The lame duck has plans to be a powerful player after he leaves office. He is not done with us -- not by a long shot.

Many presidents suffer a shock when they leave office. The trappings of fame and power are missed.  The spotlight no longer shines on them. Some go gracefully: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and the Bushes come to mind. One has gone shamefully: Richard Nixon. Then we have Bill Clinton who still seeks the spotlight with hopes it reflects onto Hillary and helps her achieve her goal to be the next president. There is Jimmy Carter who is a meddler who has irritated all successor presidents (see “The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity) but is spent as a political force.

Barack Obama intends to smash this paradigm.

A man so addicted to power and so intent to extend his legacy will not retire to a lifetime of golf and well-paying speechifying. He will be a relatively young and healthy ex-president. He has not given up his goal to fundamentally transform America.

How will he stay a political player once he has left office? He has already tipped his hand with some of his recent actions.

Barack Obama has the lowest approval levels of his presidency. He has lost key demographic groups that propelled him to election and re-election to the presidency.  Many whites, young people, and Asians have lost faith in him -- and faith and hope were propellants to his presidential campaigns. At this point he is uninterested in repairing the damage with those groups -- he never showed interest in triangulating after the midterm thumping in 2010 and certainly has no desire to compromise now. He is a lame duck with duck hunters in charge of Congress.  As he noted, he will not be on the ballot ever again. But he still loves the love among his most loyal supporters -- people who support him come hell or high water: blacks and Hispanics. He has a reason to shore up support among those key groups going forward.

Obama knows that demographics are destiny. African-Americans are 13% of the population of America, with key concentrations in states rich with electoral power (California, New York, and Illinois for example). Hispanics are 17 % of the population and also live in states that have a huge impact, particularly in presidential contests. These states comprise the “blue firewall” that Republicans have a hard time overcoming in presidential races.  Texas, heretofore, reliably red for decades, is a number one target for flipping by Democrats, given that state’s high Hispanic population (the second highest number of Hispanics in the nation).  Florida is also a tempting target.

The number of Hispanics will grow immensely, especially relative to the white population (which is stagnant). In 2011 Hispanics already accounted for more than half the nation’s population growth in the previous decade. Much of this growth, incidentally, is due to high fertility rates among Hispanics in America. Once born on American soil, they instantly become American citizens eligible to vote when they are 18.

Obama’s de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants will further change the demographics of America and fundamentally transform America. Millions of Hispanics will no longer face deportation and will enjoy a plethora of benefits. These policies (the de facto Dream Act; the failure to enforce our laws; the abuse of prosecutorial discretion) will act as inducement for further immigration into America. There are now up to eleven million illegal immigrants in America; those numbers will substantially grow in the years ahead. Most of them will become Democrats if they become citizens and their children clearly will.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2014/11/21/welcome-new-democrats/

Why does Obama increasingly appear on Univision while avoiding interviews by not just Fox News but other networks as well? The broadcast networks have increasingly come to complain about his and his team’s disdain and treatment for them. He knows his target market.

A wave is coming and the Hawaiian in the Oval Office wants to go surfing.

Obama’s actions to cater to the Hispanic population in America are designed to shore up support in that community, while his playing the race card is part and parcel of his goal to continue to retain the support of the black community.

By many measures, blacks have not fared well during his presidency. Deroy Murdock sums up the facts in “Black Americans are worse off under Obama.”  Open borders will probably further damage the black community as jobs are taken by Hispanics that might otherwise had gone to blacks and as wages are depressed. In fact, immigration raids, when they were still held, have helped black hiring-as they did, for one example, as this poultry plant in Georgia.

How to distract from this sorry state of affairs?  Stoke racial tensions and play the race card. He has taken a lesson from his mentor, Saul Alinsky, who wrote, “The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent.”

Obama has been playing the race card for years.  Even in his memoir “Dreams for my Father” , he wrote “white folks’ greed runs a world in need” (see also The 25 Most Obnoxious Quotes from Barack Obama, including more derisive comments). His beloved grandmother was a “typical white person” and thus paranoid about blacks. And contrary to the media and campaign spin, Obama heard the anti-white racism from his mentor, moral compass and pastor Jeremiah Wright and not only listened but came back for more and more (while bringing along his impressionable young daughters), and gave Wright’s church almost all the charitable donations he made so he could spread The Word.

William Bigelow notes some examples at Breitbart:

Obama, January 2014: “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President.” 

Obama, January 2012: “Everything we fought for during the last election is at stake in this election. The very core of what this country stands for is on the line — the basic promise that no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, this is a place where you could make it if you try.”  [emphasis added]

After the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., in 2009: “there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”

Even Bill Clinton once accused Obama of playing the race card, in 2008: "I think that they played the race card on me. And we now know, from memos from the campaign and everything that they planned to do it all along. I was stating a fact, and it’s still a fact."

