Samizdata

I suspect this observation from writer Katya Sedgwick that Mr Obama and his circle are increasingly driving the US administration, is going to gain ground and become noisier in the months leading to November 2024:

It’s clear that Joe Biden doesn’t have the mental agility to lead the country, much less control the nuclear briefcase. The subject of his dementia comes up fairly often, especially on the Right. Yet the question of who is actually leading the country is almost never raised, even though there is an obvious candidate. There is zero willingness to investigate the matter.

The gossip about Joe’s presidency being Obama’s third term has been around for some time. In a fantastic conversation printed in Tablet, David Samuels and Obama biographer David Garrow discussed that possibility. Samuels noted that although there is a lot of talk in the capital about the 44th president running the executive branch out of his D.C. mansion, journalists are reluctant to investigate.

The “reluctance” of journalists to investigate issues unflattering to the Obama/Biden administrations – with honorable exceptions – is almost a default assumption of mine these days. (The Hunter Biden laptop episode, etc.)

Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently made a statement that Barack Obama is running the Biden Administration. But this stands in contrast with the rest of the establishment’s silence. And if an occasional quip about the nature of the regime pops up in the media, maybe in the form of a meme, there is no discourse, no attempt to make sense of what is going on in the Oval Office. Even the Right is more comfortable talking about large, powerful groups like the globalists or the swamp ruling through bureaucratic institutions than to consider the meaning of a senile president embodying the executive authority of the U.S. government. This summer, a vague song about power called “Rich Men North of Richmond” became an instant social media sensation. I can’t help thinking that it’s not the single wealthy individuals that we want to hear about, but one specific man, our clandestine leader.

And because we are a country obsessed with race, our first black president can’t be revealed to be subverting our constitutional order. Interracial relations took a dive during Obama’s second term and continue to worsen. The news that the former president is pulling the strings for the incapacitated Biden could bring them to the boiling point.

The idea is too dark for most Americans to consider. Even conservatives who continuously warned that Obama, born in Hawaii to a foreign father and raised abroad, is not aligned with our mentality are not ready for the hard crash of the hope and change circa 2008. It’s one thing to warn about voting for a questionable candidate, and another to see that same candidate upend the constitutional order.

Obama was in many ways a very bad president. On foreign policy, his stance towards Iran and subsequent views on it, for example, looks like being a disaster, as we are now finding out. Or consider the domestic side – if you cast your mind back all the way to his encounter with Joe the Plumber (RIP), and his “you didn’t build that” speech, it is a reminder of how hostile this man is to the sort of small business free enterprise that is the backbone of the US. It was not all bad – Obama appeared to pursue a policy of benign neglect around private spacefaring, giving an opening for Elon Musk and others to perform wonders. Maybe Obama just wasn’t interested enough. In any event, he did not try to screw with it, and neither did he – at least that much – try to shut down fracking. (Again, I suspect that he just isn’t that into things like engineering.)

OK, I will try and be fair and make the point that I am sure Obama isn’t the first ex-POTUS to try and pull the strings of a successor – as is claimed – but the sheer frailty and mental decline of Mr Biden (I don’t think this is any longer a controversial statement) makes the point all the more serious if it is true. (In the UK there are suppositions that Tony Blair is exerting a lot of influence over the Labour Party again, which if true is also troubling.)

As regulars might know, I am not a Trump fan at all, and I hope for a better choice of GOP candidate to run against Biden, but given the way the Republican Party has developed an almost cult-like devotion to him, almost because of his problems and very serious flaws (his stance on lockdowns and latitude to Fauci hasn’t impressed some conservatives), we are where we are. As a Brit, it bothers me that the choice at the next US elections is so poor. We need someone who could be a two-term POTUS to undo so much of the damage of recent years and be free of the lawfare that is bound to be a relentless feature of a second Trump term.

Back on the back-seat driving allegation vs Mr Obama, an issue is that it is easy to make that accusation on sort of circumstantial grounds, hard to back it up without smoking gun sort of evidence. And to be honest, I imagine that all presidents do at times take advice from former holders of the office. They may even keep and retain cabinet members from previous administrations (such as Robert Gates at Defense, or how Volcker and Greenspan stayed on at the Fed under different regimes). The question here is more whether, because of Biden’s physical condition and the fact that his vice president is clearly unfit for the job, the back-seat control is more glaring, and more dangerous to notions of democratic accountability.

This matters a lot, particularly given the Irsrael horror. It may be that Biden is taking the decisions on what the US ought to do, but given the involvement of Iran in bankrolling Hamas and other terrorist groups that want to destroy Israel, it would be nice to know that a former POTUS whose judgement on Iran was so poor is spending more time writing another set of self-glorifying memoirs rather than influencing policy.