By Jeffrey Blehar
Sunday, October 13, 2024
It was little noticed when this Thursday, prior to a
speech delivered at a Pittsburgh rally on behalf of Kamala Harris, Barack Obama
spoke to a gathering of black Harris supporters and turned
it into a surprisingly blunt lecture to black men about their failure to
support her. I want to take the time to transcribe it for you in full, because
I haven’t seen anyone do it elsewhere and I find it to be incredibly revealing
in its own way about both Democratic anxieties and Democratic vanities. The
video captures Obama striding into a room full of black Harris voters –
campaign staff and volunteers – on what he clearly believes to be a mission
of mercy.
I’m here to go ahead and speak some
truths if you don’t mind. Because my understanding based on reports I’m getting
from campaigns and communities is that we have not yet seen the same kind of
energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we
saw when I was running. Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more
pronounced with the brothers.
So if you don’t mind just for a
second I’m gonna speak to y’all and say that when you have a choice that is
this clear, when on the one hand you have somebody who grew up like you, knows
you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that
comes from those experiences, who’s able to work harder and do more and
overcome and achieves the second-highest office in the land and is putting
forward concrete proposals to correctly address the things that are vital in
our neighborhoods and communities, from housing to making sure that our mothers
and our fathers and grandparents can afford medicine, and making sure that we
are dealing with prices that are too high, and rents that are too high, and is
committed to making sure we maintain the Affordable Care Act so everybody’s got
healthcare, and cares about things like education, and entrepreneurship in our
neighborhood.
Note that this last paragraph was one single extemporized
run-on sentence. Put that thought in your back pocket for a moment.
And that’s on one side and on the
other side you have someone who has consistently shown disregard not just for
communities but for you as a person. And you’re thinking about sitting out? And
you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses? I’ve got a problem with
that. Because, because part of it makes me think – and 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 it. And I think anybody you’re talking to in
a barbershop, anybody you’re talking to in your house, in your family, at
church who is coming with that kind of attitude? I think you have to ask them,
“Well how could that be?” because the women in our lives have been getting our
backs this entire time. They’ve been raising us and working and having our
backs and when we get in trouble and the system’s not working for us they’re
the ones who’re out there marching and protesting, and so now you’re thinking
about sitting out, or even supporting somebody? Who has a history of
denigrating you? Because you think that’s a sign of strength? Because that’s
what you think being a man is, putting women down? That’s not acceptable.
That’s not—this shouldn’t even be a question.
It was a remarkable declaration of frustration, and a
truly revealing one. Obama went out later that night in Pittsburgh and
delivered a rally address that hit on some of the same themes, but with none of
the specificity to African-American male voters as this quieter, less
publicized cry. Put bluntly: There are clearly enough black men in the
Democratic coalition who are skeptical of Kamala and unoffended enough by Trump
to terrify the people crunching numbers inside the campaign. You do not send
Barack Obama, of all people, out there to sermonize to “the brothers” — note
the sudden duck into the vernacular, a tell from the patrician Obama if ever
there was one — about this unless the Harris campaign is sweating over the vote
of what was supposed to be their core demographic like Ted Stryker landing
an airplane.
And they aren’t jumping at shadows, either. The most
recent New York Times/Siena national poll also made sure to oversample black voters on the side to get a better sense
of nationwide African-American trends, and their numbers showed that Donald
Trump was currently on track for something like 15 percent of the black vote
versus Kamala Harris’s 78 percent. That may obviously seem like a lopsided
number to some, but as anyone who ever watched a Republican win statewide in
Illinois despite Democrats netting “only” 78 percent of Chicago can tell you,
it’s small shifts in the margin that make all the difference. Men are driving
Trump’s unusual strength among black voters relative to typical Republicans,
and the problematic news is that they live in both Sun Belt states and Blue
Wall states in potentially decisive numbers. (There aren’t as many black male
voters in Arizona as in other states, but I have unfortunate news for the
Harris campaign about the other decisive ethnic demographic currently swinging in
Trump’s direction.)
The petulance of Obama’s tone was perhaps the most
remarkable aspect of the entire encounter, and what bodes most ill for Harris
underneath the surface. There is something supremely condescending about the
way Obama comes out, with vinegar sobriety, and addresses Harris’s weaknesses
while fulminating about how black men just aren’t feeling the joy. Remember
that run-on sentence from the top of this piece, the one I told you to stash in
your back pocket? That was Obama, clearly improvising on the fly, trying to
first describe all the good qualities of Kamala Harris, all the things she
supposedly brought to the table for black men, the obvious reasons she was
supposed to be “your candidate.”
And yet it was almost comical how he sounded like he was
describing a different person altogether. An ideal candidate, the candidate he
wished Kamala was, the candidate he (Barack Obama, super-genius) would
be: “somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you,
understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experiences,
who’s able to work harder and do more and overcome and achieves the
second-highest office in the land and is putting forward concrete proposals,”
etc. That sounds like a great pitch for a candidate to me, too, honestly; does
it remind you (or black voters for that matter) in any way of Kamala
Harris?
This is the disconnect that Obama cannot intellectually
or politically allow himself to acknowledge, so instead, his default
explanation is: Black men are sexist self-hating pigs who should feel guilty
about possibly voting for Trump or simply not voting for Harris. Why? Because
she’s black, and she’s a woman, and black women have supported you your entire
lives, so transfer that onto her, I guess. (Yes, Barack Obama wants you to vote
for Kamala Harris — of all people! — as your mom or nana.) It’s a shamelessly
unintellectual argument, an appeal to pure tribalism, and the sort of thing
someone as smart as Obama deploys only after every other better weapon at hand
has failed, and public shaming is all that remains.
I suspect it will be as ineffective as all such appeals
to alienated voters are, even though I remain skeptical of Trump’s final share
of the black vote in November. (Try as I might, I just can’t see Charlie Kirk
cleverly micro-targeting inner-city black turnout to get Trump over the hump.)
But it is worth noting that, with this little mini-speech, Barack Obama has now
stepped into the shoes of someone he does not admire but grudgingly respects:
Bill Clinton. Clinton famously got increasingly agitated over the way his
wife’s campaign seemed to be completely uninterested in tending to the
homefires of the “blue wall” back in 2016. (“Remember white working class
voters in Wisconsin? You need those people too.”) Now, in the final stages of
the campaign, Obama has returned to direct his anger at the voters instead of
the campaign. It’s a bold strategy; we will see how it turns out.
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