Obama took the campaign trail and most people just shrugged. Here are just a few of them.
There are two significant things about this article.
Obama on the campaign trail has one particularly tough crowd: Young black men – NBC News
The phenomenon where black men are shrugging off Obama.
If there’s a prototypical Kamala Harris voter it might seem to be Charles Johnson, a 23-year-old black college student.
Johnson is informed and politically engaged; he went to hear former President Barack Obama speak Friday at a Democratic campaign rally on the University of Arizona campus.
Yet he isn’t all that impressed with Obama, the nation’s first black president, nor Harris, who would be the second. He says he’s leaning toward voting for Donald Trump.
“The media says he [Trump] is horrible and he’s racist and he’s going to bring us back, but he’s only gaining support with black voters,” Johnson said in an interview. “He’s only gaining support with black men.”
Miles Covington, 35, a black student at the University of Arizona, said he hasn’t yet decided how he’ll vote.
He came to hear Obama speak and as he stood in line for the event on campus, he said he didn’t see Obama as a figure who would be especially influential with young black men.
“He is resonating with a different culture,” Covington said. “They’re going to need a young guy to come and stand up who is black. He’s not the young guy.”
Some of this is blowback to Obama’s dumb comments suggesting black men were sexist for not being enthusiastic about Kamala.
But the other significant thing here is that the media is acknowledging that Obama is over.
Obama took the campaign trail and most people just shrugged. The media’s shrugging too. It’s publishing criticism of Barry. And anyone over 30 can remember a time when that was completely unthinkable.
Obama could not be parodied, mocked or questioned in any way. The very idea that he was less than a national savior was blasphemy.
As I’ve been saying for a while, he has faded. The old messiah served his purpose. No one has been fainting at his rallies in a long time. And even the media has been falling out of love.
To give Obama credit, he’s been somewhat aware of this, and his response was to treat his public presence like a kryptonite superweapon.
His people make a big deal of him hanging back until his emerges at the last minute as a dealbreaker.
Well he did it. He emerged. And the deal is far from done. Obama is over.
Photo: Reuters