The 2024 Michelle Obama Factor

By Joel Gilbert

Over the summer, media commentators on both the left and right have been discussing Joe Biden’s political future.  They all largely agree on one thing: Biden is not a viable presidential candidate in 2024.  They cite Biden’s immense unpopularity due to his disastrous record as president in every field, from the economy to the border to the war in Ukraine.  Some cite Biden’s physical and mental frailty and the corruption investigations in the House as reasons Biden won’t be a 2024 candidate.  Others are skeptical that Biden will even finish his current term.  Commentators also note that Biden is certainly not acting like a 2024 presidential candidate.  Biden has no campaign office and does no campaigning.

In fact, the only thing that indicates that Biden might run in 2024 is a three-minute video he released about seven days after RFK Jr.’s announcement.  That video release suggested that someone in Biden’s circle feared the Kennedy name and wanted to send a message to Democrat voters and the media to back off RFK Jr. as well as any others who might jump in.  If RFK Jr. had not announced, I doubt Biden would have said a word about 2024.

There are more curious questions.  For example, why has Biden spent nearly 40% of his presidency on vacation in Delaware?  Knowing that his son Hunter was the subject of criminal and House investigations, why did Biden flaunt Hunter during his Ireland trip and at recent White House parties?  Why, just this past week, did Joe Biden respond to a press question about the disaster in Hawaii with a simple “no comment”?

Biden is sure acting like someone who is just marking time, rather than someone who is president now or has any real plans to run again.  In fact, Biden’s entire presidency seems like he’s doing a favor for someone.  If so, who could that someone be?

The Biden presidency began with a slew of Obama-esque executive orders reversing many of Donald Trump’s accomplishments, and exists with about 70% of staffers who are veterans of Obama’s eight years in the White House.  All evidence points to none other than Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama.

Recall that after leaving office, Obama strangely continued to live in Washington, D.C.  For the first two years, it was under the guise that his daughter Sasha was still in high school, but she graduated in 2018, and Obama is still there — except, of course, for the sojourns to his climate change–denying home on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard.

Known for lying incessantly, Joe Biden is also known for talking too much.  He sometimes accidentally tells the truth.  Recall that when Joe and his son Hunter got $10 million in bribes to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor looking into Burisma, Biden openly bragged about it in order to entertain an audience.  Biden also bragged in 2020 that Democrats have put together “the most extensive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.”  As to whether he would seek a second term, Biden told Democrat voters in 2020 that he intended to be a “transitional president.”  This was understood to mean that Biden would serve one term due to his advanced age.  All three of these Joe Biden boasts appear to be true.

So what is Biden really up to in the White House?  I am convinced that he knows he is simply a placeholder, who is forwarding Obama’s agenda while paving the way for a Michelle Obama presidency, which would cement the ultimate goal of Barack Obama: “the fundamental transformation of America.”

The Democrats have meanwhile set it up for Michelle to be their 2024 nominee by moving the first primary out of Iowa, where Michelle would have had to campaign in 99 counties, to South Carolina, where half of the Democrat party primary electorate are African-American.  South Carolina is also the state Michelle claimed as her “adopted home state” back in 2008, when campaigning for Barack, because her grandparents are from there.  And, if that weren’t enough, the Democrats have placed their 2024 convention in, of all places, Chicago, Michelle’s hometown, to set up what they believe will be a “homegirl convention.”

I believe November of this year is the key month, where we’ll see Biden officially drop out for health reasons, and Michelle will declare for president in order to meet the December 23 deadline for primary signatures in most states.

What exactly has Michelle been doing to prepare for that moment?  Since 2016, she’s been copying the steps Barack Obama took before running for president.  Like her husband, Michelle served as keynote speaker at a Democrat convention.  Barack’s 2004 breakout speech introducing John Kerry made him a viable candidate four years later.  Michelle’s 2020 speech on behalf of Joe Biden established her as the favorite next nominee.  Michelle will likely justify her own candidacy by restating what she said when introducing Biden: “you know I hate politics, but I love this nation, and I love your children.”

