Nowhere will the end of the Obama era be more welcome than in Israel

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK / ZB PHOTOS

Residents of D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood will likely be seeing less of Barack Obama, as his third term draws to an ignominious close and the prospect of a fourth term has been decisively rejected. The gatherings of former Obama administration officials, now ensconced in the Biden administration, at the Obama mansion are a relic of the past.

David Garrow, Pulitzer-prize winning biographer and the author of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, told the Daily Mail that Obama’s current political relevance is at the level of Bill Clinton, the previous supernova of the Democratic Party. And what is that level? When Bill dropped into a McDonald’s recently, while on the campaign trail, the excited cashier asked him, “Are you Joe Biden?”

The Obamas campaigned hard for Kamala. She was, after all, the perfect frontwoman, through which Barack could have continued to pull the puppet strings — just as he had for an enfeebled Joe Biden. She articulated no policy ideas of her own — beyond the ridiculous call for price controls on groceries — and would have been fully content to follow his lead. But all Barack and Michelle’s hectoring of black brothers to overcome their misogyny and vote for Kamala does not appear to have moved the needle even a smidgen.
OBAMA ORGANIZED the present-day Democratic Party around a Faustian bargain between college-educated elites and an alphabet soup of identity groups. The latter would provide the votes needed for the elites to pursue their pet projects — a radical climate agenda, biological men in women’s bathrooms and competing in women’s sports, open borders — and, in return, the billionaire class would take care of them.

That balkanization of America into identity groups — e.g., POC, MENA, LGBTQ — gave rise to DEI regimes in the universities and major corporations to which a majority of Americans are ever more hostile, including blacks and Hispanics, who have discovered that the admission of middle- and upper middle-class members of their groups into elite universities and professions, based on DEI criteria, has done little to elevate their group as a whole or improve their economic prospects.

And the ubiquitous imposition of racial quotas, in the name of equity, has stoked resentment between favored and disfavored groups. Americans hoped that Obama’s election would finally begin to heal the wounds of slavery and racism. But at the end of his eight years in office, both blacks and whites consistently viewed race relations as having regressed.

November 5, however, marked the end of a politics based on racial or gender essentialism of the kind invoked by Biden on the campaign trail in 2020, when he told African Americans, “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black.” Kamala Harris, a woman of half Caribbean descent, underperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 results among black voters and among women (with the single exception of older, college-educated white women), and most dramatically among Hispanics.

Democrats continued to address minority groups as if they owed the party their allegiance. As Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid put it, “This version of the Democratic Party is arrogant and patronizing, taking minority voters for granted and treating them like children.”

Trump addressed members of those groups like everyone else — i.e., as workers seeking a brighter economic future; and as parents, concerned with their children acquiring the skills needed to attain well-paying jobs, and opposed to their being indoctrinated in advanced gender theories designed to undermine the traditional nuclear family or in portrayals of America only in terms of its litany of sins and not as a beacon of freedom to mankind. The most effective Trump ad spot juxtaposed the candidates thus: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

The organization of the MAGA movement around common economic interests rather than immutable racial traits is surely a healthier, less divisive way forward for America. No doubt, the Democratic Party will at some future date do better with its traditional minority constituencies than it did in 2024. But as the old song goes, “How are you going to keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” Once terms like “Uncle Tom,” “racist,” or “misogynist” lose their power to intimidate, they can never do so again to the same extent.
A PARTY THAT JUST received the thumping the Democrats did would normally be expected to look in the mirror and figure out where it went wrong. And about that thumping, there can be little doubt. Harris 2024 underperformed Biden 2020 in every state in the country, except Washington. Indeed, she barely had any counties on a national map where she did better.

Trump captured seven nearly entirely Hispanic counties along the Texas-Mexico border and a 40 percent black county in North Carolina, which had never gone Republican before. The overall vote for Republican House candidates was better than in any election since 1928. And all that is even after January 6 and Dobbs.

Yet such introspection does not come easily to Democratic Party elites; they are too convinced of their own virtue. The problem with American democracy, by their lights, is the pesky “American voter.” To hear the denizens of The View tell it, only misogyny and racism can explain the failure of Kamala Harris’s “flawless” campaign.

Never mind that before the candidacy was handed to her by party elders, she had the lowest approval rating of any vice president in history: 37 percent. Or that she had long proven herself a hapless national politician, whose 2020 candidacy for the Democratic nomination ended before the first caucus vote was cast in Iowa. Or that she was selected as Biden’s running mate only because Biden had promised Cong. James Clyburn, to whom he owed his victory in the 2020 South Carolina primary, that he would select a black woman to run with him. Or that she could not separate herself from the Biden-Harris administration, which had plummeted in public support ever since the disastrous August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Saner voices than Joy Reid or Joe Scarborough will eventually emerge. Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky, for instance, castigated the entire party for having become the anti-common-sense party “so focused on pandering to niche groups and politically correct language that they are alienating everyday Americans.” But an aversion to self-criticism will continue to plague a party whose elites are so focused on their own virtue-signaling.

