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Up until now, Vice President Harris apparently has been campaigning almost purely on the blessings that will be bestowed on us all from electing a woman president who strongly supports women (or anyone who wants to be considered a woman) and their “issues.” What little attention the Democrats were paying to the male half of the electorate amounted to belittling Trump supporters for their unholy sexism, transphobia, and toxic masculinity. Unsurprisingly, polling is showing that this election strategy is not strengthening the vice-president’s appeal to male voters. Until these polling subsets dropped, the Harris campaign brashly believed that it could overcome this entirely foreseeable gender-based enthusiasm gap through cringe-producing political strategies such as selecting a fumblingly submissive running mate, holding manifold “X Men for Harris” Zoom tent revival meetings, and running preachy political advertisements such as “Real Men Vote for a Woman.”

With these campaign strategies falling short with male voters and the election mere weeks away, Democrats are now calling upon presidents Clinton and Obama to climb up into their post-presidential bully pulpits and sermonize to their fellows on the moral evils of failing to support a Presidential candidate from their party whose chief qualification for the office that she is aspiring to (and just about every other political office she has ever held) is that she is female and running against “ultimate” anti-woman candidate: Donald Trump. While everyone expected the Democrat party to trot out its past presidents during the final weeks of the election, at least those two who could still trot, sending out these pulpiteers to preach against the pernicious misogyny supposedly at the root of male voters’ indifference to Vice President Harris represents the apogee of hypocrisy.

The Harris campaign is sending out former president Clinton throughout the South to politic on her behalf, presumably in order to connect with the good old boys who supported him back in the 90s. But when it comes to sexism, there is no bigger sinner than Bill Clinton. More than a quarter of a century after he escaped legal retribution, America knows full well and fully appreciates that “Ol’ Put Some Ice on it” Bill’s illimitable extra-marital dalliances were either nonconsensual, or at the very least, procured through what we now call relationship power imbalances, and then covered up by his wife and staff through scurrilous personal attacks on his “me too” victims. Democrats cannot even draw a fine line between Clinton and an actual sexual predator — one who is at least as notorious as they claim that Donald Trump is.

But when it comes to former President Obama’s approach to campaigning on Harris’s behalf, that is where the hypocrisy reaches Pharisaical levels. Last week Obama sternly scolded African American men for demurring from backing a Democratic female presidential candidate at the same levels they once supported his candidacies. Of course, Obama’s chastising the usually reliable and always indispensable AA subset of the Democrat base “to turn out in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities… and support the party’s candidates” is an old election-year sermon of his. But this year, Obama made it excruciatingly plain that he was condemning “the brothers[‘]” less “pronounced” political support for a female Presidential candidate on nothing less woefully sinful than their misogyny.

“And now, you’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you because you think that’s a sign of strength because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down?”

Since he offered this Old Testament-level admonishment, Obama has come under criticism for unfairly scapegoating young black men for the Harris campaign’s and the Democrats party’s ignoring their particular concerns and taking their electoral support for granted. Furthermore, the Harris campaign and its supporters in the legacy media take it as an article of faith that misogyny is the chief, if not only, reason that the vice-president is not polling better with privileged white male voters, even though these votes usually trend Republican regardless of the Democrat ticket’s XX and/or XY chromosomes. Nevertheless, the entire reason Obama is called upon to preach from his post-presidential pulpit to African American men is because he knows this flock and can move them to vote for Democratic candidates. 

Both persons of color and non-color have long recognized tacitly that sexism is particularly prevalent among male youths living in urban neighborhoods. Obama imputably believes these biases are so entrenched so as to cause them to vote – or not show up to vote — against their own self-interest; to rashly abandon, as he puts it, the “[w]omen in our lives [who] have been getting our backs this entire time.” But what Obama did not acknowledge is misogyny’s negative influences on the behaviors in young AA men beyond just their voting participation rates. Disrespect for black women in this country tends to explain the higher incidences of their abuse and higher rates of single-mother households. Further, the concomitant toxic masculinity has been shown to lead young men of color into gang life and street violence.

What may righteously be viewed as sanctimonious, therefore, is Obama’s singling out the young black men for committing the Democratic party’s mortal sin of misogyny solely because their sinning might cost his party the presidency next month. Rather than homilize on the societal harms that gender biases routinely cause black women, Obama admonished these behaviors only insofar as they may hurt the electoral chances of one Democrat candidate who has never lived in an actual ghetto and has indisputably benefited politically from her mixed race. While he may sincerely believe that a Harris presidency would be better for the young men “in all quarters of our communities and neighborhoods,”  Obama is disingenuously declining to preach against what the pernicious effects of their sexist attitudes outside the voting booth.

As soon as this election is over, we should all expect Obama to descend once again from his post-presential pulpit and go back to traveling on private jets to his four or more mansions across the country, yachting with his fawning wealthy white coterie, and hobnobbing with rappers and entertainment moguls who have frequently proven to be sexual predators themselves and whom he has so far never condemned. Should support for Harris among people of color increase and she be elected, the former President will retain his strong partisan influence and authority which he has enjoyed over the past four years of his post-office ministry. But should he sincerely believe that misogyny is a gravely serious problem in this country, and specifically in the community which he influences so powerfully, Obama would deliver this looked for sermon without once again waiting for the next election season.

Image: AT via Magic Studio