Barack Obama pulled that card from his deck in June 21, 2008:

We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid.

“They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

There are other examples of Obama’s deliberate plan to exacerbate racial tensions in America, that puts paid to his ringing oratory back in 2004 that there was “not a black America and a white America and a Latino America.”  But the line worked to galvanize a political career. It served its purpose and was then thrown into the dustbin of history.

Recently, he added to his repertoire that “racism is deeply rooted in American society.” He did this on his the Black Entertainment Network.

He seems to becoming a regular on two networks that appeal to Hispanics and blacks. That is a strategy.

Barack Obama has not been alone in trying to stoke racial tensions.

Eric Holder, who is as much of, if not more so, a political tool more than he is an Attorney General, called America a nation of cowards on the topic of race (rich when it comes from someone who stonewalled subpoenas from the House and then relied on an extraordinary abuse of executive privilege to shield him from responsibility for his incompetence [or worse] over the Fast and Furious operation) and said:

Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices," Holder said.  "The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin[.] ... When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?"

Of course, when the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown shootings happened, Holder and Obama both moved to capitalize on the racial tensions that resulted by, literally, making a federal case out of both incidents. The former investigation saw no civil rights violation; as will the latter as time goes on.

Al Sharpton has also played a role as Barack Obama’s go-to guy on race relations in America. By the way, there was always distance between Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson in Chicago because Jackson saw Obama as a threat to his influence among a segment of the black population.

That is a significant clue to his plans for the future.

One can expect more fomenting of tensions between the rest of America and the black and Hispanic populations in the next two years as Barack Obama enters the Bulworth phase of his presidency.

After all, this is a president who backs disruptive protests; who says “power concedes nothing without a fight”; who responded to questions about the need to quell anger coming from the bonuses granted to American International Group executives by stating he was not interested in quelling that anger but channeling it instead; who cheered on Occupy Wall Street protesters by saying they were the reason he “ran for office”; who suggested to his followers that should they come across people who did not support him that they argue with those people and “get in their faces.”

To what end, this thugocracy?

After he leaves the presidency does Barack Obama have plans to revitalize his Organizing for Action (OFA) group? This is a community action group that has been used as tool by Barack Obama for years:

Initially founded after the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, the group sought to mobilize supporters in favor of Obama's legislative priorities, particularly health care reform. Eventually, the organization played a role in the midterm elections of 2010. Later, it became the grassroots arm of Obama for America. After Obama's second inauguration, it was reorganized as Organizing for Action and returned to its previous mission of organizing around the President's agenda.

Barack Obama is not going gently into the night. He is in his early fifties, in good health, and his daughters will be well on their way to adulthood by the time he leaves office.

Barack Obama is a man who likes to exercise power (“That’s the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want.”) 

There will be time after his presidency to play golf and reap millions from speechifying.

There will also be time to revitalize OFA and enrich it with donations from his well-heeled donors. Bill Clinton formed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation to serve as a precursor to Hillary’s presidential campaign (as even the New York Times has pointed out, it gives a miniscule portion of the money it raises to good causes -- unless one sees President Hillary Clinton as a good cause).

Barack Obama has his data bank of supporters; he has his megaphone and always will; he has his social networks. There is no doubt regarding his ability to raise staggering sums of money -- something he was able to do even as his popularity faded. True he won’t have ambassadorships to hand out to bundlers or crony contracts to funnel taxpayer dollars to donors, but he can always tap his fellow celebrities in Hollywood. Perhaps, more importantly, he will no longer be restricted by federal law to relying on Americans to financially support his plans. Similar to the Clinton Foundation, he can tap vast funds from overseas, including from such “friendly” sources as Qatar. After all, they will owe him after all the power he has given them in Middle East politics despite- (or because of) their support for terror groups such as Hamas.

How will he now transform OFA? Having secured his base of tens of millions of Hispanics and blacks even at the expense of race relations in America what will he do with this power?

Will he control the votes of millions of people in key battleground states with a bevy of electoral votes? Will he turn this bloc into a battering ram to defeat candidates who will not toe his line and do his bidding? Will he use it to extract a political price from politicians across America to protect and promote his pride and joy, Obamacare, to support redistribution on a vast scale, to support climate change policies here at home and weakness, appeasement and surrender abroad?

Obama is playing long ball, as befits a relatively young man with a bold dream to “fundamentally transform America.”

He is not done with us yet.

Drawing of Obama by Otto Veblin