley, together with punitive taxes on the shrinking
and soon departing middle class.

A subtext of the Obama era new dichotomy of white/nonwhite was not
necessarily privilege versus lack of privilege, or racists versus victims of
racists. Instead the message was of an unspoken and disappearing tribe being
replaced by ascending tribes-and therefore everyone for their own careerist
advantages should make the necessary adjustments to a society obsessed with
identity. And for those without the necessarily correct DNA, racial
rebranding could become a construct of self-identification, as in case of
Ward Churchill, Elizabeth Warren, or Rachel Dolezal.

Obama's Only Real Legacy
In matters of sex and gender, the Obama administration also looked to the
campus for guidance. The Department of Justice's new rules on sexual
assault, particularly at colleges and universities, seemed to be imported in
toto from the Gender Studies department and ignored the Bill of Rights.

New Department of Justice guidelines essentially did away with due process
and created a Star Chamber academic court. Here, the accused (if male) was
denied the right to face his accuser (if she was female), to producer
counter evidence, to exercise the right of cross examination, and to assume
the tradition of being presumed innocent until proven guilty. If there had
been no Duke lacrosse cases, no Rolling Stone frat boy investigations, and
no iconization of "Mattress Girl," they all would have had to be
invented-given the new atmosphere where an accuser, if of the right gender
or race, must be believed, and where the accused, if of the wrong gender or
race, must be condemned as guilty. The current Kavanaugh confirmation circus
is the logical expression of the Obama Administration's eight-year
subversion of due process in matters of accusations of sexual assault.

Finally, another cultural achievement of Obama was to destroy the last
vestiges of a Democratic workers' party of Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy,
or even Bill Clinton and to replace it with a pyramidal party of the poor
dependent on government entitlements and reparations, and a small, rich, and
hip elite at the top.

Obama institutionalized the idea that a Silicon Valley hipster billionaire
could and should play act being left-wing, if only he would pledge to use
his wealth and power to promote progressive causes, whose consequences he
cynically would be able to avoid by virtue of his influence and riches.

Hollywood celebrities, Wall Street schemers, and techie billionaires all
entered the public square demonizing "white privilege" that the rich enjoyed
by fobbing it off on those poorer who had none of it. The substitution of
race and gender for class, then, was Obama's truly signature achievement.

It was no accident that in the days after he left office, the Obamas cut
nearly $60 million in book and film deals, while Obama himself took off to
millionaires' yachts and islands to deplore the Trump Administration, whose
policies were beginning to help the unemployed that had been most left
behind by his own boutique environmental and regulatory policies so
cherished by the affluent.

By 2017, these fundamental transformations were clear. Americans now
scrambled to find their proper tribe (and on occasion gender), either for
careerist advantage or for perceived protection, from the government. And
the very rich had found a way to be the very cool, by virtue signaling their
superficial embrace of tribalism, just as in private they continued to live
their mostly apartheid existences. Shouting from the rooftops that one
"celebrates diversity" meant that behind the enclave wall he didn't need to.

The agenda of balkanizing America into tribes, and white/nonwhite binaries,
and galvanizing the rich and poor against the middle class was Obama's only
real legacy. But it is a legacy that nonetheless fundamentally transformed
America.

https://www.amgreatness.com/2018/09/23/obama-won/