At a pair of fundraisers in California this week held for Democratic Party groups, former President Barack Obama expounded on some of the threats posed by the prospect of Republicans taking power — threats he cast as essentially existential.
Many Republican officials and politicians seem increasingly unconcerned with preserving the basic norms and procedures of the democratic process. The majority of House Republicans who voted in favor of ditching certain electoral votes from the last presidential election despite the lack of real-world evidence of systematic fraud wasn’t the end of it. As for the former president, fundraisers where Obama appeared included an event on Wednesday in San Diego benefiting the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee alongside another gathering on Thursday in San Francisco benefiting the Democratic National Committee.
“There’s a lot of mischief that can be done with a Republican House majority,” Obama said in San Diego. “So this is not a normal election. The stakes could not be higher. And I hope that everybody understands the stakes in this last quarter. I’m going to be out there talking about it, and I expect all of you to be doing the same.” That event raised $2.75 million, and the Democratic fundraiser where Obama appeared the following day brought in over $2 million, spokespeople said.
“Not only did [our democracy] not work, but we elected somebody who actually didn’t believe in it,” Obama added the next day. Trump, of course, continues pushing his conspiracy theories about the election. Earlier this year, he pushed for action on the 2020 presidential election results by Robin Vos, a Republican state legislator in Wisconsin who leads the state Assembly. The House committee investigating January 6 wants to speak with Vos about his communications with the ex-president.
“What we’ve seen the last four years, with a whole bunch of leading figures in one of our two major political parties, is they’re not even faking it,” Obama continued Thursday. “Essentially what they’ve said is that, we fear we may be a minority party, our ideas aren’t selling, but if we can exploit some of the play in the joints of a creaky democracy, if we can work and game the system enough to exploit its anti-majoritarian trends or tendencies, we may be able to just seize power, even if we’re not getting the most votes, even if we’re not marshaling the most support from our population, and if we’re ruthless enough about (it).” Currently looming elections in the U.S. and elsewhere are “a contest between those of us who believe in a vision of society in which each individual is treated with equal worth and equal dignity” and an opposite side “that has everything to do with tribe and race and sect and power and violence,” Obama added.
Trump even stands by the violence at the Capitol, repeatedly dangling the prospect of pardoning participants in it if he regains the presidency. Elsewhere in the GOP, promotion of the prospect of violence — even if the person doing the promoting makes a show of regretting it — also continues. “What we’re seeing right now is that what used to be sort of vestiges of a poll tax, Jim Crow, voter suppression, which could be overcome, has now escalated to voter nullification,” Obama said. “That’s essentially what ‘Stop the Steal’ is about. It’s what Republican candidates up and down the line are now professing… Essentially what they’re saying is, ‘We do not have to abide by the norms that we had set up just to count votes.’”
