President-elect Donald Trump not only defeated Vice President Kamala Harris last week, he also defeated former President Barack Obama.
Obama, who campaigned hard for Harris, told the public the 2024 election was a choice, not between policies, but between values and character.
But with Trump’s decisive 312 to 226 Electoral College victory, secured, in part, by Trump becoming the first Republican since former President George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote, this time by almost three million votes, the public’s choice is clear.
That choice has decimated the Democratic Party, which is poised to remain powerless in Washington, D.C., until at least 2026, and has severely undermined the legacy of its defacto leader, Obama.
After he irrevocably changed the Republican Party with his win eight years ago, the political destruction wrought by Trump in 2024 has resulted in Democrats now having to regroup, with many members urging the party to search for new leadership, not rely on its leaders of the past.
‘Yesterday’s voices’
Former Obama Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, for example, is imploring the Democratic Party to “do better than reach back to its glory days to find victory” as Democratic governors, several of whom are predicted to run for president in 2028, form a coalition, Governors Safeguarding Democracy, to better protest Trump.
“It’s no longer the party of Obama,” Johnson told the Washington Examiner. “Neither is it the party of Roosevelt or Kennedy anymore. The Republican Party is certainly not the party of Reagan anymore. A good political party knows how to look forward, not backward.”
Democratic strategist Tom Cochran, managing director of public relations and public affairs firm 720 Strategies, in addition to being an Obama State Department alumnus, agreed that it is “hard” for the party “to inspire people” with “yesterday’s voices when we’re trying to solve tomorrow’s problems.”
“This problem is magnified when polling numbers reflect dissatisfaction with the status quo and a hunger for significant change,” Cochran told the Washington Examiner. “The Democrats need new ideas, voices, and [to] demonstrate a willingness to listen [for] a clear understanding of what the collective frustrations are in America.”
Obama would not be the first one-time popular former president from whom his own party has distanced itself, according to presidential historian David Pietrusza.
Pietrusza cited Theodore Roosevelt as one example, with that former president acknowledging he had become politically problematic by the 1910s.
“I don’t think Obama has reached that point, but he may no longer wield the power and influence he once had,” Pietrusza told the Washington Examiner. “After a while, time simply moves on. And while you may have once been historic, at some point you simply become yesterday’s news.”
Obama, 63, has been one of the most popular Democrats for years, a former political wunderkind described as a once-in-a-generation presidential candidate who became the country’s first black commander in chief in 2008 when he was 47 years old.
Obama’s lecturing black men fell flat
Despite his prestigious academic pedigree and reputation for communicating with soaring rhetoric, Obama’s political judgment has not always been sound and he has sometimes been tone-deaf.
One example is Obama’s first appearance on the 2024 campaign trail for Harris. After a stop at a Democratic office in Pittsburgh, the former president was criticized for lecturing black men for not supporting the vice president because of sexism.
“My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Obama said last month. “I’m speaking to men directly: part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/in_focus/3230175/democrats-search-answers-barack-obama-influence-wanes/
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