OPINION:
Barack Obama, who’s been pretty quiet — meaning, quieter than he could have been — on the political frays that have been coursing through Capitol Hill of late, has just formally waded back into the D.C. deep.
He’s going to headline a fundraiser for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group seen as crucial to the rebuilding of the party.
What delicious irony. What delightful incongruity — for Republicans.
Get the guy who tore down the party to come and help build it back up — what breathtaking logic.
And all the people on the ideological right go: LOL.
Obama’s re-entry to politicking shouldn’t worry Republicans much. It was under Obama’s leadership, after all, the Democratic Party suffered massive losses, the kind that hasn’t been seen since World War II.
As FiveThirtyEight.com quipped in a succinct headline in early January, a day before Donald Trump was to be sworn in as president: “Barack Obama Won the White House, But Democrats Lost the Country.”
You don’t say.
“At the beginning of Obama’s term, Democrats controlled 59 percent of state legislatures, while now they control only 31 percent, the lowest percentage for the party since the turn of the 20th century,” FiveThirtyEight.com wrote. “They held 29 governor’s offices and now have only 16, the party’s lowest number since 1920.”
You do say.
If Obama were an emoji, he’d be the grim reaper.
Having him headline an event to waken the Democratic dead is the stuff of Republican dream. What’s curious is that lefty party leadership know this — yet want Obama anyway.
“[Obama wants to] build the bench” for the party, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez told The Washington Post. “Because tomorrow’s president is today’s state senator. And he know that very personally. When you lose 900 state legislative seats, those are people who could have been the next governors and senators and Cabinet positions, and that is something that he’s very committed to.”
Committed enough to keep away? ’Cause truth be told, Obama’s track record of building reads more like a destroyer.
His policies, his penchant for socialism, his bully-pit politicking, his pushes for all-things-progressive, his very unpatriotic rhetoric and views — eight years of such has had an effect. And it’s one that’s given meteoric rise to Republicans.
The fruit of Obama’s labors is an American people who reject his ways.
Perhaps at this point, the Democratic Party’s biggest hope is gapping as large a distance between its members and the former president as possible. By head counts, and election results, the Democratic Party’s looking pretty dead.
Sticking Obama on top of the heap of bodies isn’t going to magically bring life.
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