Former President Barack Obama appears to be taking a more personal interest in the Democratic Party’s future than he has in recent years.
Jonathan Martin, politics bureau chief for Politico, reported Thursday that Obama recently hosted several meetings with younger House Democrats. Described as “informal, but lengthy,” the meetings “took place over cheese and crackers in Obama’s Washington office.”
The question is why.
Obama’s meetings were largely secret — “private” in Martin’s word, and not publicly reported until now — but they weren’t not entirely clandestine. According to Martin, “Obama’s advisers took care to alert the Biden West Wing about the conversations.”
Still, a former Democrat president reaching out to current Democrat lawmakers under a sitting Democrat president does raise eyebrows.
The column also features the usual claptrap one would expect from an inside-baseball kind of story about Washington elites. Obama for instance, “is no doubt aware” that his meetings could fuel “the fever swamp right’s racially unsubtle view that Obama is, alternately, secretly running the Biden White House or plotting his former vice president’s ouster.”
Having made the obligatory racial remark (which is basically meaningless in this context and not even mentioned elsewhere in the column), Martin went on to explain that Democrats are exploring ways to shed their elitist image.
One hesitates to offer advice to members of a party that lacks even one redeemable quality. Better that it should perish and fade into history.
However, if Democrats wish to shed their elitist image, they might start by ceasing to denigrate their working-class MAGA opponents as white supremacists. The Martin column’s “racially unsubtle” line merely parrots the Democrats’ slanderous language.
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It is not racist to wonder about a former president’s role in a current administration and, in Obama’s case, about his lingering influence in a corrupt federal bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, the obvious subtext to Obama’s meetings with House Democrats is Biden’s sagging poll numbers.
The RealClearPolitics average for Biden’s job-approval rating as of Thursday stood at 42.3 percent. This trails former Presidents Donald Trump (44.6 percent), Obama (47.8 percent), and George W. Bush (63.2 percent) at the same points in their respective presidencies.
Whatever one thinks or suspects about Obama’s motives, surely the former president is savvy enough to know that, while there is a solid voting base for the Democratic Party, there is no such thing as a “Biden voter.”
The 42.3 percent of Americans who supposedly approve of Biden’s job performance are the same sort of voters who sent Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman to the Senate. They will vote blue no matter who.
From a conservative perspective, the heartening thing about Obama’s meetings with House Democrats is that those meetings appear to signal Obama’s awareness of Biden’s floundering presidency.
On one hand, this should not surprise us. Biden’s brazen corruption, political persecution of opponents and staggering incompetence make us wonder who those 42.3% of people are and what exactly they approve of.
On the other hand, Democrats control the establishment media, the education system, the entertainment industry, and nearly all of the largest sources of information or opinion.
Despite these advantages, nearly 60 percent of the country appears to recognize the Biden administration for the corrupt and tyrannical failure it is.
Despite these advantages, House Democrats need tutoring and a pep talk from the party’s former leader.
That is the real story.
