Barack Obama's share of responsibility for today's crisis

I just posted a clip from my conversation with Daniel Bessner, where I make the case that Barack Obama was the only person who could have prevented the crisis of order and legitimacy our country finds itself in today, and point to two specific major mistakes that he made.

Please see the clip and a shorter, edited transcript of it below.

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The next installment of The Glenn Show, which will be posted on my Patreon page this coming Monday, will feature my conversation with John McWhorter, wherein we react to the assault on the US Capitol last week and President Trump's culpability. Some mea culpas are issued, but our contrarianism lives on…

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The bankers

There's a journalist called Christopher Lydon, he's a friend of mine. Shortly after Obama had been elected, Chris was so enthusiastic and ebullient about Obama. He said, "Obama, Obama," and I said, "fuck Obama, he put Larry Summers in charge of the money! Damn him!” 

Cause Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, and all those guys, and the bankers behind them had charge of the money, and that's where Obama was going to go. 

Now, in a way that was a cheap shot, it was easy to say. But it's also true.

I mean, the elites definitely failed us. There's not any doubt about that. (Laughs.)

I always thought, and I guess I still think that the people who basically were in the casino, betting my money, getting rich if they won and leaving me holding the bag if they lost—that’s basically what went down—needed to feel some pain in the aftermath of the crash. 

They needed to go broke. 

They needed to be bankrupted. 

They needed to be dispossessed. 

Their stocks should have been taken over and they should have been rendered zero. 

They don't have a right to be rich, you know?

And even if it wasn't good policy, it would have been damned good politics. (Laughs.)

It might've sent a shiver through the financial system and dried up the energetic engine of finance by just a little bit, but we could have lived with that, in my opinion. There should have been much more grave consequences for those people than actually befell them.

Law and order

I don't really start souring on the left until we get to Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin, and Black Lives Matter, and "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," and Al Sharpton, and all of that.

And there—I’ve said this before—I thought an opportunity for the country was missed by the first black President who, knowing that he would be only 56 when he left office—gosh, how young, I would say—and that his post-presidency was going to be much, much, much more important to his life than his presidency, chose to preserve his viability and his reputation within a certain set of forces of American elitism by not doing what I thought the country needed to be done in the wake of civil disturbances that emerged after Freddie Gray, the Baltimores and the Fergusons and all of that, which was to stand for law and order.

Which was to say, as between the responsibilities of office attendant to me being the chief executive at the center of political responsibility in a nation in crisis—which is to affirm order and law—as between that on the one hand, and me continuing to represent this mythic ideal of some kind of embodiment of some kind of aspiration for some kind of romantic racial liberation and freedom on the other, he basically chose to maintain his viability in the latter narrative.

And made mistakes.

I think Al Sharpton was a mistake. The deployment of Al Sharpton as an ambassador to America, and to black America, on behalf of black people by the government of Barack Hussein Obama, was a mistake. It was bad for the country. I think this was bad for black people. 

I thought it was the easy path. 

I thought playing to the editorial pages, playing to the popular sentiment at that moment was a loss of an opportunity.

I think the only person who could ever have changed the direction of this juggernaut that now careens seemingly out of control—which is this antipathy for the forces of order and legitimacy and so forth in the country—the only thing that could have stopped it was a black chief executive saying something other than "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," doing something other than deploying the justice department to serve as a counterweight to the findings of innocence of police officers, and so on, and so on. 

And I hold it against Barack Hussein Obama. I say, he let us down. 

Frankly, I'll tell you this: I don't believe the summer of 2020 would have happened if Obama had bit the bullet—assuming that he was inclined to do so in any way, shape, or form—and had a much more pro-law enforcement posture. I don't believe the summer of 2020 after George Floyd would have been possible if Obama had stood up for law and order in 2014.

I don't even know if Donald Trump—certainly not that dimension of Donald Trump's portfolio—would have been possible. 

In other words, I'm saying to you two mistakes now: at the beginning of the two terms, failing to smack the bankers on their ass and creating Occupy Wall Street; and at the end, failing to hue to a center line—a center line, it didn't have to be right wing, it didn't have to be fascistic—of the maintenance of order. 

Mobs in front of courthouses are not due any respect whatsoever. A mob in front of a courthouse is to be denounced. 

I think he should have given speeches, in which, instead of equivocating and saying "we understand that people have a reasonable expression," he should have said, “There's no excuse whatsoever for what you're doing.” 

He should have said, “I want to know everybody who broke the law, and I want them arrested and brought to trial. If you throw projectiles at police officers, you've going to be held accountable. If I've got facial recognition software that can find that you were among the looters who walked out of there without paying for those goods, you should be held accountable. “

I think he should have told people, "This is not Emmet Till. You're hysterical. This is the United States of America—flawed as it is, it's not the 1950s United States of America. Have you noticed that I was elected President as a black man?" 

I think he should have told them that the cops are essential to the maintenance of civil order in our society. They must be held accountable when they step afoul of the law, but they are not our enemy, they are essentially our friend. 

It wouldn't have been hard to write those speeches.

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