Daniel Greenfield: Obama Plans to Rule America Outside the
White House, by Daniel Greenfield, 12/22/16, Politichicks
Barack
Obama has two faces. After Trump’s victory and Hillary’s defeat, the public
Obama has been gracious and diplomatic. His lectures to Trump, directly and
indirectly, are couched in praise. He echoed the feeling of millions on both
sides when he said, “We are now all rooting for his success”. That’s
a lie. Or rather a disguise.
Obama
and his aides had, in one insider narrative, decided to don the “mask of
decorum”. The contempt for Trump still seeps through the mask. And the mask
hides Obama’s next big move.
President
Obama is over. He knows that. There are still some things that he can do before
he leaves office, but everything except the most destructive, can be undone by
his successor. The next phase of his campaign will not be fought from the White
House. It will be fought against the White House.
The
other Obama is emerging in conference calls with his supporters. “One of the
challenges that I’ve discovered being president is I’d like to be
organizer-in-chief, but it’s hard,” he said in one call.
Obama
can no longer be commander-in-chief. Instead he’s plotting to become
organizer-in-chief. The infrastructure for the organization was put into place
long before anyone thought that Hillary might lose.
Organizing
for Action gave him his own organizing hub. If Hillary had won, it would have
been a pressure group. Now that Trump won, it’s an axis to build a personal
counterrevolution around.
In
his post-election conference call with his OFA troops, Obama told them, “I’m
giving you like a week and a half to get over it”. Then it would be time to
“move forward not only to protect what we’ve accomplished, but also to see this
as an opportunity”. What opportunity could there be in Trump’s win?
Obama
is now the only major national figure still standing among the Democrats. After
Hillary’s defeat, he’s worked hard to attribute the loss to her shortcomings,
not his policies and decisions. That’s not just to soothe his ego. If he’s
going to dictate the future of his party, he can’t afford to be blamed for its
latest disaster. And Obama is still determined to dictate the future of the
party and the country.
In
conventional politics, Obama is done. There’s no way back into the White House.
And Hillary’s fate won’t leave much enthusiasm for nominating the uncharismatic
spouse of a charismatic ex-president.
But
Obama is not a conventional politician. He’s an organizer and a campaigner at
the vanguard of a radical movement that seeks to control traditional
institutions, but doesn’t feel bound by them. Unlike Bill Clinton, his plans
don’t begin and end with the White House. As an organizer, Obama is equipped to
build bases of power outside traditional institutions.
And
that is exactly what he is doing. The demoralization of the Democrats is, as
Obama put it, an opportunity. Social chaos is a time for the left to overthrow
and undermine traditional institutions. Fear, anger and despair are
radicalizing. The left has always operated by throwing bombs and then profiting
from the fallout. That’s Obama’s agenda. Having wrecked the country and the
Democrats, he sees that not as a setback, but as an opportunity.
“The
network that you represent, you’re perfectly poised to do that,” Obama told his
OFAers. “In other words, now is the time for some organizing.”
While
the leftist rioters in the streets are garnering the most attention, the real
threat comes from the network of staffers dubbed Obama Anonymous which are
beginning to organize and coordinate. OFA is Obama’s equivalent of the Clinton
Foundation. The Clintons built Clinton-world around staffers, but its goal was
harvesting money.
Obama
Inc. is being built around organizing and activism. Like Clinton-world, it will
be a network encompassing a variety of political and non-profit institutions.
Unlike them, it will be much less focused on directing money to its bosses in
preparation for an election. Instead it will function like a traditional
leftist movement, merging influence operations with crowdsourced mobilization.
OFA
will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever was.
The Clintons hoped to ride back to power on a giant wave of money. Obama is
taking a much more radical course.
The
staffers exiting government are being wired into Obama Inc. whether or not they
take jobs directly working for him. The OFA alumni are building networks across
organizations while taking their marching orders from him. They expect Obama to
lead them back from the wilderness and into the halls of power. He’s told them
so.
“I’m
going to be constrained in what I do with all of you until I am again a private
citizen. But that’s not so far off,” he assured them. “I’m still fired up and
I’m still ready to go.” His next comments promised that radical political
change could and would take place.
Obama
isn’t going to retire. He’s not going to spend years puttering around with a
presidential library. He’s not even going to set up a Clintonesque slush fund
and try to make his wife president. Instead he wants to force radical change
from outside the White House by using the network he’s built.
While
the public Obama wraps up business at the White House, concludes yet another
world tour, alternating between praising Trump and offering him condescending
advice, the other Obama is preparing to deploy a network that will dominate the
Dems and set the agenda on the left.
If
Obama succeeds, then he will get another shot at picking his White House
successor. But beyond that, he’s been handed the keys to an organizing machine
that will allow him to set even more of the agenda for his party than ever
before. And he has a cause that is sending the party reeling back into his
arms.
Obama
believes that he can rule America from outside the White House. And he might be
right. Political norms and old rules have been falling faster than leaves in an
autumn wind. If Obama sets out to move the center of power outside the White
House and into an organization that will control national politics through the
left, it would be dangerous to assume that he can’t and won’t succeed.
The
Democrats didn’t respond to their defeat, one of a sequence, by trying to move
to the center. Instead there is every sign that they are moving further to the
left. Keith Ellison, a radical leftist with an anti-Semitic past, is tipped to
head the DNC. Schumer still has the Senate, but Elizabeth Warren may have it
before too long. Combine that with Obama as the president-in-exile and the Dems
will be more radical and extremist than they were even when Obama was sitting
in the White House.
The
Democrats are ceasing to be a national party. Instead they are becoming a
nationalizing party. They are losing their presence in much of the country,
from state legislature to state legislature, and becoming the party of major
cities and the national government. Their agenda is to move power from local
areas to central ones, from the villages and the suburbs to the cities, from
states to D.C. and from locally elected legislators in D.C. to the satellite
bureaucracies of the Federal government.
Obama
sees Hillary’s defeat as an opportunity to burn the Dem’s last bridges with the
larger country and its “bitter clingers”, to double down on nationalizing power
and to define the political narrative around the agendas of urban elites. The
left crippled the Democrats. Now it wants to utterly consume them.
Barack
Obama is still being vague and coy about his plans. He informs reporters that
he will attack Trump when it comes to “core questions about our values and
ideals”. But the “faithful” are getting much clearer signals. “You’re going to
see me early next year, and we’re going to be in a position where we can start
cooking up all kinds of great stuff to do.”
The
election was a catastrophic disaster for the Democrats, but it opened all sorts
of doors for Obama.
Hillary’s
defeat removes the Clintons, his only real internal rivals, off the stage.
Trump’s triumph in working class areas cuts more ties with the traditional Dem
base and transforms it into a party of left-wing urban elites and their radical
agendas. And the popular figures on the left, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren,
Keith Ellison, lack his national stature, speaking skills and organization.
Obama
will move to consolidate the left. And then the Democrats. He will function as
a president-in-exile heading up the opposition to Trump. When it comes to
verbally challenging Trump, Obama will be more likely to be interviewed and
heard than Ellison or Schumer. And his people will coordinate responses across
the left from street level organizing to think tanks and policy moves. Some
of it is ego.
Obama
believes that he can find the key to beating Trump in the traditional tactics
of the left. But most is ideology and power. Obama is not done transforming
America. And America isn’t done with him yet.
Comments
Countermeasures
should include the total defunding of left-wing non-profits. If we don’t do
this, we are arming the enemy. I recommend overkill. Congress needs to expose the lies and the
treason.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment