You’d almost think he was illegally running for re-election at the wrong time. But no. Accompanied by oomph and steadfast charisma, ex-President Barack Obama has instead been out and about giving knock-’em-down speeches on behalf of fellow Democrats crying for help. They have been pretty much in control of Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, but their performances are about to be assessed in midterm elections by nationally distributed victims.
Although two terms of Obama’s own mistakes may have helped Donald Trump become president, Obama could well deliver Democratic victories in some close races, perhaps saving portions of his dubious legacy from Republicans taking over both the House and Senate. Helping candidates running for still other offices, he is heroically substituting for President Joe Biden who struggles to attract crowds unenthused by verbal fumbles. After all, Biden’s foremost campaign talent in his 2020 triumph was to stay mostly quiet in his Delaware basement.
Obama, a Harvard Law School grad, is hardly showering his audiences with sophisticated, deeply analytical, detailed discourse, but bombarding them with demagoguery, as in saying, “Democracy as we know it may not survive in Arizona” if Republicans are elected as U.S. senator, governor, secretary of state and attorney general. These candidates believe that Biden won election as president through fraud, and Obama thinks they will plot ways to win elections with fraud.
Let’s agree the Trump claim on this front is hooey while noting that Hillary Clinton likewise says to this day that she was cheated in her loss to Trump. Interestingly, her campaign helped arrange for phony information to be dropped in the hands of the FBI that helped initiate the Mueller investigation lasting two years and finally saying that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Not a few Democrats today still squawk about “racist” voter IDs that Black voters happen to favor and that generally speaking spur voting increases. A major assertion in the midterms is that Republicans are trying to destroy democracy when one of the biggest recent scandals along those lines was New York Democrats gerrymandering voting maps to the disgust of judges. Obama as president had all kinds of victories against democracy, as in breaking records by issuing 600 major regulations costing at least $100 million each. Why do we need elected representatives in Congress when we have unaccountable bureaucrats doing their job?
It’s worth pondering as well that Democrats helped Trump supporters get elected in Republican primaries. The self-confessed motive was that they would more likely lose to Democrats in the general election than those considered less a danger.
Obama had some major victories as president, such as Obamacare, but it often took progressive enthusiasts to clap. He mostly stumbled in foreign affairs, as in skipping the required treaty process for an Iran deal with little chance of hindering the development of nuclear weapons. His personal popularity seems pretty much to have held its ground but not his deeds. From the start of his two terms to the end, Democrats in the House dropped from 257 to 188 and in the U.S. Senate from 58 to 44. Democrats had controlled 27 state legislatures, then it was just 11. There had been 28 Democratic governors at the start, with 18 around on departure day. A question is whether Obama also helped Trump win.
It’s not unusual for a president’s party to lose strength during his White House tenure. People don’t just hear what’s said. They see what’s done. Right now, Obama and Biden would rather have voters examine MAGA Republicans instead of ultra-progressives boosting inflation with runaway spending, increasing crime by reducing police forces, pointing to the horror of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot without noting the horror of Black Lives Matter ruining a city and dodging the way Biden border policies are killing migrants and enabling drug smugglers to kill thousands with fentanyl. The list goes on, Obama or no Obama.
