Defenders of Zohran Mamdani argue that their candidate faces the same criticisms that were directed at Obama in 2008. Mamdani is foreign born, Muslim, socialist, soft on terrorism, and so on. Some comparisons are valid, but the most important one has gone unnoticed.

Illinois senator Barack Obama became a national figure on July 27, 2004, when he told the Democratic National Convention:

Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.

In 2006, the Illinois Democrat gained election to the U.S. Senate and in 2008 ran for president. The Hillary Clinton campaign circulated a rumor that Obama had been born in Kenya and was, therefore, ineligible to run for president. Those who jumped on the story got branded as “birthers,” but they were all wrong. The issue wasn’t the place of his birth, which was indeed Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961. The issue was his father’s identity, which comes up in Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Maternal grandfather “Gramps” might say the Kenyan looks like Nat King Cole, but the book has no photo of the African. Beyond the cover, Dreams from My Father has no photos, no index, and no footnotes. The Kenyan quickly becomes a nameless “Old Man,” as the author explains, “a prop in someone else’s narrative.” More attention is given to the black poet “Frank,” who counsels young Barry, as everybody calls him, before he goes off to Occidental College. In Los Angeles, he encounters members of the Nation of Islam, an organization of which he is uncritical, and Barry’s favorite book is The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“Frank” disappeared from the audio version of Dreams and made no appearance in The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s second book, which wrapped him up in the American flag. He won the presidency in 2008, and as he sought a second term in 2012, Paul Kengor published The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. As it turned out, the Stalinist “Frank” earned a place on the FBI’s security index.

That same year, documentarian Joel Gilbert produced Dreams from My Real Father, making a strong case for Davis as Obama’s real father. Republican candidate Mitt Romney ignored the evidence, and Obama was reelected. His Affordable Care Act was part of his fundamental transformation of the United States into a place where you get only what the government wants you to have—standard practice under socialism. In his last year in office, details surfaced about the Kenyan “prop” who supposedly “bequeathed his name” to the Dreams author.

In all his writings from 1958 to 1964, housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, the Kenyan Barack Obama made no mention of an American wife and son. The president declined to read them, and shortly after leaving office, faced another disturbing revelation:

Dreams from My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.

That was Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow in his book Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. While researching that work, a reporter told Garrow that the “composite character” and David Axelrod cooked up the whole story. Back in 2007, The New York Times proclaimed Axelrod “Obama’s Narrator.” In his 2015 Believer, Axelrod portrays himself as a great storyteller, but his narrative fails to mention Davis.

In 2018, a photo surfaced of Obama posing with Nation of Islam boss Louis Farrakhan in 2005. Had the photo surfaced in 2008, many speculated, it might have harmed Obama’s bid for the White House. The photo did not turn up in Obama’s 2020 book A Promised Land, in which Dreams from My Father gets only a single mention, and Frank Marshall Davis again goes missing.

The composite character president enjoyed great success concealing his relation to Davis, his association with Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers, and his cozying up to Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. By contrast, Zohran Mamdani, born in Uganda to Indian parents, openly proclaims, “I am a Muslim. I am a Democratic Socialist,” but there’s more to him.

At a Democratic Socialists of America convention in 2023, Mamdani went on record saying that “we have to make clear when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” the Israeli Defense Forces. On the other hand, Mamdani would order New York police to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Muslim socialist refused to demand that Hamas, perpetrator of the 10/7 massacre, lay down their weapons.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Islamic jihadists crashed highjacked airliners into the World Trade Center, killing 3,000 people. Mamdani told us that his major concern after that attack was that his auntie was afraid to ride the subway while wearing her hijab. The candidate also posed with Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Even so, New Yorkers still made the Muslim socialist mayor of the nation’s biggest city.

Some blame weak opposition candidate Andrew Cuomo, changing demographics, or younger voters falling for the false promises of socialism. By all indications, nobody asked Mamdani what he thought of Thomas Sowell, who grew up in Harlem. Like the former president, the New York Mayor seems unaware of Sowell’s existence.

Other election analysts cite H. L. Mencken on democracy, “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” That invites another contrast with the president formerly known as Barry Soetoro, stepson of Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian student his mother Ann Dunham married in 1965.

In “The Obama Factor,” from Aug. 2, 2023, Tablet editor David Samuels interviewed Rising Star author David Garrow. Obama’s lawyer Bob Bauer told Garrow, “whatever you do, don’t ask him about his father,” which Garrow thought was odd. As he learned, Obama was “not a normal politician or normal human being” and “for me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him.” The liberal Samuels was on the same page.

“I find Barack Obama deeply sympathetic as a person. I identify with him emotionally” he told Garrow. “Yet there was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.” The fictional character was still in D.C. during those Biden years and “there are obviously large parts of White House policymaking that belong to Barack Obama because they’re staffed by his people.”

Obama was okay with everything that happened under Joe Biden, who, in Conrad Black’s phrase, was a waxworks effigy of a president. The Biden Era was Obama’s promised land, a showcase of managed decline. New Yorkers have cause to wonder what might happen under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the proud Muslim who makes no secret of his zeal for socialism. Other cities may offer clues.

In 2019, John Cleese observed that London was “not really an English city anymore.” Mayor Sadiq Khan, a “proud Muslim,” shot back, “Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength.” Under Mamdani, New York could become more like an Islamic colony than a truly American city. Indeed, the colonial process has been underway for some time now. Consider also the city of Dearborn, once home to Henry Ford.

Muslim mayor Abdullah Hammoud renamed Warren Avenue after Arab American News publisher Osama Siblani, who has praised Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters. When Christian minister Ted Barham protested the change, Mayor Hammoud told him, “although you live here, I want you to know, as mayor, you are not welcome here, and the day you move out of the city will be the day I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of the city.” No apology from the mayor, who predictably branded Barham a racist and Islamophobe.

In a similar style, Mamdani attacks those who traffic in “Islamophobia,” an incantation to ward off criticism and block debate on themes such as jihad. The mayor has yet to tell any protester that he is no longer welcome in New York, their own city. Should that take place, the response could well exceed the mayor’s expectations. Like the Biden Era, managed by Obama, the Mamdani Era will be the disaster New Yorkers must live through now.