In his forthcoming book, Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump, Edward-Isaac Dovere reveals a few choice words that former president Barack Obama had for his successor, Donald Trump. As reported in the Guardian, these include “madman”, a “racist, sexist pig,” “that f---ing lunatic,” and a “corrupt motherf---er.”

In his own most recent memoir, Promised Land, Obama’s fixation on Trump is manifest. In fact, it borders on obsession. In reviewing that memoir for my own forthcoming book, Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, I could not help but notice, however, just how situational is Obama’s objection to the sexual mores of others.

There is, of course, his and Michelle’s coziness with Hollywood pervert and major Democratic donor, Harvey Weinstein. In fact, their daughter Malia interned with Weinstein. Tweeted cultural critic Frank Rich after the Weinstein saga became too big to ignore, “Biggest mystery of @nytimes Weinstein story: How exemplary parents like Obamas let their daughter work there. The stories were out there.”

Said Obama long after he should have spoken out, "Michelle and I have been disgusted by the recent reports about Harvey Weinstein. Any man who demeans and degrades women in such fashion needs to be condemned and held accountable, regardless of wealth or status."

“Any man,” that is, except those who are politically useful, and none was more useful to Obama than the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. About Kennedy, Obama cannot gush enough. The Kennedy Obama came to know, he tells us in A Promised Land, was “the closest thing Washington had to a living legend.”

In his early support of Obama’s 2008 campaign, Kennedy was “was absolutely electric, summoning all the old Camelot magic, batting down the argument of inexperience once used against his brother and now directed toward me.”

For the record, Ted’s war hero brother, John, had served in Congress twelve years before launching his presidential campaign. Community organizer Obama had served two, and the toughest thing he ever fought was the waves at Waikiki.

Having risen from his deathbed to ensure the passage of ObamaCare, Ted Kennedy strikes Obama as worthy of canonization. The road to sainthood, however, must first pass across the bridge at Chappaquiddick. In the #MeToo era, not even progressives get to detour around it.

An accounting of Kennedy’s road to perdition may not belong in Obama’s memoir, but he should have factored it into his assessment of the man. The damage that Kennedy wrought on the women in his orbit did not end at that fabled bridge. In 1990, when journalists still felt some obligation to the truth, Michael Kelly wrote the following for GQ. In 2007, when Obama was a U.S. senator, the New Republic reprinted the account:

As [Carla] Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound [Sen. Ted] Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on [Sen. Chris] Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room.

The incident above took place in 1985 at La Brasserie restaurant in Washington, D.C., where Loh and Gavigilio both worked as waitresses. In his memoir, Obama identifies Dodd as “one of Ted Kennedy’s best friends,” but goes no deeper than to speak of his “warm relationship” with the Connecticut senator.

Obama may or may not have known of the La Brasserie assault at the time, but everyone in Washington did, and the story lived on.

Obama surely knew about the Good Friday incident in 1991 when Kennedy commemorated Christ’s death on the cross by taking his nephew William Kennedy Smith and his son Patrick out barhopping. The young men brought two young women home with them.

Hoping perhaps for his share of the action, a drunken Ted Kennedy, nearly sixty now, wandered without pants into the room where everyone gathered. The one woman fled in panic. The other woman remained and claimed Smith raped her. Smith’s criminal trial was long and very public. The Kennedys rallied to Smith’s defense and cheered his acquittal.

To be fair, Obama does not discuss Trump’s sexual peccadillos in A Promised Land. He makes no reference in the book even to the infamous Access Hollywood tape. That job was left to every other Democrat on the planet, Michelle included.

“I can’t stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted,” Michelle said in October 2016 while stumping for Hillary in New Hampshire. “So while I would love nothing more than pretend that this isn’t happening and come out here and do my normal campaign speech, it would be dishonest and disingenuous to just move on to the next thing like this was all a bad dream.”

In her book, Becoming, Michelle accuses Trump of “bragging” about “sexually assaulting women.” As with almost every questionable thing Trump has ever said, Democrats have magnified the words beyond their intent.

Left out of Michelle’s analysis of the Access Hollywood tape is one key phrase: “And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.” Sexual assault, of course, implies a lack of consent. Trump is no saint, but no one ever drowned in his Oldsmobile.

Jack Cashill’s latest book, Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, is now on pre-sale. See www.cashill.com for more information.

Image: Piotr Siedlecki 

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