Even though former president Barack Obama is believed to keep his current office and primary residence both less than two miles, as the crow flies, from the White House, he has been decidedly low-profile in the early days of the current Biden administration.
But in a freewheeling New York Times interview published Tuesday, Obama appeared to admit that with his people installed in key White House positions, Biden’s presidency was his de-facto third term.
“I think that what we’re seeing now is Joe Biden and the administration are essentially finishing the job,” Obama told former Vox editor Ezra Klein, after complaining that former GOP president Donald Trump deprived him of the opportunity to take full credit for the economic boom that occurred in the years following his departure.
With Democrats having successfully managed to wrest power from Trump and install a proper successor, Obama doubled down on his gambit that he would finally get the credit he was due as the chief architect of President Joe Biden’s extreme, globalist agenda.
“I think it’ll be an interesting test—90% of the folks who are there were there in my administration,” Obama said during the podcast.
“They are continuing and building on the policies we talked about, whether it’s the Affordable Care Act, or our climate change agenda, and the Paris Peace Accords, and figuring out how do we improve the ladders to mobility through things like community colleges,” he said. “And if—as I think they will be—they’re successful over the next four years, I think that will have an impact.”
Obama visited the leftist podcast to promote a his third memoir, A Promised Land, which was published only two weeks after the widely disputed Nov. 3 election last year.
But the timing of his reappearance may raise some eyebrows as the honeymoon of Biden’s first four months gives way to growing malaise and criticism.
Biden’s middling 54% presidential approval rating has been consistently underwhelming—despite an inherent polling advantage on the Left that systematically over-samples Democrats and offers up to a double-digit boost for preferred candidates.
Even the administration itself seems inclined to set a lower-than-usual bar of achievement for the country’s biggest popular-vote winner in recorded US history, with Biden’s apparent 82 million backers eclipsing Obama’s own historic 2008 electoral victory by nearly 12 million votes.
Many have assumed that Obama is functioning one or two levels above the Oval Office as a shadowy puppet-master calling the shots for his vacuous former vice president.
Yet, others wondered if he wasn’t shrewdly trying to keep his distance, relishing the fact that Biden’s catastrophic lurch left would validate an early Obama warning: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.”
By comparison, Biden’s policies have made even the radical, highly divisive Obama seem reasonable.
Obama’s administration may have brazenly ignored the Constitution dozens—if not hundreds—of times, forcing even far-left media to admit he left America’s sacred founding documents weaker than he found them.
But at least Obama kept up the appearance of border security and budget restraint, as well as other common-sense presidential obligations toward transparency that have been jettisoned by Biden.
Obama said relatively little in the podcast interview about the Biden administration’s shaky start—including renewed international tensions; an unprecedented immigration crisis; gas shortages; terrorist cyber-attacks; and fears of crippling hyperinflation due to Biden’s proposed $6 trillion budget, replete with welfare entitlements, wasteful boondoggles and unabashed pork spending in the guise of “infrastructure” and “pandemic recovery” funding.
But the nation’s best-known “community organizer” had plenty to say about himself, and his struggles to succeed in a country where systemic racism was constantly hovering like a storm-cloud over his unblemished legacy.
Obama said his presidency was another milestone on the road for the far-left social-justice movement.
“It’s planted a flag from which then the next generation builds—and by the way, the next generation can then look back and say, yeah, we do take that for granted,” Obama said.
Yet, “We can do a lot better than that and go even further,” he added.
Still, he warned that it was far from being an “inevitable progression” since GOP philistines could always rain on the progressive parade with their own political counter-movements.
“Sometimes, the backlash can last a very long time, and you can take three steps back after two steps forward,” Obama lamented.
“But it does seem to be in the nature of things that any significant movement of social progress, particularly those aspects of social progress that relate to identity, race, gender, all the stuff that is not just dollars and cents and transactional,” he continued. “That, invariably, will release some energy on the other side by folks who feel threatened by change.”
