If you’ve been following the New York City mayoral race, you might feel as if you’ve seen this show before. I certainly do. Mamdani’s meteoric rise, the spellbound devotion of his supporters, and the way they cheer for him simply because he ticks all the diversity boxes and embraces radical policies — it’s all eerily familiar. This isn’t a new story; it’s a sequel, with the same recycled plot and a predictable, disappointing ending.
Maybe you haven’t noticed it yet, but the parallels between Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral run and Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign are impossible to ignore. Both promise hope, change, and sweeping idealism, yet rest on candidates with thin résumés and a voter base eager to push the limits of radical leftism.
Like Obama, Mamdani has mastered the art of appearing transformational while offering little evidence of the experience or judgment needed to actually manage the world’s most complex city. And, much like Obama, he’s gotten plenty of help from a fawning media and an establishment eager to anoint the next big thing before the vetting’s even done.
At 34, Mamdani is the Democratic Socialist assemblyman who shocked New York politics by defeating Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, echoing Obama’s upset over Hillary Clinton in 2008. Despite a thin résumé — including stints as a failed rapper, campaign manager, and part-time activist—Mamdani has turned his outsider image into a citywide movement, gaining endorsements from influential Democrats desperate to pander to the radical left base.
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The Obama parallels aren’t accidental. Both men built their careers on charisma and the language of renewal. Obama, the community organizer who launched his presidential campaign in the middle of his first term as a U.S. senator, became the messiah of the radical left, while simultaneously selling himself as a “Yes, We Can” optimist who would unite our country. Mamdani’s using the same script — promising “a city we can afford” and “childcare for all,” and everything else on the socialist wish list.
But there’s another echo from 2008 — the issue of radical associations. Back then, it was Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Tony Rezko. Today, Mamdani’s roster includes Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, along with far-left provocateurs such as Hasan Piker — a man who once claimed “America deserved 9/11.”
The cult of personality around Mamdani evokes the hypnosis that brainwashed Obama’s supporters back in 2008. Just as Obama’s scandals failed to slow his rise, Mamdani’s backers are either ignoring his radicalism and troubling antisemitism — or simply don’t care. In 2008, Obama’s looming victory filled many of us with a sense of dread, because we could see through the polished slogans and promises of unity to the reality beneath. And history proved us right: the Obama presidency was a disaster that inflicted real, lasting harm on our country. Mamdani’s campaign, a decades-later sequel no one asked for, feels like that same nightmare playing on repeat — same charm, same empty promises, but with consequences that could be just as severe for New York City.