America’s legacy media has long since proclaimed Barack Obama to be the nation’s “leading tutelary figure,” in the words of David Samuels in Unherd. But the legacy media’s credibility on that score, or on any other, has long been shot, as it turned itself into cheerleaders for the Democratic Party. The nearly unanimous support of the legacy media for Harris, both print and broadcast, had almost no impact. They have simply lied and gaslighted the public on so many subjects in the service of the government/Democratic Party narrative that no one believes anything they say. Among those subjects: the origins of the Covid virus in a Chinese government lab; the efficacy of masking; the numbers of illegal migrants crossing the southern border, over 10 million during the Biden administration; President Biden’s steadily declining mental acuity — a coverup, incidentally, in which Harris was a full participant.

Consider just a couple of stories damaging to the Harris campaign that were almost entirely suppressed by the legacy media in the weeks leading up to the election. Israel’s plans for its second foray against Iran were apparently leaked by someone in the Defense Department prior to the attack, a very serious national security breach. Suspicion immediately fell on Ariane Tabatabai, a senior DOD official, with top security clearance, who is known to have taken direction from Iran’s Foreign Ministry, and who was a close associate of Robert Malley — chief Iran envoy for President Obama and President Biden, who has been suspended without pay for security breaches in his handling of classified documents. Obviously, the implication that Iran has successfully infiltrated an agent into the upper realms of the Biden administration was not one the White House was eager to have bandied about.

A second story, about Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s shameful treatment of women, which contrasted sharply with the media’s attempt to portray him as the poster boy for non-toxic masculinity, also drew scant press attention in America. One would have to go to Britain’s Daily Mail to read the sordid details.

At least Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, seems to realize that when a newspaper ceases to engage in journalism, instead of cheerleading, it has little to sell and no influence. His refusal to allow the Post to endorse Harris reflected his recognition that the paper has lost its credibility. Few in the media, however, have considered why their influence with the public has sunk to such lows.
THE GREATEST WOUND of the Obama era — at least in Israeli eyes — was his unremitting support for Iran, which he somehow convinced himself would be a balancing counterforce to the Middle East’s Sunni regimes. In pursuit of that theory, he and his successors in the Biden-Harris administration, including many of those responsible for the original formulation of that policy under Obama, have continually propped up the Iranian regime and provided it with tens of billions of dollars, with which Iran has financed the creation of a “ring of fire” around Israel.

Iran almost certainly would have obtained nuclear weapons sometime during a Harris presidency, and with scant opposition from the United States, which under Obama and Biden consistently avoided confrontation with Iran and, by and large, its proxies.

Trump will reimpose strict sanctions on Iranian oil sales, the same type of sanctions that had the mullahs begging for relief at the outset of the Biden presidency, and thereby deny it the resources necessary to maintain the “ring of fire” that Israel has done so much to eliminate over the past months.

No one can say with confidence that the United States will join Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations — which assistance might be necessary to achieve that goal. But at the very least, Trump has made clear that he will not oppose Israeli efforts to do so. And he has expressed support for Israel taking out much of the Iranian regime’s vital oil refining infrastructure.

Nor is Iran the only Middle East issue on which the second Trump administration will differ radically from the Biden-Harris regime. Since the election, the Biden administration has informed Israel that it fully intends to impose an arms embargo, at a crucial juncture in Israel’s current two-front wars, if Israel does not comply with 15 conditions by the November 13 deadline.

Among those conditions are that Israel not prevent funding of UNRWA, as the Knesset has already voted to do, in light of UNRWA’s ongoing complicity with Hamas, including the employment of many senior Hamas operatives. Trump already defunded UNRWA in his first term, and there is no reason to think he would not do so in a second term. Nor is there any chance of his imposing an arms embargo on Israel.

Finally, Trump will be eager to expand on his greatest diplomatic achievement — the Abraham Accords — by bringing the Saudis into the Accords, without insisting, as the Biden administration has done, on movement to toward a Palestinian state. The greatest achievement of the original Abraham Accords was decoupling the Palestinian issue from relations with the Sunni Gulf states, which the foreign policy establishment had always maintained was impossible.

Israel dodged a bullet, or more accurately a barrage of bullets, by not being left to face a Harris administration staffed by old Obama Iran hands and others with a longstanding hostility to the Jewish state. Nowhere will the end of the Obama era be more welcome than in Israel.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1036. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)