Next, Barack Obama based his candidacy on his personal story, writing two autobiographies: his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, and 2006’s The Audacity of Hope.  Both were efforts to rewrite the candidate’s personal and political history for public and media consumption.  Sure enough, Michelle wrote a wildly popular 2018 memoir, Becoming, and a 2022 autobiography, The Light We Carry.  Both are on Netflix as a movie and an interview with Oprah, respectively.  Conservatives failed to notice that Michelle was selling out arenas around the country, ostensibly to promote these books, but in reality to solidify her political ambitions.

Finally, Barack started in politics by running a voter registration drive called “Project Vote.”  Michelle now aggressively runs “When We All Vote,” a Soros-funded project designed to showcase Michelle’s leadership and remind voters of her solid skills at reciting Democrat talking points.

The showcasing has worked.  Michelle Obama is a genuine pop culture phenomenon.  Like Oprah or Madonna, she scarcely needs her last name anymore.  She has almost 100 million followers on social media — 22 million on Twitter, 55 million on Instagram, and 19 million on Facebook.  With 15 years of positive media coverage, hundreds of magazine covers, and talk show appearances, Michelle is arguably the most popular person in the country, if not the world.

The one thing that can stop Michelle’s drive to the White House is the truth about Michelle, especially as it affects her core voting bloc: black voters.  The truth is that Michelle is no friend of the black community.

In my film and book of the same name, Michelle Obama 2024: Her Real Life Story and Plan for Power, I chronicle Michelle’s real-life history in Chicago.  Black voters are no fools.  If they knew that Michelle was really an “Oreo,” the racial slur hurled at her growing up by the black kids in her neighborhood, they might not support Michelle politically.

“Oreo” means you are black on the outside but white on the inside.  This was a major insult: the neighborhood black kids who had observed Michelle for years understood her elitist attitude.  Yes, it was Michelle and her brother Craig who were doing “White Flight” in the 1970s, running away from all-black schools one block from their home to study far away with white kids in a magnet school and a Catholic school.  They knew that Michelle had no black friends in their middle-class South Shore neighborhood and ridiculed her for “acting white.”

Michelle got her revenge on the black community in her professional career.  Chicago liberals couldn’t hire a white person to make 20,000 blacks homeless.  Their answer was to hire Michelle Obama.  She became Mayor Richard Daley’s assistant planning commissioner.  Her job was to facilitate the destruction of the low-income all-black Cabrini Green housing project and cede the choice downtown real estate to Democrat party donor-developers like Tony Rezko.

Nor could the white liberal elites at the University of Chicago Medical Center hire a white person to deny access to health care to blacks who were using their emergency room.  Only a black person could fill that job.  For a cool $300,000 a year, Michelle was prepared to do all the denying that was needed.  Michelle headed up the “South Side Health Collaborative,” a scheme to prevent blacks who showed up at the University of Chicago Medical Center emergency room from receiving medical care.  Michelle made sure they were put into white vans and shipped to crappy neighborhood strip mall clinics on the South Side.  This was all illegal; it was called “patient dumping.”

Given Donald Trump’s inroads with minorities due to his policy successes, Democrats are doubling down on putting their leadership into the hands of non-white candidates.  Their pitch to African-Americans is the rather shallow and insulting “see, we look like you, vote for us.”  Michelle checks all their boxes, and Biden does not.  In addition, with Michelle, the media can use their two favorite weapons to attack those who disagree: race and sex.

As a first lady, Michelle was beyond scrutiny.  She appeared black enough to make her husband seem black by extension, and no one raised questions.  On the campaign trail, the mistress of Martha Vineyard will have a much harder time playing “homegirl.”

Hollywood film director Joel Gilbert is president of Highway 61 Entertainment.  Among his many films are political documentaries including The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America; Trump: The Art of the Insult; There’s No Place Like Utopia; Dreams from My Real Father; Atomic Jihad; and Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam and the new film and book Michelle Obama 2024: Her Real Life Story and Plan for Power.