Like many professional athletes, politicians need to know when to retire from the scene. Nowhere did truisms for both become more evident than this past week when Ezekiel Elliott of the Dallas Cowboys and Barack Obama of the Progressive Democrats tried to reprieve their former glory. Last Sunday in the Cowboy’s 9-47 loss to the Detroit Lions, Zeke carried 8 times for 17 yards for a 2.1-yard average. Then, last week before a black male audience, Barack scapegoated his listeners for not being sufficiently behind the 2024 Democrat presidential nominee.
In both cases, their lack of success could have been problems with the benefactor of their efforts as much as their trying to stay too long in the game. This 2024 edition of the Dallas Cowboys is following a 28-year separation from their last Super Bowl Victory. If Zeke had been running for Detroit last Sunday, he might well have looked like the old Zeke, for a game at least.
Let’s face it, Kamala Harris’s “Opportunity Economy” in 2024 does not energize voters like Barack Obama and his “Hope and Change” did in 2008 which carried him to victory. As Lloyd Bentsen quipped in the 1988 vice presidential debate against Dan Quayle, “You are no Jack Kennedy”; Kamala Harris is no Barack Obama.
Also, the Barack Obama of 2024 is not the Barack Obama of 2008 either. Since leaving office n 2017, Barack and Michelle have advanced their financial status from well-to-do middle-class Americans into the upward mobile multimillionaire class. Their short move from the White House in 2017 was to their new home in the Kalorama historic district in Northwest Washington, D.C. One group estimated the value of this mansion with nine bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and an expensive garden and terrace at $ 8.1 million.
The Obamas are better known, however, for their gorgeous 6,892-square-foot house on the prestigious Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Bought in 2019, this home is situated on a secluded 29.3-acre coastal estate with manicured grounds leading to the water and amazing ocean views. One might guess that they see little of their old Kenwood/Hyde Park, Chicago, neighbors or stay many nights in the residence that they bought there in 2004 when Barack was first elected to the U.S. Senate.
Barack and Michelle Obama’s net worth has been estimated somewhere between $70 and $250 million. The wealth and lifestyle of the Obamas are only mentioned here to suggest that “that old black magic that has me in its spell” may no longer ring as true with black Americans as these words did twenty years ago when Barack entered the national political scene as a community organizer in poor Chicago neighborhoods. Obama’s former constituents now are just trying to feed their families in the face of the Biden/Harris inflation.
If Barack’s new image does not ring as true as before, then perhaps the Kamala Harris standard introduction of “I was raised in a middle-class household” has not cleared the sniff test well. She grew up in an affluent neighborhood in Montreal, Canada. After moving to the United States, her mother was a biologist with a graduate degree in endocrinology from the University of California, Berkeley. She pursued a research career for 40 years. After moving here from Canada, Harris’s father also enrolled in UC Berkeley and specialized in development economics. Later, he was the first Black scholar to be granted tenure at Stanford University’s economics department.
Harris’s political career began In 1990 as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California. Four years later her upward political mobility accelerated when she began “dating” Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown, the kingpin in California’s progressive Democratic Party politics. With Brown’s blessing, she moved upward through the Democratic Party ranks as they changed California’s bi-partisan politics into a one-party state. Some would argue Harris has the same one-party ambitions for America if she were to become President of the United States.
This follower of the 2024 presidential election has reported previously on the prior Democratic “Magic Shows” as they proceeded along their proposed path to another progressive presidential victory. Will Barack and Kamala be able to carry this new Obama/Harris magic show to victory with that old black magic he used to weave so well?
Stay tuned, more October surprises may be yet to come.
John Whitmore Jenkins
October 17, 2024
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