Barack Obama Lectures ‘the Brothers’

It was little noticed when this Thursday, prior to a speech delivered at a Pittsburgh rally on behalf of Kamala Harris, Barack Obama spoke to a gathering of black Harris supporters and turned it into a surprisingly blunt lecture to black men about their failure to support her. I want to take the time to transcribe it for you in full, because I haven’t seen anyone do it elsewhere and I find it to be incredibly revealing in its own way about both Democratic anxieties and Democratic vanities. The video captures Obama striding into a room full of black Harris voters – campaign staff and volunteers – on what he clearly believes to be a mission of mercy.

I’m here to go ahead and speak some truths if you don’t mind. Because my understanding based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities is that we have not yet seen the same kind of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.

So if you don’t mind just for a second I’m gonna speak to y’all and say that when you have a choice that is this clear, when on the one hand you have somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experiences, who’s able to work harder and do more and overcome and achieves the second-highest office in the land and is putting forward concrete proposals to correctly address the things that are vital in our neighborhoods and communities, from housing to making sure that our mothers and our fathers and grandparents can afford medicine, and making sure that we are dealing with prices that are too high, and rents that are too high, and is committed to making sure we maintain the Affordable Care Act so everybody’s got healthcare, and cares about things like education, and entrepreneurship in our neighborhood.

Note that this last paragraph was one single extemporized run-on sentence. Put that thought in your back pocket for a moment.

And that’s on one side and on the other side you have someone who has consistently shown disregard not just for communities but for you as a person. And you’re thinking about sitting out? And you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses? I’ve got a problem with that. Because, because part of it makes me think – and I’m speaking to men directly – part of it makes me think that well, you just aren’t “feeling” the idea of having a woman as president. And you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for it. And I think anybody you’re talking to in a barbershop, anybody you’re talking to in your house, in your family, at church who is coming with that kind of attitude? I think you have to ask them, “Well how could that be?” because the women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time. They’ve been raising us and working and having our backs and when we get in trouble and the system’s not working for us they’re the ones who’re out there marching and protesting, and so now you’re thinking about sitting out, or even supporting somebody? Who has a history of denigrating you? Because you think that’s a sign of strength? Because that’s what you think being a man is, putting women down? That’s not acceptable. That’s not—this shouldn’t even be a question.

It was a remarkable declaration of frustration, and a truly revealing one. Obama went out later that night in Pittsburgh and delivered a rally address that hit on some of the same themes, but with none of the specificity to African-American male voters as this quieter, less publicized cry. Put bluntly: There are clearly enough black men in the Democratic coalition who are skeptical of Kamala and unoffended enough by Trump to terrify the people crunching numbers inside the campaign. You do not send Barack Obama, of all people, out there to sermonize to “the brothers” — note the sudden duck into the vernacular, a tell from the patrician Obama if ever there was one — about this unless the Harris campaign is sweating over the vote of what was supposed to be their core demographic like Ted Stryker landing an airplane.

And they aren’t jumping at shadows, either. The most recent New York Times/Siena national poll also made sure to oversample black voters on the side to get a better sense of nationwide African-American trends, and their numbers showed that Donald Trump was currently on track for something like 15 percent of the black vote versus Kamala Harris’s 78 percent. That may obviously seem like a lopsided number to some, but as anyone who ever watched a Republican win statewide in Illinois despite Democrats netting “only” 78 percent of Chicago can tell you, it’s small shifts in the margin that make all the difference. Men are driving Trump’s unusual strength among black voters relative to typical Republicans, and the problematic news is that they live in both Sun Belt states and Blue Wall states in potentially decisive numbers. (There aren’t as many black male voters in Arizona as in other states, but I have unfortunate news for the Harris campaign about the other decisive ethnic demographic currently swinging in Trump’s direction.)

The petulance of Obama’s tone was perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the entire encounter, and what bodes most ill for Harris underneath the surface. There is something supremely condescending about the way Obama comes out, with vinegar sobriety, and addresses Harris’s weaknesses while fulminating about how black men just aren’t feeling the joy. Remember that run-on sentence from the top of this piece, the one I told you to stash in your back pocket? That was Obama, clearly improvising on the fly, trying to first describe all the good qualities of Kamala Harris, all the things she supposedly brought to the table for black men, the obvious reasons she was supposed to be “your candidate.”

And yet it was almost comical how he sounded like he was describing a different person altogether. An ideal candidate, the candidate he wished Kamala was, the candidate he (Barack Obama, super-genius) would be: “somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experiences, who’s able to work harder and do more and overcome and achieves the second-highest office in the land and is putting forward concrete proposals,” etc. That sounds like a great pitch for a candidate to me, too, honestly; does it remind you (or black voters for that matter) in any way of Kamala Harris?

This is the disconnect that Obama cannot intellectually or politically allow himself to acknowledge, so instead, his default explanation is: Black men are sexist self-hating pigs who should feel guilty about possibly voting for Trump or simply not voting for Harris. Why? Because she’s black, and she’s a woman, and black women have supported you your entire lives, so transfer that onto her, I guess. (Yes, Barack Obama wants you to vote for Kamala Harris — of all people! — as your mom or nana.) It’s a shamelessly unintellectual argument, an appeal to pure tribalism, and the sort of thing someone as smart as Obama deploys only after every other better weapon at hand has failed, and public shaming is all that remains.

I suspect it will be as ineffective as all such appeals to alienated voters are, even though I remain skeptical of Trump’s final share of the black vote in November. (Try as I might, I just can’t see Charlie Kirk cleverly micro-targeting inner-city black turnout to get Trump over the hump.) But it is worth noting that, with this little mini-speech, Barack Obama has now stepped into the shoes of someone he does not admire but grudgingly respects: Bill Clinton. Clinton famously got increasingly agitated over the way his wife’s campaign seemed to be completely uninterested in tending to the homefires of the “blue wall” back in 2016. (“Remember white working class voters in Wisconsin? You need those people too.”) Now, in the final stages of the campaign, Obama has returned to direct his anger at the voters instead of the campaign. It’s a bold strategy; we will see how it turns out.