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The Politicking of Barack Obama

Former President Barack Obama speaks at a celebration of life service for civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. on March 06, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois. (Steve Olson/Getty Images)

Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson

Victor Davis Hanson, a senior contributor for The Daily Signal, is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and host of "The Victor Davis Hanson Show." His website, The Blade of Perseus, features columns, lectures, and exclusive content for subscribers. Contact him at [email protected].

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.

I’d like to comment recently on the politicking of Barack Obama. He’s been in the news recently, speaking at the Jesse Jackson funeral. What he did there, I’ll get to in a second, but he had a habit of talking down to black Americans as if they were naive, stupid, lacked his sophistication.

Do you remember most poignantly when he told supporters of Kamala Harris, don’t dare, you don’t know what’s good for you. Don’t dare vote for basically a white racist like Trump when you could empower a black woman. That didn’t go over very well, but he has a long history of that.

Before I continue, though, the Democrats have a long history of using the venue of the funeral memorial service to hijack it and use it for political purposes.

In 2002, they did that with the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, and what should have been a memorial service turned into a four-hour campaign harangue. It was sort of the same way when Barack Obama went to the funeral of John McCain. He was asked to speak, and there’s no secret that John McCain and Donald Trump were not friends.

Donald Trump felt that he had endorsed John McCain in 2008. John McCain had not turned the favor by explicitly telling the country that he would not vote for his own party’s nominee in 2016. John McCain, remember, had been a lifetime supporter of private medicine, and when Obamacare came on the scene, he was a vehement opponent.

And when Donald Trump then was president, he had the votes to repeal Obamacare and bring in a free-market alternative. John McCain inexplicably, in a late-night vote, flipped and decided to cast the deciding vote to crush that effort. And we have Obamacare today thanks to John McCain. He was never forgiven.

Trump then said some things, and that all surfaced at the McCain funeral where Barack Obama sort of, without mentioning Trump, but it was very overt, the reference. He said that unlike people who are brash and think they’re tough and crude, basically, John McCain was tough, but he didn’t have to emphasize it.

The next occasion came in 2020 for Barack Obama. That was at John Lewis’ funeral, and like the Wellstone funeral and the McCain funeral, once again, it was occasion to hijack the purpose, that is to honor the dead, and instead to use it for political purposes. So once Barack Obama came to the podium, he had an agenda.

And he was going to attack Donald Trump. And the way he did it was he said, we are suffering from racism and voter suppression. We don’t need voter IDs. We need a national holiday for balloting. We need to let prisoners vote, and we have too much Jim Crow racism in the country. Therefore, we’ve got to get rid of the Jim Crow racist filibuster footnote.

He used it very ineffectively, but he used it in 2006 to deny the nomination of Justice [Samuel] Alito to the Supreme Court. And then he said that we have racist gerrymandering.

That’s kind of ironic to see who’s been gerrymandering lately. And he has fully endorsed the efforts of Illinois, of Massachusetts, of Virginia, of California to ensure that Republicans don’t have House representation commensurate with their popular vote in their states.

In that long sermon, people were kind of startled. They thought, “Wow, this is a campaign. Is this a campaign advertisement, or is this an occasion for Obama to get relevance again after being out of office?” I would drop it there, but he did it again. He just went to the funeral of Jesse Jackson. I should add another footnote here that Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama were not close friends.

Jesse Jackson said that he had been the trailblazer, the first African American presidential candidate that had a real chance to win. There had been others, but he felt that he was the most viable and that broke the barrier. And Obama was the beneficiary of that. He got so angry that in 2008 he got tired of Barack Obama, he thought, talking down to African Americans.

So he said in a hot mic in the Fox Chicago studio, “I’d like to cut his” off, a vulgar reference to Obama’s testicles. But anyway, Obama was asked to speak.

Now, I would say in another footnote, all of these speeches at these funerals that Obama presents are basically about himself. He always relates anecdotes, not about necessarily just about the politician in question, but about his interaction with him.

But in this particular Jesse Jackson speech, he went after division in the country using government. These are all sins he purportedly thinks that Donald Trump has committed—disunity, racism, valuing some people over others, and using the government to pursue enemies.

This was very, very rich. Very rich. Barack Obama, remember when he was president, he used the government to do what? Surveil Associated Press reporters, politicized the IRS to make sure they went after conservative groups and denied them tax-free status before his reelection effort.

And remember most egregiously of all: He had at one point James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey in the Oval Office with him during the transition after Trump had been elected. And he basically said to them, your intelligence assessments from national intelligence, FBI, CIA are flawed because I’m not getting the results I want. I want Russian collusion. Collusion. Now go back and give me Russian collusion and Donald Trump.

So, what I’m getting at is that once again, Barack Obama hijacked a funeral, but more importantly, it’s really disturbing to see this former president who, when he was president, not only used government, but he also divided the country.

All of his speeches had one thing in common at these three funerals: unity, unity, unity. But it was Barack Obama who said that Henry Louis Gates was endemic of police racism. Trayvon Martin was the son that I never had. He weighed in on Ferguson. Most importantly, he gave that awful speech where he said that the white working class were clingers, they stick to their guns and religion just because he lost the primary in 2008.

And then we have, of course, this dichotomy where he is the man of the people, reemerging now to galvanize the Democrats and the progressives, and yet he’s building this German flak tower-type of library that’s ruined a park in Chicago. It’s going to cost eventually about a billion dollars. It’s one of the ugliest monoliths imaginable, but it’s a testament not so much to his presidency, but to his ego.

This is a man, remember, who flies from one of his four mansions, either in Hawaii or Martha’s Vineyard, or Kalorama or Chicago, to lecture people about how they’re either, as he did in one of the funerals, greedy, the age of greed, or they’re too self-centered, or they’re not idealistic enough, or they’re not galvanized enough, and then he gets in a private jet after sometimes talking on other occasions about climate change.

People who talk about climate change shouldn’t fly in private jets. They should not have seaside resorts when they tell us that the seas are going to inundate our coast.

What I’m getting at is that we are in a situation now where the Democratic Party has moved radically to the left, and no institution is free of politicization.

And we’re going to have politics 24/7, seven days a week. Funerals, speeches, any occasion, and we’re going to see Barack Obama in the center of it, and he’s going to try to convince us that his administration started the leftward move of the Democratic Party, and he’s going to be the one that sees it completed, as we saw during the Biden administration, when his operatives were really running the country.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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