Obamaworld Embraces Mamdani

Conservatives may be surprised to know this, but a lot of center-left Democrats think that Barack Obama was a moderate president. 

Yes, I know, that seems nuts. But it is also true. I think it has to do with his demeanor and the way he presents himself. He is always immaculately dressed, speaks the language of the academically inclined, and can wax poetically in a way that appeals to them. 

He hits all their political and cultural erogenous zones. That's why David Brooks could detect his presidential timbre from his pants crease. 

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama's office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn't take long for the two men to click. "I don't want to sound like I'm bragging," Brooks recently told me, "but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don't know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me."

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks's mind. "I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant," Brooks says, "and I'm thinking, a) he's going to be president and b) he'll be a very good president." In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama's The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was "Run, Barack, Run."

Yes, there are people who think like that. Weird, I know, but there it is. 

For conservatives who weren't just itching to be featured as a New York Times columnist, though, it was pretty easy to see that underneath the smooth Obama exterior, Obama was more inclined to side with the Jacobins than Edmund Burke. The David Brooks-types of the world may be impressed that Obama knows Burke, but those of us who actually care about results instead of aura, Obama's educational credentials left us suspicious, not admiring. 

"...Obamaworld views Mr. Mamdani differently: not as a threat or a liability, but as a promising figure in a Democratic Party with a pressing need for fresh blood."https://t.co/P4fFwu9Hr2

— James P. Pinkerton (@JamesPPinkerton) August 14, 2025

Which gets us to Mamdani and the mayor's race in New York City. The Democrats are having a hard time figuring out what to do about Zohran Mamdani. The establishment fears that he is electoral poison outside the deepest of Blue areas, while the ascendant left is thrilled that one of them is about to become one of the most important politicians in America. 

Mamdani is a problem for the establishment because he is so good at politics that appeals to the left, and so very communist in a way that scares everybody else, and rightfully so. As the pointy heads at the Poynter Institute invent "fact checks" that insist that Mamdani isn't a communist, the man can't quit quoting Marx, talking about seizing the means of production, and eliminating private property. 

Obama and crowd? You would think that they would be leery of embracing a literal communist, but you would be wrong. They see the future of the Democratic Party. 

In the days after it became clear Zohran Mamdani had won New York City’s June mayoral primary, much of the Democratic establishment began to panic.

Former President Barack Obama, the last Democrat to captivate the party’s base, got on the phone. In a lengthy call in June, Mr. Obama congratulated Mr. Mamdani, offered him advice about governing and discussed the importance of giving people hope in a dark time, according to people with knowledge of the conversation.

Others in Mr. Obama’s orbit have also shown a keen interest in Mr. Mamdani and his campaign. Jon Favreau, who served as Mr. Obama’s speechwriter, and Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser, have been in communication with the Democratic strategist Morris Katz, among Mr. Mamdani’s closest aides.

David Axelrod, who served as Mr. Obama’s chief campaign strategist and senior adviser, was also curious. Last month, he stopped by Mr. Mamdani’s campaign headquarters, then in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan, to meet the candidate and his staff, and see things for himself.

“What I found when I went over to that office was a familiar spirit that I hadn’t seen in a while of just determined, upbeat idealism,” Mr. Axelrod told me. “You may not agree with every answer he’s giving, or every idea he has, but he’s certainly asking the right questions, which is how do we make the country work for working people?” He said Mr. Mamdani’s ability to inspire young Americans, who feel economic uncertainty acutely, was critical and something the party at large needed to reckon with.

This is exactly the same trajectory that the French Jacobins took in 1789. Most people have only the vaguest notion of the history, but while we think of the French Revolution as one long explosion of violence and terror, the actual trajectory was quite different. The original revolutionaries--the early Jacobins--were the professional classes and the types we would think of as academic analogues, systematically undermining the regime, with the more radical actions and policies advancing over a few years. 

Robespierre was a lawyer and was famed for being especially upright in his virtue. His pants crease was, I am sure, perfect. 

Mr. Axelrod was introduced to Mr. Mamdani by Patrick Gaspard, another Obama insider. Mr. Gaspard — Mr. Obama’s 2008 national political director, and later the U.S. ambassador to South Africa — has been serving as an informal adviser to Mr. Mamdani.

The interest from the closely guarded world of Mr. Obama and those around him is the clearest sign yet that Mr. Mamdani is likely to be embraced by the Democratic mainstream, whether the party’s leaders and donors like it or not. It comes at a time of dueling visions among voters, Democratic politicians and donors over the future of the party.

The underlyng radicalism of Obamaworld was always there, just well hidden for the people who love the surface urbanity of their leader. 

The meteoric rise of Mamdani is merely an extension of the Obama movement, not a deviation from it. Mamdani's rhetoric doesn't mirror Obama's, but that has everything to do with Obama's paving the road that allows him to let his Marxist freak flag fly. Obama was smart enough to see that the country wasn't ready for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the 2010s, but he and his crowd are betting that it will be in the 2030s. 

This is the "long march through the institutions." America was never going to lurch into socialism. It had to be lured, one step at a time, and Obama, as a disciple of the academic left, understood that. 

Mamdani, assuming the rules hold, can never be president. But capturing the nation's premier city will be another major step for the radical left. 

And Obamaworld is seizing and pouncing on the opportunity. 

• Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.

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