Obama Takes Over as Biden Falters

With Joe Biden’s presidency collapsing around him, Barack Obama is growing increasingly active in the day-to-day political goings-on of Washington, asserting his control over the Democrat Party and attempting to salvage what’s left of his own legacy.

According to a Washington Post report last week, Obama met with Biden earlier this summer and warned that Trump is a “more formidable candidate” than most Democrats realize. The meeting was a clear sign of concern from the 44th president ahead of next year’s election, particularly as Biden faces stubbornly low poll numbers and mounting pressure from the probes into his family’s business dealings.

Politico also reported in June that Obama has been hosting a series of “informal, but lengthy private meetings with groups of next-generation House Democrats,” including progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Maxwell Frost (D-FL), as well as more moderate figures like Mike Sherrill (D-NJ) and Haley Stevens (D-MI). The sessions reflect an unusual level of interest from a former president in maintaining influence over key congressional leaders.

They also come after Obama was highly active in stumping for Democrat candidates ahead of the 2022 midterms last year. Many of those candidates enthusiastically embraced campaigning with Obama, but explicitly asked Biden to steer clear of their races.

Obama has also grown more vocal in the media in recent months after largely keeping a low public profile throughout the first two years of Biden’s presidency. During a wide-ranging interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in June, Obama offered his thoughts and advice on everything from the war in Ukraine to the indictments facing former President Donald Trump.

Taken together, these developments create the unavoidable impression that Obama is anxious to reassert himself and attempt to offset Biden’s failures – a notion that is perhaps unsurprising given the long history of Obama’s barely-concealed condescension toward his former vice president.

Even before Biden announced his candidacy for the 2020 Democrat nomination, it was clear that Obama had little faith in Biden. One anonymous source famously quoted Obama as warning Democrat leaders to “not underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” There were also widespread reports that Obama considered replacing Biden with Hillary Clinton ahead of his 2012 re-election bid – rumors that were given more credence four years later when, according to Democrat insiders, Obama led a successful effort to dissuade Biden from running and backed Clinton instead.

More reports surfaced in 2019 that Obama again encouraged Biden not to run, with the 44th president telling another Democrat candidate that his two-time running mate “doesn’t have it.”

For someone who reportedly had such reservations, it must have been terrifying when Obama heard that Biden was declaring himself to be an “Obama-Biden Democrat.”

But after carefully avoiding any appearance of a Biden endorsement during the primary, Obama went full throttle in the final months of the general election campaign, holding massive fundraisers and filming multiple ads for Biden, even as Biden himself remained sequestered in the basement of his Delaware home.

Obama’s actions both before and after Biden became the Democrat nominee reflect the calculus of a leader determined to actively shape the direction of U.S. politics and policy. Obama’s decision to not endorse anyone in the primary can be seen as ploy to maintain his own influence over whoever ultimately ended up atop the Democrat ticket – and potentially the next president.

This became even more clear once Biden entered the White House. During one particularly telling interview just after the election, Obama told CBS News that he wished he “could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman [to be POTUS], and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony.”

While Obama was describing his attitude toward his own presidency, it is hard not to wonder if the remark also reflects his approach to Biden’s presidency. It is no coincidence that Biden’s Cabinet and White House senior leadership are filled with former Obama officials, and that Obama so obviously overshadows Biden during events at which both men are present.

But just why is Obama so keen on keeping his hands on the levers of power?

One obvious answer is that Obama believes no one can do it better than him. Even the New York Times admitted in a 2012 profile that Obama’s own allies often criticized him as cocky and arrogant.

But there could also be another powerful motivation that has everything to do with the view that Biden’s tenure is “Obama’s third term” and the swirling corruption allegations engulfing the Biden White House.

As AMAC Newsline reported earlier this year, the Biden family corruption probes are also likely to implicate Obama as well. A House Oversight Committee report released in April revealed that associates of Hunter Biden visited the White House more than 80 times during Obama’s tenure – meaning that Obama either knew something wasn’t right and did nothing, or the Biden family carried out their corrupt business deals for years, in Obama’s White House no less, while Obama was none the wiser.

There is also a direct link between Biden’s corruption and Obama’s own abuses of power. Through his blatant lies about Obamacare and the Benghazi debacle, Obama asserted a president’s “right to lie” that Biden has enthusiastically embraced. Moreover, it was Obama’s weaponization of the government against conservatives – most infamously the Lois Lerner IRS scandal – that paved the way for Biden to persecute his own political enemies, including Donald Trump.

As Biden’s legacy collapses, then, so too does Obama’s, and along with it the political fortunes of the Democrat Party. From this perspective, Obama may feel he has no choice but to try to step in to stop the complete destruction of his brand and image.

B.C. Brutus is the pen name of a writer with previous experience in the legislative and executive branches.