Despite mail-in voting and ballot harvesting and a host of other perfectly legal ways to tilt the playing field, could Old Joe Biden actually lose in November? If a Tuesday New York Times story is to be believed, the answer is a resounding yes, and among the most worried is the senescent corruptocrat’s old friend and mentor, Barack Obama.
“Old friend and mentor,” as is well known, is largely an image manufactured for public consumption. Obama has actually taken the measure of his aged former wingman, and has famously warned: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” If the Times story is accurate, and not just another signal that the Democrat establishment is ready to send Biden to a much-needed retirement, Obama is deeply worried that Old Joe is going to demonstrate his remarkable ability to mess things up in the coming rematch with Trump, and is ready to step in and lend his expertise to the cause of inflicting Biden on America for four more years.
Biden’s ability to ruin everything has been on abundant display over the last three-plus years, and so, the Times says, Obama has been having frequent phone conversations with White House chief of staff Jeffrey D. Zients, “to strategize and relay advice.” These calls, the Times insists, demonstrate “Mr. Obama’s support for Mr. Biden,” but the Paper of Record concedes that they also indicate Obama’s “grave concern that Mr. Biden could lose to former President Donald J. Trump.” This unnamed aide says that this is nothing new: Obama has “always” feared that Old Joe might pull his biggest bungling act in the upcoming election. The aide added Obama is ready to do what he can to help the bungler “eke it out” in several swing states.
And so, “in a sign of things to come, they are to appear together, with former President Bill Clinton, at a major fund-raiser for the Biden campaign at Radio City Music Hall in New York on Thursday.” That will likely draw in some big money from deep-pocketed leftists, but will it bring Old Joe any votes? Everyone can see what a hash Biden has made of the presidency, and the nation, since January 20, 2021. Obama may still have considerable star power among the Democrat party’s far-left base, but aside from Muslims enraged over Biden’s public (albeit hollow) support for Israel, that base was going to vote for Old Joe anyway.
Still, Obama’s intervention is an indication of how worried he is that Bad Orange Man could return to the White House. The Times reviews the checkered history of the Biden/Obama relationship, going back to 2015, when Biden (who is, after all, a famously shameless liar) claims that the lame-duck Obama told him that if he “could appoint anyone to be president for the next eight years,” he would have picked Joe. If this was a true story, and it probably wasn’t, it indicated yet another serious lapse in judgment on Obama’s part, and Obama himself may have realized it, since he reportedly annoyed Biden’s team with his strong support for Hillary in 2016.
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The Times claims that “several of them work in the White House today, and they believe that Mr. Obama and his advisers sidelined Mr. Biden, whom they think could have changed the course of history and beaten Mr. Trump in 2016.” Yeah, the course of history would have been changed, all right: we would be in an even greater fix than we are now. In any case, Old Joe and Barack patched things up when the Scranton Kleptocrat entered the race against the hated Trump in 2019, and the rest is history, albeit it is a sad, shameful, sorrowful history of a nation in freefall.
That freefall, however, is one that Barack Obama largely set in motion. Biden has just built on the damage Obama did. It was Obama’s White House that first betrayed Israel at the United Nations when it abstained on a bill denouncing Israeli settlements in Judea (which means “land of the Jews”) and Samaria, known today as the White House. It was Obama who first showered billions on the Iranian mullahs who finance Hamas, and Biden’s regime has just done it again. So it’s no surprise that Obama would want to make sure that Biden continues to pretend to be president until he is a sprightly 86 years old: Biden’s legacy is Obama’s legacy. The two are forever intertwined in history. And, unfortunately, in American public life.