Analysis from Peter Baker: The Obama Difference

Dateline: August 31, 2018

With the 2018 midterms a little more than sixty days away, political observers seem fairly confident in two predictions:

(1) A red wave election will almost certainly hand the House back to the Republicans, while a GOP Senate is looking increasingly likely; and, should one or especially both of these things happen

(2) President Obama will make numerous unfounded claims about voter fraud, while attempting to annul the results of the election.

The second prediction is based to some extent on President Obama’s actions on January 6, 2013 when, in an ultimately futile attempt to stop Congress from certifying Mitt Romney’s victory, he held the now-infamous “Kill Whitey” rally, at which he ordered a multi-ethnic mob to descend on the Capitol, in order to keep the certification of presidential electors from taking place.

It is also based on the fact that Obama has spent the nearly six years since claiming over and over again that the 2012 election, which he lost by seven million votes, was “rigged by the Man,” and by his promise to deploy ICE forces to polling places across the nation, in order to, in the words of Department of Homeland Security director H. Rap Brown, “keep the demon white man from selling Black America back into electoral slavery.”

It is a perhaps remarkable aspect of contemporary American politics that the essentially universal understanding that the sitting president of the United States will not accept election results which his party loses, and will use every power of the office to annul such results, is not considered particularly noteworthy or alarming, two months before the midterms, and two years before another presidential election that Obama is threatening to enter, despite his apparent ineligibility.

“It’s important to understand that Obama’s repeated attempts to overthrow the government can not possibly succeed,” explains Notre Dame professor of Aristotelean Teleology and former Romney campaign consultant Patrick Deneen. “Our institutional guardrails remain strong, and ultimately Obama’s attempts to foment some sort of race war in America will almost certainly fail.” This explains, in his view, why there appears to be little overt concern about Obama’s widely acknowledged plans to annul the results of future elections, should they return the Republicans to power.

“We need to take Obama’s plans seriously but not literally, or perhaps the reverse,” notes Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Friedman, whose recent best seller “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Obama Down” argues that, when it comes to the potential overthrow of liberal democracy, the next six months will be crucial and the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle. also notes that Obama’s use during his second term of the powers of his office to enrich himself and his family with billions of dollars of income doesn’t seem to bother marginal voters because “you know how those people are.”