Barack Obama hit the campaign trail for Abdul El-Sayed just as voters started asking hard questions about his socialist agenda.
Democrats need those voters talking about anything but that platform.
And Obama reached for the same move his own critics flagged nearly two decades ago.
Obama Brought a Birth Certificate to a Policy Fight
The former President packed a gym at Cass Technical High School in Detroit for El-Sayed, the Democrat nominee in one of the tightest Senate races in the country, and he didn’t waste much time getting to the line he flew in to deliver.
“They will use lies, and they will use fear, and they will use division,” Obama told the crowd. “And they may even use your name or your faith to somehow suggest that you are dangerous and less than trustworthy and less patriotic and less American than they are.”
Then came the applause line. “We have seen this movie before. I starred in it. I’ve got a long-form birth certificate to prove it.”
Obama assured the room, “It’s not going to work on Abdul.”
From there he walked through El-Sayed’s biography like a proud uncle flipping through a high school yearbook. Born in Michigan. Parents in the auto industry. Team captain in football, lacrosse, and wrestling. Obama even joked about the candidate’s arms. “You see those big guns? That’s why he wears those T-shirts, you know.”
He closed the riff by swinging at Republican Mike Rogers over the Iran war and the tariffs.
But notice what never came up. Not one word about abolishing ICE. Not one word about Medicare for All. Not one word about the wealth tax or the Electoral College.
The Michigan Advance reported that Obama compared the attacks El-Sayed has taken for pushing progressive policies to the ones he faced in 2008. Read that one twice. Voters questioned the policies, and Obama answered with a birth certificate.
Abolishing ICE Has Nothing to Do With Anybody’s Name
El-Sayed doesn’t exactly hide his agenda. During a televised July debate against Haley Stevens, the Congresswoman he beat in the August primary, he put it about as plainly as a politician can. “I’ve been clear that you can’t reform ICE, you can’t retrain ICE, you have to abolish ICE,” El-Sayed said.
He followed that up by insisting the country could still secure the border without the agency that actually enforces immigration law. Good luck explaining that one to a sheriff in a border county.
Then there’s health care. El-Sayed backs Medicare for All with no premiums, copays, or deductibles, a plan that would wipe out the private coverage millions of Michigan auto workers and retirees count on and hand the whole system to Washington. He literally wrote a book on it. National Review noted that his own wife, a psychiatrist, doesn’t accept insurance at all. Her patients pay out of pocket.
He also wants a wealth tax on fortunes above $1 billion and higher taxes on top earners. And his list of things to scrap runs long: the filibuster, the Electoral College, and ICE, plus a plan to “reform” the Supreme Court that would conveniently turn it into a rubber stamp for whichever party adds the new seats.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) all lined up behind him. El-Sayed insists he isn’t a socialist. Writing in the Daily Signal, Michael Freund pointed out how neatly the platform tracks with the Democratic Socialists of America’s national program anyway.
None of that has a thing to do with where his parents came from or how he prays. A retired tool and die maker in Macomb County who doesn’t want to lose his union health plan isn’t a bigot for asking about it.
Obama Wrote This Exact Script in 2008
Here’s the part Obama left out of his movie review. He didn’t just star in the 2008 version. He wrote it.
Campaigning in Springfield, Missouri, on July 30, 2008, Obama warned a crowd about what Republicans had in store. “What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” he said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”
Line those two speeches up side by side. Funny name, not patriotic enough, scared of me. Then fast-forward to your name, your faith, dangerous, less patriotic. Same script. New cast.
Reporters back then asked Obama campaign manager David Plouffe twice to point to where John McCain or George W Bush had said any such thing, according to the Washington Times. Plouffe never gave a direct answer.
McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, didn’t mince words. “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” Davis said. Obama shot back on NPR that the charge was “ridiculous.”
And the habit spread. In September 2009, former President Jimmy Carter told NBC News, “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.” That’s how Democrats greeted the Tea Party. Millions of Americans worried about a government takeover of health care suddenly found themselves lumped in with Klansmen.
Even Obama’s own White House didn’t want to touch that one, and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs publicly distanced the President from Carter’s comments.
Now, some of the noise around El-Sayed does go after his faith. A fringe agitator named Jake Lang staged a protest outside the rally. Rogers and Trump have both raised an alleged link between El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood, a claim El-Sayed flatly denies. Obama could have picked out specific things he objected to and left everybody else alone.
But he didn’t draw that line. He painted the whole opposition with one brush and then never got around to the platform.
The Excuse Shows Up Before the Ballots Do
Every campaign has a closing argument. This one looks more like an alibi.
If El-Sayed loses, the explanation is already sitting on the shelf, wrapped and ready. Voters didn’t reject abolishing ICE or a government takeover of health care. They just couldn’t handle a candidate named Abdul. It’s the same story Democrats told themselves after Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris lost, and it lets the party skip the hard part, which is admitting that working families in places like Warren and Sterling Heights don’t want what the Left is selling.
There’s a practical reason Obama made this trip, too. The Associated Press reported that Stevens ran stronger than El-Sayed in Wayne County, home to Detroit, during the primary. That’s why Obama spent so much time telling Detroit that El-Sayed is “as Michigan as it gets.” The problem with those voters isn’t bigotry. A lot of them simply backed somebody else.
And the shield doesn’t stop at one Senate race. If “they’re attacking his faith” can neutralize a call to abolish the agency that deports illegal aliens, every DSA-flavored candidate with an unusual name now has a get-out-of-scrutiny card. Expect to see it dealt again before the next primary season heats up.
But voters have a long memory for this particular trick. They heard it in 2008. They heard it again in 2009. Most of them figured out that disagreeing with a politician about health care doesn’t make anyone a racist.
Jimmy Carter figured it out, too. On September 15, 2009, he told NBC that racism drove an overwhelming portion of the anger at Obama. On October 1, he told CNN that the vast majority of the people who disagreed with Obama on health care or the environment were not tinged by racism.
Sources: RealClearPolitics, “Obama on El-Sayed: ‘We’ve Seen This Movie Before, I Starred In It, I’ve Got A Long-Form Birth Certificate To Prove It’”; Michigan Advance via News From The States; Michigan Advance, “El-Sayed, Stevens sharpen contrasts in first one-on-one Senate debate”; Associated Press via WFTV and WDBO; The Daily Signal, “Abdul El-Sayed’s Socialism by Another Name”; National Review; Fox News; The Philadelphia Inquirer (August 1, 2008); The Washington Times (August 1, 2008); CBS News; CNN transcripts (September 15, 2009); Salon; Fox News (Carter walk-back); The Grio; Newsweek
