[IsraelHayom] Americans felt the vibe — that American wokeness and moral self-doubt were insidious weaknesses. And therefore, they ruled that the Obama era finally must end.
More than last week's US presidential vote being a victory for Donald Trump, it was a searing defeat, a supreme rebuke, for Barack Obama.
In a torrent of impassioned campaign stops over the past two months, former President Obama made it clear that this election was a referendum on his policies. He explicitly warned that unless Kamala Harris was elected president, everything that he stood for and worked for would be washed down the drain. He literally said that the "fate of the nation" hung in the balance. He said the same thing in 2016 when he strenuously campaigned for Hillary Clinton.
Back then, Obama told voters "If you supported me in '08, if you supported me in '12, if you think that I've done a good job, if you believe that Michelle has done a good job — everything that we've done over the last eight years will be reversed with a Trump presidency. And everything will be sustained and built on with a Hillary Clinton presidency."
Well, there never was a Hillary Clinton presidency, and there will not be a Kamala Harris presidency either. And it is not just because both were flawed candidates. (In Harris' case, this is the understatement of the century.)
It is because more than half of Americans rejected the notion that Obama had "done a good job," and they were not interested in "sustaining" his policies. They didn't want another four or eight years of stand-ins for Obama, on top of his own eight years in the White House and his four surrogate years via President Biden.
They did not buy the Democratic message that everything was swell in America and that all that was needed was a competent Democrat to advance Obama's superior approach. They didn't buy the assertion that Obama was America's leading tutelary figure. |