By The Daily Wire (World News) | Created at 2026-10-19 16:40:40 | Updated at 2026-10-19 21:07:48
9 hours ago
To be a golden boy is nice. To be the Democratic Party’s golden boy is, well, golden. The exaggerated triumphs, the ignored mistakes, the dogged pursuit of your enemies, the fact checks never performed; it’s as close to political heaven as a man can come.
Barack Obama has spent so much time in this coveted role, the better part of two decades now, that he knows no other existence but this charmed one. He first got a taste of it at the 2004 DNC, and never looked back after dispatching Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary four years later.
Among what he’s been credited with in recent years: rejecting the hypersensitive, authoritarian woke worldview that has cost his party countless races over the last decade. Long before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sheepishly admitted that “Woke 1 was crazy,” Obama was sounding the alarm.
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” he argued in October 2019. “I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people.’”
“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb,” he added. “Then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”
He repeated himself three years later while complaining that Democrats could be buzzkills.
“People just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells,” he pronounced.
It’s an ironic habit of the former president’s, given that he’s the man responsible for empowering the toxic, campus progressive wing of the party in the first place. A disciplined campaigner and electoral pragmatist, Obama disguised his true colors well during the prime of his political career. But at his core, he was never a technocrat or a New Deal Democrat; he was, and is, a Columbia University ideologue.
It’s a truth he implicitly acknowledged last week in tortured commentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The fact is that the Jewish people, for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed. Europe was responsible for much of it. They understandably sought a refuge in a place where they had historic ties. That is undeniable,” explained Professor Obama, the coming “but” looming over his grudging acknowledgment of the world’s oldest hatred. “What is also undeniable is that they took the land of people and they were expelled. And those people, understandably, said, ‘This is an injustice, and I want my land back.'”
“At some point to break the cycle, the stronger party has a responsibility by virtue of its strength,” he insisted. “If the attitude of Israel is now that, ‘We are the strongest army, most technologically advanced in the region, then our security is dependent on us simply doing whatever we please and taking whatever we want, and not making any concessions to anyone.’ That may work short term. It is a disaster for you long-term.”
Only one steeped in the radicalism of self-indulgent academic leftism could so proudly present such a sick moral inversion and twisted reading of history with a straight face.
In 1947, the United Nations presented a plan for a two-state solution in the Holy Land; the Jews accepted, the Arabs didn’t. When Israel came to be the following year, the Palestinians (led by Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, a Nazi collaborator who spent World War II hunkered down in Berlin with the Führer) and their “allies” across the region didn’t go to work building out their own country. Instead they, as is their custom, lost a conflict they launched with the aim of driving the Jew into the sea. Like his mustached friend before him, the grand mufti failed – and not just to accomplish his genocidal aims.
Some Palestinians were forced to leave their homes over the course of the war. That’s called war. But Palestinian leadership also urged the populace to pack up and leave so as not to legitimize the new Jewish state.
This was the first example of a pattern that would become familiar. The Palestinians and the Arab world would start a war, the Israelis would finish it, and then the world would weep for the defeated aggressors. Obama explicitly identifies why: Israel is the stronger party, so it’s the one to blame for all the conflict’s consequences. It’s a bizarre lens through which to understand this world and its history, but one all too familiar to anyone who’s spent more than a semester on a college campus over the last 75 years or so.
Despite his best efforts to contain it, Obama’s revisionist worldview, in which power imbalances, rather than history or first moral principles, guide his view of just about everything, has reared its ugly head before.
There was, of course, his infamous 2009 apology tour, which saw him say sorry on behalf of the United States to Europe for our “arrogance,” to the Muslim World for our “fear and anger,” to the Americas for being “disengaged,” and even to Iran for the much misunderstood fall of would-be dictator Mohammad Mossadegh’s government in the 1950s. The through-line is clear: were it not for his own country’s chauvinism and heavy-handed exercise of its abilities, the world would be a better place. He’s psychologically incapable of wrapping his mind around the existence of evil outside of the West’s borders.
His embrace of campus-forged Everything Leftism was evident domestically as well. Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, where he was shot by a cop he had assaulted, kickstarted riots in the city. After a grand jury declined to indict the cop, Obama took to a podium to erroneously suggest that the cop – and the grand jury – had been at fault.
“There are Americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry. It’s an understandable reaction,” said Obama. Understandable if you weren’t aware of the relevant facts, which the former president once again eschewed in favor of an ideologically driven summary judgment. A few months later, his own Department of Justice, run at the time by his “wingman,” Eric Holder, declined to bring charges against the officer in question. So just how understandable was the disappointment and anger, really?
The ascendant wing of the Democratic Party now doesn’t represent a break from the Obama Era; it’s its namesake’s most enduring legacy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and Abdul El-Sayed don’t see the world any differently than Obama; they’re just more militant and less mercurial operators who believe that the country is ready for, and indeed, begging for their brand of undiluted campus radicalism.
The kind that is reflexively anti-American, often antisemitic, unwaveringly dogmatic, and immune to evidence – and that Obama pioneered.
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Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.
