How Barack Obama Cost the Democratic Party Its Base

Opening the Borders Was the Only Way for the Dems to Grow a New One

In watching Democrats scramble to keep ICE from deporting its future, I am reminded of college basketball in the NIL era. When teams lose their starters to the transfer portal, coaches have to hustle to find replacements. For the Democrats, their transfer portal is called Latin America.

From my summer digs in Chautauqua County, I have had a useful perch on how the Democrats lost their stalwarts in upstate New York In 2008, Obama carried the rust-belt Chautauqua as he did most of the upstate counties. The voters who put him over the top were traditional, old-school Democrats that had grown up in union households and voted Democratic as reflexively as they went to Mass. In 2008, they showed themselves ready to vote for a black president, but they weren’t ready for the one they got.

Published in 2000, this tale of a conservative uprising proved oddly prophetic

Thanks to a growing conservative media presence on the internet and through the air waves, the common sense Democrats of upstate began to see that Obama’s proposed “transformation” of America was being sold on a platform of lies.

Deceit came easily to Obama and his people. There were his speechwriters, Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett, joking with Charlie Rose on national TV about who came up with the punch line, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

There was Jonathan Gruber insisting that “lack of transparency [was] a huge political advantage” in selling Obamacare to voters, whose “stupidity” made them easy marks.

Jonathan Gruber banked on "stupidity of the American voter" to sell Obamacare

There was top advisor Ben Rhodes saying of the very reporters who did his bidding, “They literally know nothing.”

There was the State Department’s Jen Psaki who sold her “useful lie” about Iran, saying, “There are times when diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress.”

There was Susan Rice telling the same Benghazi lie on five different shows one Sunday morning.

Yes, insisted Susan Rice, it was the “video” that killed 4 Americans at Benghazi

There were John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey, whose multiple deceits could fill a book, no a library.

And then there was Obama who built his political career on a series of fables, most fundamentally that his parents shared an “improbable love” and “an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.”

Weary of the lies, Chautauqua turned on Obama. In 2012, Mitt Romney beat Obama by 13 points. In 2016, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 23 points. In 2024, Trump beat Kamala Harris by about the same margin and swept upstate save for a few urban counties and those peopled by New York City refugees.

Even after the people abandoned Obama, however, the media remained firm. The late Washington Post president and publisher Philip L. Graham is credited with the observation that “journalism is the first rough draft of history.” If so, future histories of the Obama years will likely be as fawning and superficial as were the news reports. A November 2018 Vanity Fair article by presidential historian Jon Meacham suggested what we can expect.

“It seems safe to say,” Meacham wrote, “that his background—as a child raised in Hawaii, the son of a white mother and a Kenyan father, together with the hyper-vigilant care with which he approached the task of living a life balancing disparate traditions, influences, and worldviews—was critical to his rise to the pinnacle of American power.”

After eight years of the Obama presidency, Meacham remained as star struck as he was at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “Obama’s personal answer to our current plight?” Meacham wrote. “Tell a better story. Insist on a more appealing counter-narrative.”

The problem for Meacham is one that historians of earlier presidencies never had to face, namely a smart conservative media. Scores of serious people, many of them not formally “journalists,” had been un-telling the Obama story since he first emerged. Thanks to the internet, they had as much access to information as Meacham did, and they were not constrained by the polite mendacity of the liberal establishment.

Obama cost the Democrats everything but the fringes, and not just geographically

This independent media had considerable success in checking the progressive advance. The proof is in the numbers. In January 2009, the Democratic Party controlled both chambers of twenty-seven state legislatures. Eight years later, Democrats controlled both chambers in only thirteen states.

It gets worse. On Obama’s watch, his party lost a net total of thirteen governorships and 816 state legislative seats. Although historians talk of the “Age of Jackson” and the “Reagan Era,” when all is said and done, Barack Obama will deserve little more than an unpleasant footnote.

The fault was not entirely Obama’s. He was tasked with selling a center-right population on policies that were widely perceived to be unworkable, unnecessary, and, in some cases, unnatural. He got away with some of it, and had it not been for the citizen journalists on the right, he might have gotten away with all of it.

“He weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie, using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus.” So wrote Obama advisor Ben Rhodes. Rhodes was writing here about Putin, but he might just as easily have been writing about his boss.