Kamala Harris Has Learned Nothing from Barack Obama’s Mistakes

The charismatic former president is still celebrated today. But his political style led the Democrats and the country into a crisis and promoted the rise of Trump. Kamala Harris also mainly focuses on self-promotion above all else.

Some people manage to predict the future without a crystal ball. For example, the African American political scientist Adolph Reed. In 1996, he wrote about the rise of a young congressman from Chicago. He saw the charismatic political novice as the harbinger of a new kind of Black voice from the “community,” who are hatched by foundations, have charitable commitments on their resumes and stand for content-free to repressive neo-liberalism.

The young politician uses supposedly grassroots rhetoric to hide his lack of political program, and relies more on incrementalism rather than a true desire for change. Identity politics paired with old-fashioned middle-class ideas of reform. The subject was Barack Obama.

It’s astonishing just how popular the 44th president of the United States remains within his party. Yet Obama bears a lot of the blame for the Democrats’ decline and his policies are partly to blame for the rise of Donald Trump.

In 2008, Obama was elected president — and, as is well known, supported by worldwide enthusiasm. After the disastrous years of George W. Bush, Obama staged himself as the president of renewal with his slogans “Yes, we can” and “Hope.” However, he never brought his slogans to life. Hope for what? What can we do? That was never really clear.

Politics for Powerful Lobbies

Despite a comfortable majority and broad public support, Obama did little with his presidency. Today, the Affordable Care Act, now celebrated as a milestone in health care policy, is in large part a subsidy package for the private insurance industry alongside a complicated expansion of existing public systems. Instead of finally introducing universal health insurance, Obama chose the “incremental” route so he didn’t frighten any powerful lobbies.

He didn’t raise the minimum wage for eight years. And his hesitant policy of consolidating finances and stabilizing the financial sector during the economic crisis resulted in a slow recovery and a devastating loss of prosperity for the working class, as well as high unemployment figures for a long time.

Obama was always careful not to offend the powerful donors and lobbyists with whom he had been associated since the beginning of his political career. In short, he acted exactly as Reed had predicted.

In addition, he focused the Democrats so heavily on marketing him that the state associations in the heart of America lost rows of seats, senators, governorships, and haven’t been competitive in large parts of the country since then. At the end of his presidency, the party had nothing as a result of his unambitious policies, which threatened to be continued in an even more unambitious and equally narcissistic manner under Hillary Clinton, and then Trump entered the White House.

Obama spent the time after his presidency mainly earning money with books, Netflix productions and paid speeches. His narcissism is still evident in the fact that he posts his reading and Spotify lists several times a year.

A Lack of Will To Change

However, his most lasting negative influence on the Democrats can be seen in the generation of politicians who followed him and tried to copy his recipe for success. Politicians who do not want to be voted in because of a political program and a vision for the country, but because of their personality and, more recently, because of demographic characteristics. Politicians who show little will for political change, and always have an open ear for rich, big donors.

As well as Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, this archetype also includes Harris, who is ready and willing to change her political stance when the zeitgeist demands it and prefers to perform long sermons rather than campaigning for voters with concrete projects that she really wants to push through.

Harris lacks Obama’s political talent. Instead of rousing speeches, her political arbitrariness ensures that her sermons come across as pseudo-sophisticated and incoherent. The main thing is to not commit to anything that voters could later demand. Her poll ratings may be more promising than Joe Biden’s, but that is mostly because she has re-motivated Democrat voters, not because she has tapped into new groups of voters to any extent.

This is not surprising. Since Obama’s presidency, every American has known that little of the flowery speeches made during the election campaign usually remain once the respective Democrat has been elected to the White House.

Crumbling Support

The presidential election this year once again stands on a knife edge for the Democrats — despite an increasingly erratic opponent with no discernible agenda — and Obama is back in the election campaign with paternalistic accusations of sexism against Black men. In Obama’s opinion, they are not enthusiastic enough about Harris because she is a woman. This is how quickly the former victim group (George Floyd!) moves into the reactionary corner. Many Black people are not happy with Obama’s accusations. The adulation of the former president seems to be crumbling among his former followers.

Harris is at least smart enough not to take up Obama’s accusations. The presidential candidate has presented a concept for the promotion of Black men — but again she is following Obama’s style. There is no commitment to a new minimum wage or the introduction of universal health insurance — both of which would disproportionately benefit Black men.

No, Harris is again designing complicated mini programs, start-up grants for Black people, a mentoring program — and especially strange — a type of protection for crypto investments. She has found her new enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies at a fund-raising event with representatives of the financial industry, of course.

It is exactly the kind of politics and the same kind of staging that Reed wrote about almost 30 years ago. Only now it’s no longer about Obama, but about his most docile pupil.