"We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America," Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama promised on the campaign trail in 2008. Up until that moment, Obama had carefully couched his red diaper radicalism in the language of moderation, of healing, of "one America."
It's impossible to say for sure whether Obama accidentally let slip the real foundation of his candidacy or if he was feeling so cocky that close to election day that he felt he could get away with anything. But I've always felt it was the latter.
Trump was obviously kidding when he claimed in 2016 that he could "shoot somebody and... wouldn’t lose voters." Obama wasn't at all kidding about wanting to fundamentally transform America.
Conservatives and (most) Republicans shouted, "DANGER, Will Robinson, DANGER!" when Obama finally said it out loud. Even the press (belatedly and in only one small instance) kinda-sorta noticed. Here's a transcript culled from a conversation PBS host Charlie Rose had with NBC anchor Tom Brokaw one day after Obama's "fundamental transformation" line:
- ROSE: I don't know what Barack Obama's worldview is.
- BROKAW: No, I don't, either.
- ROSE: I don't know how he really sees where China is.
- BROKAW: We don't know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.
- ROSE: I don't really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?
- BROKAW: Yeah, it's an interesting question.
- ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational speeches.
- BROKAW: Two of them! I don't know what books he's read.
- ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?
- BROKAW: There's a lot about him we don't know.
That was as close as the press ever got to doing due diligence on the most radical man ever to win the White House. Not just too little but also too late — Obama's election had been a 99% certainty for weeks.
Obama's wide-eyed acolytes lapped it up; they were enraptured by the promise of fundamental transformation.
Give Obama this small bit of reluctant credit: he was the moderate radical, willing to play a long game of incremental political changes, founded upon his less moderate social radicalism. At the end of Obama's tenure, the National Catholic Register's Paul Kengor explained:
Fundamental transformation, however, has not happened in areas where many might have hoped (or feared) in 2008. It has not been a fundamental shift in the attitudes of the vast majority regarding the role of government, taxation, regulations, economics, education, or even health care, where Obama had his signature legislative achievement. It hasn’t happened in foreign policy, though Obama has made a seriously detrimental impact in regions from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.
"The reality is that the true fundamental transformation has been in the realm of culture," Kengor wrote, "notably in matters of sexual orientation, marriage, and family. The shift there has been unprecedented and far beyond anyone’s imagination eight years ago." Marxists and other collectivists always work to destroy the family, the bulwark of resistance against the state. What better way to accomplish that goal than by undefining what "man" and "woman" mean — and to encourage children to do the same?
On the political side, Obama's transformations were less legislative (he never cared for the dirty work of politicking on Capitol Hill, even when Democrats were in charge) than they were procedural. Obama's weaponization of the formerly nonpartisan bureaucracy against the Right might have begun at the IRS but it hardly ended there. He used the State Department and the UN to bypass the Senate's authority to ratify treaties and Congress's power to authorize the use of force. Then there are the multibillion-dollar slush funds at USAID and other agencies, whose corruption we've long suspected and are only now learning the true scale of.
Underappreciated in all this is the influence of former Obama hand Samantha Power — who was also Presidentish Joe Biden's pick to head up USAID these last four years. Considered too radical to lead State, where Obama wanted her, Power has moved from one powerful — but often secretive — executive branch position to another.
With the election of Trump 2.0 the DGAF Edition, all that work is being undone.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Hillary Clinton was supposed to cement Obama's revolution in place — the emerging "permanent Democrat majority" — with a continued eight years of progressive rule. Instead, that interloper Donald Trump won and upset the plan.
Professional revolutionaries don't give up so easily, and Trump's first term was undercut by "burrowed" Deep State progressives, RINOs, and Trump's ignorance about how Washington works. Then came the irregular (to put it all-too-mildly) 2020 election and the installation of an Obama puppet in the Oval Office.
Trans-radicalism and other social issues — along with epic malmanagement of the economy — led to Trump's victory. But unlike Trump 1.0, this new version understands how Obama's fundamentally transformed Washington works. And he's working hard to undo the damage.
Here's the lesson Obama never learned about America.
He could corrupt our institutions and introduce trendy social nonsense, but he couldn't corrupt our vision of ourselves as a fundamentally fair and decent people. It seems strange, impossible even, that the fairness and decency counterrevolution is spearheaded by a fundamentally outrageous TV host/real estate developer — with a big assist from the world's richest man who wants to die on Mars. Yet here we are.
What a country.
Still.
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