The ultimate goal of the efforts was to impede and hobble the duly elected president; to subvert, sabotage, and undermine his agenda; and to ultimately expel him from office — by any means necessary — in the bowels of government, in the media and entertainment, in academia and education, in Big Tech, Big Finance, and Big Business.
On the policy front, the White House has rapidly undone almost all of Trump's reversals of Obama policies, while ratcheting up the Obama agenda with even more radical steps than Obama took in his first eight years of "fundamentally transforming" the country. The border is open again. The Keystone Pipeline is canceled. Coal-mining and energy independence are out. Subsidies to "green energy" and Big Tech are back. So are Big Pork and the great party slush fund.
Barack Obama Has Now Been President Longer than FDR
This week, Barack Obama passed Franklin Roosevelt for the longest presidential tenure in American history.
What's that, you say? — president for longer than FDR? But FDR was elected president four times; Obama was elected president two times.
Yes, all of that is true. That's why this record has an asterisk next to it.
For anyone with eyes to see, the current presidency is being run by Barack Obama.
Even before this presidency began, its roots were laid in Obama's home in Washington. Over the past couple of years, Obama House was the royal court for receiving, selecting, and anointing the party's standard-bearer for 2020. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris were Obama's favored candidates, and Obama House functioned as the campaign war room. But Harris gained no traction, and she dropped out of the race on December 3, 2019, exactly two months before the Iowa caucuses.
That left Warren — to face off against Bernie Sanders in the left-wing bracket of the sweepstakes. The party had already determined, four years earlier, that Sanders was unsuitable as its standard-bearer, because he wielded an abrasive, in-your-face style of Marxism. Obama himself expressed such sentiments more than once. So the party scuppered his campaign in 2016. But in 2020, Sanders was bettering Warren in the early primaries.
So, the Obama camp had to go to plan B — find somebody who was "presentable" to the public.
In the first two contests of the nominating process, Joe Biden fared badly — maybe even worse than Harris would have done had she stayed in. He finished a distant fourth in Iowa and a much weaker fifth in New Hampshire. He was bumbling along on stage and on the hustings and going nowhere fast. Obama didn't even like Biden — but Biden would have to do. There weren't really many other options on hand.
So all the other candidates immediately dropped out, the Black vote in South Carolina and across the South was delivered to Biden, and he was anointed the nominee.
We know the rest of the story: Biden was banished to the basement, the media carried the water for him and continued demonizing Trump, Big Swamp exploited and manipulated a virus, and big-city machines stopped counting the votes late on Election Night to figure out how many "votes" they needed to get their man over the finish line.
This leads us to the inauguration of Joe Biden as president. On his first day in the White House, Biden expelled the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, as Obama had done on his first day in office. (This was because Churchill was an imperialist and led the suppression of the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, during which, Obama said, his grandfather was tortured. Trump brought the Churchill bust back on his first day in office.)
Then there are Biden's appointments. They say personnel is policy. Well, the old Obama gang is back, and at the center of the action is Susan Rice. A foreign policy specialist (ambassador to the United Nations and then national security adviser under Obama), Rice was one of Biden's first appointments, as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. That's her official title, but her actual job is Obama's "messenger boy" in the White House and to cover any remaining tracks to past criminal activities.
Heading the White House press room is Jen Psaki. She was Obama's communications director. Anthony Blinken moves up a notch, from being Obama's deputy secretary of state to the top job at Foggy Bottom. Obama's chairman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, is now secretary of the Treasury.
Anita Dunn, who had to resign from her top post in Obama's Department of Education because she'd praised Chairman Mao, is back. Merrick Garland, whom Obama wasn't able to get into the Supreme Court in 2016, gets the consolation prize of attorney general — a "take that" from Obama. Those are the most glaring of a slew of Obama retreads. It wouldn't be surprising if Van Jones and Samantha Power get appointments soon, and David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Rahm Emanuel, and other members of the Chicago Mafia are major behind-the-scenes players.
Then there are the rewards to the people who tried to sabotage the Trump campaign in 2016 and who took part in the "resistance" to his presidency. Peter Strzok, his wife, and anybody else who made "sacrifices" in the effort are being compensated for their pain and suffering.
On the policy front, the White House has rapidly undone almost all of Trump's reversals of Obama policies, while ratcheting up the Obama agenda with even more radical steps than Obama took in his first eight years of "fundamentally transforming" the country. The border is open again. The Keystone Pipeline is canceled. Coal-mining and energy independence are out. Subsidies to "green energy" and Big Tech are back. So are Big Pork and the great party slush fund.
