Barack Obama has gone out of his way to remain an unusually neutral arbiter in the Democratic presidential primary, so when he weighed in on the party’s concerns in November, what he said was almost as curious as the timing of when he said it.
The Left pounced on Obama’s correct assertion that “the average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it,” but more telling was his warning about the primary system itself.
“For those who get stressed about robust primaries, I just have to remind you I had a very robust primary,” Obama told hundreds of keyed-in donors and politicos. “I’m confident that, at the end of the process, we will have a candidate that has been tested.”
But when Obama was touting the importance of a “robust” primary, it was anything but. Joe Biden was and remains the dominant front-runner with roughly 30% of the vote, and all three candidates who tried to take him down found the effort futile. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Julian Castro all dropped out after languishing in the single digits. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren rotated between second and third place, refusing to attack each other thanks to an informal nonaggression pact. The only “robust” debate that came around the time of Obama’s warning was from Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, who pointedly debated Warren’s wacky leftism, to their benefit.
Unsurprisingly, Obama was right, and the lack of robust debate between the second-place Sanders and third-place Warren now imperils them both. Warren’s campaign all but certainly leaked the claim that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t win the presidency, and now both have been embroiled in an intersectional civil war. But this was an inevitable outcome of their attempt to deny the public a robust debate earlier on.
To their detriment, the media mostly insulated the pair from substantive criticism of their socialist plans. It wasn’t until nearly a year after announcing her candidacy that Warren faced any real pushback on how she’d pay for her $34 trillion Medicare for All plan. In all that time, she was touting radical notions such as court packing and canceling student debt while Sanders backed even more bogus spending math, with the added bonus of campaigning with some of the vilest anti-Semites in public life.
The press and the party failed to vet either of them. Their math went unaccounted for, Warren’s lies went unchallenged, and Bernie’s surrogates went uncriticized. So, now that Warren’s campaign went nuclear in the paradigm of intersectionalism, two extremely untested candidates are about to tear each other apart on a debate stage for all the world to see. No matter who gets the best of the exchange, both will be heartily damaged not even three weeks before the crucial Iowa caucuses.
Democrats spent over a year trying to insulate voters from information vital to their choice of candidates. Just as Obama warned, it’s about to backfire on them spectacularly.
