What Democrats Are Digging Out Of The Cupboard Before Midterms

We keep being told that Democrats are in incredible, tremendous shape for the midterms, and that they’re going to hammer the Republicans. 

So why is Barack Obama in Michigan? Why do Democrats have to call in their 65-year-old LeBron James to try to win just one more time?

Barack Obama is the guy you call when you’re down a little bit near the end of the game. He is not the guy you have to call when you are winning big. As Harry Enten at CNN pointed out, every election is a toss-up right now. If the polling is off even a little, Republicans won’t just hold the Senate; they’ll hold it fairly easily. Enten said bluntly, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Correct. No one knows what’s going to happen.

The goal here is to demoralize Republicans enough to cause them not to vote.

Thus, Democrats are trotting out the guy who characterizes the modern Democratic Party.

But Barack Obama also happens to be the guy who broke the modern Democratic Party. He turned it into a party of college-educated white elites unmoored from reality. He was able to carry minorities, but only because of Barack Obama as a person. It was not because of his positions or his attitude. He’s an East Coast elitist, and his top fans are East Coast elitists.

If he hadn’t been racially diverse but held the same positions, he would never have become president.

For example, in Michigan, he bragged about his record in Iran. He said of the current war on Iran, “The original rationale was, well, we were going to go in there, we’re going to make them, you know, bend the knee and give up their nuclear program, their nuclear weapons. Of course, Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons. We had curbed their nuclear program because I put in place a deal that everybody acknowledged had kept them from getting nukes.”

That is not true.

Obama’s crappy nuclear deal was approved at the time by 30% of the public. The public was correct because he did not, in fact, disarm Iran. He gave them a clear pathway to a nuclear weapon.

The reason President Trump had to go bomb Iran, not just last year but also the year before, was that he had to destroy the nuclear program that was moving at an extraordinary clip toward actual weaponization.

Barack Obama claiming that Iran is in a stronger strategic position now than they were before the war is untrue. Iran has been devastated; the Iranian rial is trading at 2.5 million to the American dollar. They used to have a navy, air force, and nuclear program, and now they don’t have any of those in any meaningful way. They do not have control of the Strait of Hormuz. More oil is now being shipped out of the Persian Gulf than was shipped before the war. They do not have a working industry. They have been forced to rely on their buddies, the Houthis, to harass shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and to bother the Saudis. The idea that Iran is in a strong strategic position is insanity.

But Barack Obama was never popular for his policies; he was popular only as a person. You have to distinguish between Barack Obama the politician and Barack Obama’s policies. The Democratic Party adopted his policies after he left the presidency, believing they would inherit his popularity. Instead, what they got was his unpopular policies without him as the frontman.

It’s always bewildering to me when Democrats call Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, or Kamala Harris to the barricades.

That does not bespeak a party that is deeply confident about its status in this election.

But the Democrats continue to run on Barack Obama’s 2012 platform. In Michigan, he said that Democrats aren’t radicals or communists or jihadists. They just want health care.

What? I thought he solved the health care problem with Obamacare. For the record, Affordable Care Act (meaning Obamacare) premiums have increased twice as fast as employer-based health care premiums.

It turns out Barack Obama didn’t fix one American problem; instead, he broke the country in myriad ways.

My going theory about American politics is that the 2012 election fundamentally destroyed the country. The American people should have sided with Mitt Romney, a total moderate, a clean-cut politician with no serious personal baggage, and probably the cleanest politician in terms of personal record ever to run for the White House.

Instead, Barack Obama decided to run one of the most scurrilous presidential campaigns in American history, win in 2012, and break the brains of the American people.

Barack Obama remains an irritant in American politics and in American history. He’ll be remembered largely as the man who led to the era of Donald Trump. One of the great ironies of American politics is that if Barack Obama had not gone on national television and mocked Donald Trump, then Donald Trump probably would never have run for president.

Additionally, Barack Obama is not getting anybody out to the polls because Barack Obama is not on the ballot.

Democrats aren’t just trotting out Barack Obama. They’re now trotting out Kamala Harris in New Hampshire. There’s been an awful lot of meat on the menu at the Ben Shapiro Show, but we’ve been missing some word salad.

Bill Clinton has also been on the campaign trail.

Man, they are emptying the cupboard.