China is no longer an enemy. Climate change is an existential threat again, and the Paris Accords take center stage. The Iran nuclear deal is back on — actually, John Kerry never stopped negotiating with Iran. And to curry favor with Iran, the administration is lifting sanctions against the country and has halted the sale of weapons to its Arab enemies that recently made peace with Israel. As for Israel, the White House is stiffing the country, big time — especially as it has the wrong leaders.
Okay — so that makes this the beginning of a third term for Obama, but FDR was elected president four times.
To complete the set of four aces, we have to rewind the tape to 2016. Obama was finishing his second term and handing off leadership of the Marxist revolution to Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, three candidates for president — Trump, Cruz, and Carson — were vehemently opposed to Obama, his policies, and the direction of the country. So Obama spied on their campaigns. Trump still won.
But not only did Trump trump the swamp; he then actually tried to put the breaks on the Marxist revolution. He took steps to reverse the regulatory state, and he allowed the economy to boom. Worst of all, Trump bruised the swamp's ego. He exposed it as arrogant, corrupt, and incompetent, and as the entrenched D.C. front of the Marxist revolution.
After he arrived in Washington, Trump quickly learned that Obama was running the "resistance" to his presidency — the government's opposition from within (in the summer of '16, Trump had informed the world that his campaign was being spied on).
During Trump's four years in Washington, Obama ran the shadow government out of his D.C. home, probably exerting more influence over the wheels of government than the man in the Oval Office did. Obama lined up whistleblowers, leaks to the press, and resistance to the president from within the government, including in the White House and the president's Cabinet. He advised "the gang of four" and other radicals on policy and presentation.
The ultimate goal of the efforts was to impede and hobble the duly elected president; to subvert, sabotage, and undermine his agenda; and to ultimately expel him from office — by any means necessary — in the bowels of government, in the media and entertainment, in academia and education, in Big Tech, Big Finance, and Big Business.
So we ought to face reality. As of this week, Obama has been running the show in Washington for 4,424 days — and counting — and he's not shy about letting us know it.
Ayad Rahim, a former journalist, is a bookseller and tutor in the Midwest.
Image: Gage
Book: Obama ‘Enamored’ with Beto O’Rourke, Skeptical of Joe Biden in 2020 Democratic Primary
Feared 'Biden would dishonor himself with a bad campaign'
A new book on the 2020 election provides more evidence suggesting former president Barack Obama has a remarkably low opinion of his former sidekick, Joe Biden.
"Obama's fears about Biden and his team ran deep—deeper than defeat," journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write in Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency. "Obama worried that his former vice president would embarrass himself on the campaign trail and that the people around him would not be able to prevent a belly-flop."
Obama, who had vowed to remain neutral during the Democratic primary in 2020, had repeatedly urged Biden not to run for president. "It had stung Biden badly in 2015 when Obama made clear his preference for Hillary Clinton," the authors write. "Adding insult to injury, Obama's advisers told Biden aides back then that they didn't think he could beat Clinton. They pressured him to get out of the way."
Obama's lack of support in 2016 was especially insulting to Biden because the former VP thought Hillary was a "terrible candidate" who would be easy to beat.
In 2019, Obama tried once again to talk Biden out of running. "You don't have to do this, Joe, you really don't," the former president told Biden, according to the New York Times. Allen and Parnes explain that Obama's "reluctance to bless Biden's candidacy" was born out of a "fear that Biden would dishonor himself with a bad campaign."
Obama ended up being wrong about Biden's prospects and seems to have embarrassingly misjudged the Democratic primary in general. "Obama, like much of his brain trust, seemed to be enamored with a former Texas congressman, Beto O'Rourke," the authors write.
O'Rourke, whose most notable accomplishment before running for president was losing an election to Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), launched his campaign with a Vanity Fair cover story in March 2019. Many of the Democratic Party's foremost political pundits insisted that Beto was a formidable candidate who reminded them of Obama and John F. Kennedy.
Beto's splashy entry into the Democratic primary was fueled by the support of wealthy Obama donors, as well as former Obama aides, including the "Pod Save America" bros. The fact that Obama himself was "enamored" with the failed candidate might have had something to do with it.
Alas, even Obama's infatuation could not save the former congressman from another failed campaign. Beto dropped out of the race in November 2019, just eight months after launching his campaign and months before the Iowa caucuses. (He would have struggled to finish in the top 10.)
The new revelations about Obama's views on Biden are supported by previous reporting. Biden has said the former president "was not encouraging" heading into the Democratic primary in 2020. During the campaign, Obama reportedly assessed that Biden "really doesn't have it" and warned Democrats not to "underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up."
Even after Biden won the Democratic nomination, Obama declined to donate any money to his general election campaign, despite being a multimillionaire. Just days after Biden's victory in November, the former president stole the spotlight by launching a book tour.
Beto is currently "thinking about" launching a failed campaign for governor of Texas.
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