Sweet Home Kalorama
By Roger L Simon
February 27, 1951, after considerable debate, the 22nd constitutional amendment limiting the term of the United States president to two four-year terms was ratified by the necessary three-fourths of the states..
The motivation was largely to avoid our republic evolving into anything resembling a word frequently bandied about today—dictatorship.
The measure was being considered by state legislatures between 1947 and 1951, close to the era of Hitler and Mussolini. Stalin was still alive. The last long-serving president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had recently been elected to a fourth term only to die a few months in. It was decided four-year presidencies were to be no more.
Our 44th president, Barack H. Obama, has found his way around this.
From CNN, Oct. 4:
“Former President Barack Obama plans to commence a 27-day campaign sprint for Vice President Kamala Harris next week in Pennsylvania, an adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign said, hoping his star power among Democrats can help propel her to the office he once held.”
Once?
I beg to differ with CNN’s Kevin Liptak. As so many of us realize, Mr. Obama has been operating behind the scenes as what we might call the über-president throughout the Biden administration and is likely to remain in that position if Kamala Harris were to win.
Other names have been floated as powers behind the throne and some have occasional influence, but when push comes to the proverbial shove, on matters of substantial national and international interest, when the stakes are high as they are now, Barack Obama makes the call, or at least gives the final nod of approval or disapproval, as the case may be.
Mr. Obama has explained his strategy to us some time ago quite clearly. He has stated publicly he prefers to rule from the basement and let someone else do the tedious daily work and take the inevitable heat of being the (superficial) chief executive.
Mr. Obama also told us he wishes to transform America.
He has done both.
It is also clear that a vast percentage of the media and the powers that be in the Democrat Party are happy that he is in ultimate covert control of all that is important. His Washington home, that he moved into in 2017, is in Kalorama, two miles from the White House. Most presidents have followed the early lead of George Washington who, in the tradition of Roman emperor Cincinnatus, left the capitol after they finished serving. Not Barack.
That is why installing a figurehead like Kamala Harris who, despite being vice president, arrived virtually unvetted and untested and who was notably unsuccessful in previous political campaigns, is fine with their party—this even though the same people criticized her only weeks before as useless, some recommending dropping her from the ticket.
Democrats, particularly leadership and media, know Barack and his entourage are really in charge. All Kamala has to do is “be there” in the sense of Jerzy Kosinski’s famous novel.
It is also why the befuddled Joe Biden could so easily be cast aside. Barack was running things all along, it was accepted, with a little hope from the ruthless Nancy Pelosi when the former president didn’t want to get his hands dirty.
But his reign is being threatened at this moment.
Thanks in part to an overwhelmingly clueless response to the many suffering in North Carolina and other states from Hurricane Helene and the increasingly well known fact that FEMA’s coffers have been drained by the care and feeding of jillions of illegal aliens, giving them free credit cards, fancy hotel rooms and who knows what else while American citizens are left with pennies during a national disaster, Kamala’s campaign seems to be teetering.
Add to that the stupefyingly weird performance, veering to the illiterate, of her vice-presidential candidate Tim “I Heart Beijing” Walz at the recent debate and, in the words of Jerry Garcia, “trouble ahead, trouble behind.”
So Mr. Obama has been roused from the luxe basement of whichever of his mansions he’s in at the moment to save things, that is to continue his transformation of America that is in jeopardy.
Can he do it? If not he, who?
Barack does have a gift for public speaking that Ms. Harris sorely lacks. That will be something for the media to gush over while continuing to avoid asking her substantive questions or to obfuscate embarrassing queries about Ms. Harris’ husband, so-called “Second Gentleman” Doug Emhoff, who appears not always to have been such a gentleman.
Obama, for his part, will work hard to be in a position to continue his subterranean transformation of our country.
But what is this transformation exactly? In the simplest version, the 44thpresident is just another globalist. He has pooh-poohed the American Dream, saying every country has one–omitting , needless to say, why so many then want to come here– but I suspect other forces are at play that one might call more psychoanalytic.
He may be seeking some kind of expiation that stems in part from having been raised by a comfortable middle class white family that put him through the fanciest private school in Hawaii, after his African father, a bigamist, abandoned him– then to emerge, after doing time in the church of the racist pastor Jeremiah Wright, as the first black president.
His memoir “Dreams of My Father” is riddled with odd misstatements (i.e. lies), some that make you wonder why he told them, including changing the skin color of girlfriends. New Yorker editor David Remnick euphemistically calls this “artful shaping” in comparing the work to authentic literary masterpieces like Richard Wright’s “Native Son” (not even close in my book). To me it seems as if Barack wants us to believe he’s something he’s not—or make himself believe he’s something he’s not..
I’m not sure what to say about all that except that I am not certain Obama himself knows exactly how he wants to transform America, although he has convinced the Democratic Party they should go along with him, whatever it is. Sure there are elements of Marxism and a love of Islam under the cover but there is also an element of weird, maybe not quite as weird as Tim Walz and his serial fabrications, not to mention bizarre gestures, but pretty weird by itself. It’s unlikely we will ever know.
Whatever the case, we must not let this man into the White House… er… basement… for a fourth time.
HIGH HOLY DAYS
We are in the midst of the Jewish High Holy Days that are more fraught than usual, for reasons that don’t need explaining. I attended Rosh Hashanah service Wednesday night and Thursday for the blowing of the shofar at Chabad of Nashville. The services were more stirring and optimistic than anxious with excellent sermons by Rabbi Yitzhak Tiechtel during which he emphasized how synagogue attendance, and devotion to Judaism in general, was expanding against a background of growing antisemitism and war, good emerging out of evil.
This has certainly been true for me. Let’s hope it’s true, or becomes true, for some of the people one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers is trying to reach in this terrific essay published Oct 4. – “Jordan Peterson: my message to the Jews.”
Finally, whatever you think of Benjamin Netanyahu, he deserves the merit badge of all time (Eagle Scout forever) for having to discuss military plans with Joe Biden. Maybe Bibi keeps him on speaker and multi-tasks.
First published in American Refugees