National Review Online editor Philip Klein wants you to believe Barack Obama was some kind of political moderate. That’s the only way to read his reaction to a viral clip of the former president telling Caitlin Clark not to let “media nonsense” get her down and reminding her she’s a great player. Klein called it “a perfect example of why Obama is hated by the far Left & also why he won two elections comfortably.”
A perfect example of why Obama is hated by the far Left & also why he won two elections comfortably. https://t.co/c8iolzBXd7
— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) July 25, 2026
Set aside the Caitlin Clark moment for a second. The framing is the real story here. Klein wants readers to believe Obama was more moderate than John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
He wasn’t.
Sean Davis, cofounder of The Federalist, made the point with numbers Klein conveniently left out. “Obama was adored by the far Left when he left office (95% approval rating among Democrats) and he remains adored by the far Left today because he is the most left-president in modern American history (89% approval rating from self-identified liberals in a CNN poll last month vs. 28% approval from self-identified conservatives, which means the left-wing loves him even more than the right-wing hates him),” Davis wrote.
I’ve written a few books about Obama, and I can tell you exactly why the far left worshipped him then — and still does: he built the most sweeping left-wing agenda of any modern president, yet somehow convinced people like Klein to call it “moderation” just because he said a few kind words to Caitlin Clark.
Let’s run through what he actually did as president, since Klein seems to have misplaced the receipts.
Obama ran in 2008 promising to “fundamentally transform” the United States, and then he did exactly that. The 2009 stimulus was one of the largest government interventions into market activity in American history. Obamacare handed Washington unprecedented control over the nation’s healthcare system, and its Medicaid expansion extended federal-state coverage to millions more people, with Washington footing most of the bill. Dodd-Frank buried the financial industry under new federal regulations.
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Obama didn’t stop at legislation. When Congress refused to pass the DREAM Act, he unilaterally shielded hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who arrived as children from deportation through executive action alone, an end run around Congress that was blatantly unconstitutional. He committed the United States to international greenhouse gas targets the same way, through executive fiat instead of Senate ratification, because he knew the votes weren’t there.
His administration also nationalized the student loan industry, cutting private lenders out of the market entirely. He reinterpreted Title IX to smuggle “gender identity” into federal law, a decision that eventually opened women’s sports and locker rooms to biological men. He repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” ordered his Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court, and later endorsed same-sex marriage after running in 2008 as a supporter of traditional marriage. Obama also helped transform the Democrat Party into an antisemitic party.
And don’t even get me started on what Obama did to race relations in this country.
That last part tells you everything about how Obama operated. He knew exactly where the country stood in 2008, so he told voters what they needed to hear. Nobody who was paying attention actually believed him. He was too shrewd a politician to show his full hand before he had the power to play it.
None of this is moderate. None of it is centrist. It’s the most aggressive leftward lurch this country has taken in modern presidential history, and Obama pulled it off while much of the press corps treated him as a reasonable, above-the-fray statesman.
So when the editor of National Review holds up a clip of Obama being nice to a basketball player as proof of ideological balance, ask yourself why a supposedly conservative magazine is doing PR for one of the most radical presidents this country has ever had. Obama didn’t win over the far left by accident. He earned every ounce of that adoration by delivering exactly what they wanted, one executive order at a time.
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