ith the rise of the Mamdani-style communists has come a widespread narrative that the sudden rise of more openly radical politicians means the Democrats of the last few years or decades are somehow moderate. Depending on who’s telling the story, it’s a harrowing tale about Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries trying to stave off the DSA Marxists; or the “far left” floundering because it doesn’t have its own Fox News; or the party needing a storybook journey home to the moderation of Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
These are all tall tales, of course. Schumer and Jeffries are engaged in a power struggle, but it’s an intramural contest among fellow radicals. Leftists “far” and near have numerous Fox News-scale allies such as CNN, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and so on and so forth. Biden is anything but moderate, and Obama has arguably done more than anyone to create the radicalism that is now pervasive on the left.
This hasn’t stopped a host of commentators from presenting Obama as a beacon of the political center. In one recent example, former President Obama’s friendly interaction with WNBA superstar Caitlin Clark went viral in the wake of anti-Clark backlash that included a USA Today op-ed accusing her of sparking racial lynching-level violence … by complaining about referees’ foul calls.
“You’re fantastic!” Obama told Clark. “Don’t let all this nonsense get you down.” His conversation with Clark had all the warmth and rizz that made Obama an effective politician, and his avuncular advice reads like a Solomonic proverb compared to this kind of raving lunacy: “It seems there is a white nationalist faction to Clark’s fandom that is deeply, deeply problematic, made even more so because the WNBA is made up predominantly of Black women, many of them queer.”
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