A new essay in The Daily Wire makes the case that Barack Obama’s long run as the Democratic Party’s “golden boy” has obscured a more radical core — one its author says now defines the party’s ascendant left wing.
The piece, written by Mediaite staff writer and Robert Novak Journalism Fellow Isaac Schorr, is framed as a reckoning with two decades of mostly favorable coverage of the former president. Schorr argues that Obama’s reputation as a disciplined pragmatist has insulated him from scrutiny of his ideological instincts, which the column traces from his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech through his 2008 primary victory over Hillary Clinton and into the present.
At the center of Schorr’s argument is Obama’s recent commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which the essay characterizes as a “moral inversion” delivered with a straight face. Quoting Obama, Schorr highlights the former president’s acknowledgment that Jewish people “for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed,” and that they “understandably sought a refuge in a place where they had historic ties” — before turning to what Schorr calls the looming “but.”
That “but,” as quoted in the column, is Obama’s statement that “what is also undeniable is that they took the land of people and they were expelled,” and that those people “understandably said, ‘This is an injustice, and I want my land back.'”
Schorr also cites Obama’s argument that “the stronger party has a responsibility by virtue of its strength,” and his warning that if Israel’s attitude becomes that its security depends on “simply doing whatever we please and taking whatever we want, and not making any concessions to anyone,” that approach “may work short term” but is “a disaster for you long-term.”
From there, the column pivots to a historical rebuttal, asserting that the United Nations offered a two-state plan in 1947 that Jewish leaders accepted and Arab leaders rejected, and that when Israel was established the following year, Palestinian leadership under Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini — whom Schorr describes as a Nazi collaborator who spent World War II in Berlin — went to war rather than build a state. Schorr acknowledges that some Palestinians were forced from their homes during the fighting — “That’s called war” — but argues that Palestinian leaders also urged people to leave so as not to legitimize the new Jewish state. He contends this established a recurring pattern in which the Arab world starts wars, Israel finishes them, and the world then blames the stronger party.
A broader indictment of Obama’s worldview
The essay extends well beyond the Middle East, framing Obama’s approach as one in which power imbalances, rather than history or first principles, guide his judgments. Schorr points to Obama’s 2009 overseas speeches — often characterized by critics as an “apology tour” — in which the president acknowledged past American “arrogance” in Europe, addressed “fear and anger” toward the Muslim world, described the U.S. as “disengaged” in the Americas, and referenced the 1950s ouster of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
Schorr’s through-line: that Obama views American power as the root of global dysfunction and is, in his words, “psychologically incapable of wrapping his mind around the existence of evil outside of the West’s borders.”
On domestic matters, the column revisits Obama’s response to the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Schorr writes that Brown was shot by an officer “he had assaulted,” and that after a grand jury declined to indict, Obama said from a podium that Americans who were “deeply disappointed, even angry” were having an “understandable reaction.” Schorr notes that Obama’s own Justice Department, then led by Eric Holder, later declined to bring federal charges against the officer, and asks how “understandable” that anger really was given the facts.
The argument about ‘woke’ politics
The column also takes aim at what it calls an ironic habit: Obama repeatedly warning Democrats against progressive purity politics, even as Schorr credits him with empowering the campus left in the first place. He quotes Obama’s October 2019 critique of “this idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke,'” and the former president’s observation that young people sometimes treat being “as judgmental as possible about other people” as the way to make change — tweeting or hashtagging about someone’s misstep in order to “feel pretty good” about being “woke.” Schorr also cites a later Obama remark that “people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells.”
The essay’s closing argument is that the party’s rising left — naming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, and former Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed — is not a break from the Obama era but its most enduring legacy. In Schorr’s telling, those figures see the world much as Obama does; they are simply “more militant and less mercurial operators” who believe the country is ready for an “undiluted campus radicalism” that is, in his words, “reflexively anti-American, often antisemitic, unwaveringly dogmatic, and immune to evidence.”
The column is an opinion essay rather than a news report, and its characterizations of Obama’s record — including the framing of his 2009 speeches and his Ferguson remarks — reflect the author’s interpretation. The quotations from Obama are drawn from public remarks and are presented in the piece as evidence for its thesis: that the former president’s reputation as a cautious moderate has always been a mismatch for his actual ideological commitments, and that the fights now consuming the Democratic Party are the ones he helped set in motion.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-charmed-life-of-barack-obama-the-democratic-partys-golden-boy