The Obama-Brexit bounce

Has Barack Obama ever persuaded anybody of anything? (I mean anything other than voting for him for office.) I don’t think so.

Obama’s contribution to the Remain case — the threat the Great Britain will have to get “in the back of the queue” for a trade agreement with the United States — may even have proved a boon to the Brexit cause. So says Nigel Farage, the stalwart British opponent of the European Union and the man without whom the referendum would never have taken place. The Hill reports:

Nigel Farage on Friday said Obama’s calls for the United Kingdom to stay in the EU caused people to vote to leave.

“Threatening people too much insults their intelligence,” the United Kingdom Independence Party head said.
“A lot of people in Britain said, ‘How dare the American president come here and tell us what to do?’ ” Farage continued on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily,” citing Obama’s U.K. trip in April.

“It backfired. We got an Obama-Brexit bounce, because people do not want foreign leaders telling them how to think and vote.”

Quoting Sharyl Attkisson, Richard Fernandez notes that Prime Minister Cameron’s Remain campaign adviser was Jim Messina, “who was Obama’s campaign adviser & heads biggest pro-Hillary super PAC.”

I offer malice and discount stupidity as the explanation, but Fernandez seeks to reopen the question: “All those who are still debating the question of whether Obama’s disasters are due to malice or stupidity can chew on this gold-plated, hold-my-beer example of jen-yoo-wine idiocy as a new data point.”

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