IT’S TIME FOR HIM TO GO
Scott Johnson, Powerline
David Samuels and David Garrow explored “The Obama factor” in the classic 2023 Tablet column/discussion. Commenting on Obama’s post-presidential residence in Washington, D.C., Samuels observed:
[I]it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms. The fact that these were not normal times could be adduced by even a passing glance at the front pages of the country’s daily newspapers, which were filled with claims that the 2016 election had been “stolen” by Russia and that Trump was a Russian agent.
Samuels returns to the subject of Obama’s refusal to depart the scene in last week’s post-election UnHerd column “How Trump crushed Obama’s legacy.” Both of these excellent columns deserve the closest attention.
Washington Examiner editor Hugo Gordon adds this: “It’s eight years since he ended his second presidential term. Yet he lingers like a bad smell. Why is he still here? Because despite his elegance of manner he doesn’t have the grace to get out of the way. He won’t allow others to rise to meet the challenges of today, so Democrats stay as radical as a Chicago South Side community organizer.”
All true, but there is more to that bad odor. Neither Samuels nor Gurdon has had the opportunity to take in the transcript of Remarks by the President in Roundtable with Progressive Journalists (January 17, 2017). “The President” was of course Obama. Although released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2022, it was only posted publicly in recent days. Park MacDougald brought it to my attention last week with this comment:
On four occasions in the conversation, he seeded the Trump-Russia collusion narrative among the journalists, despite knowing that it was a false piece of Clinton campaign propaganda. As usual, Obama spoke in innuendos, rather than directly, but the point of his briefing was clear. He blamed Trump’s victory on the Clinton campaign and the media for not reporting enough on “the Russia leaks.” He stated that “the Russia thing” was a “problem” with the incoming administration and said it’s “hard to know what conversations the President-elect may be having offline with business leaders in other countries who are also connected to leaders of other countries.” That’s an apparent reference to the discredited Alfa Bank conspiracy theory, shopped first to the CIA and then the press by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, which held that Trump was secretly communicating with Putin through the servers of a bank. Obama suggested that Trump was receiving indirect payouts from Vladimir Putin through Russian nationals purchasing apartments in his buildings….All this, again, about a piece of Clinton campaign opposition that Obama himself knew was false.
As we saw in the closing days of the Harris campaign, President Obama remains a poisonous blight on our national discourse. As was once said of Al Gore, now it can be said of Obama. It’s time for him to go.
