No successful two-term president has ever sought to control his party after leaving office as forcefully and deviously as Barack Obama has. Bill Clinton stayed high profile, but he handed the baton to Hillary Clinton and was content to bask in celebrity and make himself wealthy rather than keep his grip on the levers of power. Ronald Reagan remained a star into the 1990s but only from a proper and dignified retirement.
But Obama, with dwindling subtlety, has sought to command and control the Democrats ever since quitting the White House in 2017. There has been much reporting about his holdover staff steering President Joe Biden. The same people visit Obama’s grand home in the Kalorama district of Washington, D.C., presumably to receive their marching orders.
A Washington Examiner magazine issue this February depicted a Biden ventriloquist dummy sitting on Obama’s knee under the cover headline “Obama’s Three-peat” and inside headlines “The puppet in the White House” and “Biden seeks a second term while completing Obama’s third.”
Now that second term is under mortal threat — it should be after Biden’s debate belly flop — the person doing most to inflict maximum damage on him is none other than his former boss, Obama.
Obama could stop the Democrats’ civil war with just a phone call. But he doesn’t. He vetted Hollywood megastar George Clooney’s op-ed calling on Biden to step down, and although he reportedly stayed neutral to the extent of not endorsing or encouraging it, he didn’t oppose it. That is the way the narcissistic, power-hungry, radical former community organizer operates, with ruthlessness and authority but without leaving his fingerprints on the body of his victim.
At least, that was how he operated until Biden’s yearslong mental meltdown became a party crisis after 51 million TV viewers watched the debate and saw that Biden cannot lead the country any longer and has not genuinely led it for a considerable time already. His implosion exposed Democrats’ cynical modus operandi of having an empty suit notionally in charge but manipulated by sinister unelected operators. It’s not a good election look.
Clooney noted that Biden was as bad at a recent $30 million Hollywood fundraiser as he was in the debate. This is revealing, for the actor and Biden were onstage together with, of course, Obama. Obama must have seen Biden’s condition as clearly as Clooney did, and he then chose to lean over ostentatiously and tug the frozen stock-still Biden by the arm and lead him gently, like a nursing home patient, off the stage.
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Those of us who analyzed this accurately were blasted by White House drones, but perhaps that was the moment Obama knew his sock puppet had to go. He engineered a deliberate public humiliation to start the scramble to replace Biden and was quickly justified by the president’s calamitous debate.
Now Obama has thrown the Democratic Party into what he presumably believes is a state of creative destruction. He knows that voters know Biden is incapable. So he needs a new figurehead who has a better chance of winning and who can give a more convincing impression of presiding over Obama’s fourth term.
