By Lee Smith
The publication of Barack Obama’s new memoir Tuesday was timed to carry the news cycle regardless of the election’s outcome. The opinions expressed in “A Promised Land”—on America, race, Donald Trump, and so on—are more vivid than anything the Democratic candidate has said in his last year of campaigning. And so even after Joe Biden and the press corps have declared him President-elect, he continues to walk in the shadow of his former boss.
That is intentional. Obama wants it understood that Biden is an avatar for a third Obama term. Now he can complete the work of “fundamentally transforming America,” as he put it days before the 2008 election. Hillary Clinton was expected to at least protect what she inherited from Obama. But the victory of Trump, who had campaigned on undoing Obama’s domestic and foreign policy initiatives, left the outgoing president with only two options—watch his successor dismantle his legacy or stop him.
The coup is evidence of his choice. The senior U.S. officials, Democratic party operatives, and media personalities who targeted the Trump circle for four years weren’t simply defending the privileges of the “Deep State.” These are bureaucrats, deputies, and courtiers who would not dare an attempt that bold unless it was ok’d from above. The purpose of the coup was to block Trump from destroying Obama’s legacy until he could find an opening for him to return.
In a sense, Obama never left. He was the first president in a century to stay in Washington after the end of his term. Woodrow Wilson had suffered a stroke and could not easily leave the capital. Obama explained that he and the first lady wanted their youngest daughter to graduate from her private high school before they moved on. Their child entered the University of Michigan last fall but with the 2020 election cycle underway, the de facto leader of the Democratic party wasn’t going anywhere.
In political circles, it was no secret that Obama had thrown his support behind Kamala Harris. She is ambitious and appealing and, without any strong ideas or opinions of her own, poses no threat to him. She was Obama’s ideal heir, but primary voters found her fake and unlikeable, and she was out of the race in early December. He’d find a way to restore her, but in the meantime needed a horse to ride through the primaries.
His onetime vice president rambled incoherently, dropped lines, and finished fourth in the Iowa race. Nonetheless, in the first week of March Obama’s establishment pushed out Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren to consolidate support behind Biden. In the age of coronavirus, a politician who was obviously disoriented reflected the state of the country. A voluntary shut-in was the perfect role model for Americans forced to stay home. And Obama made sure they did.
In April, he told Democratic mayors on a conference call not to re-open their cities until coronavirus testing and monitoring were available nationwide. Shutting down the economic activity of major U.S. cities would put limits on any economic rebound and thereby hamper Trump’s re-election chances. COVID-19 also became the platform for the massive vote by mail campaign, which Obama promoted the same month in a succession of tweets that also alerted Democratic voters that his was the hand driving the Biden campaign.
When details of the coup started to seep through the media blockade, Obama played defense. In May, he leaked part of a phone call with Democratic officials in which he expressed dismay that the Justice Department had dropped charges against Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn. He said that Flynn should be charged with perjury, a recommendation soon picked up by the judge in the Flynn case, who appointed a former prosecutor to make an argument for charging the retired three-star general with perjury.
Obama is the most corrupt person to have ever been involved in US politics. Sure, Hillary padded her bank accounts and Biden had his son peddle is feeble influence, but Obama threated the very core of our government.
Obama was never an actual President, just a “shell” for others. Biden is the same.