Obama’s influence on the Democratic Party dwindles

Jim Geraghty of National Review Online ponders the power of America’s 44th president.

The one time since leaving office that Barack Obama has felt strongly about the direction of the Democratic Party was in the summer of last year, where he put his efforts into derailing the nomination of Harris. And as far as we can tell, Obama’s efforts went nowhere. No one even bothered to formally challenge Harris for the nomination.

For more than eight years now, the Democrats who adored Obama from 2008 to 2016 have grappled with a particularly thorny question: If he was such a great president, why did the country elect Donald Trump in 2016? Sure, Hillary Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate, but the electorate doesn’t roll the dice on a complete outsider and human wrecking ball like Trump unless they’ve lost all hope from traditional avenues of reform. By the autumn of 2016, two-thirds of Americans said the country was on the wrong track, and just 28 percent told Gallup they were “satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time.”

And more than a few Democrats have concluded that Obama wasn’t such a great president. They conclude he compromised too much, that he was “the last gasp of neoliberalism,” that his failures birthed Trumpism, and in the final catastrophic mistake, he picked Joe Biden off the scrap heap in 2008 and elevated him to the position of his successor within the party. (Had Obama picked Indiana Senator Evan Bayh instead, our entire modern political history would have turned our differently.)

We aren’t just in the post-Obama era; we’re the in the post-post-Obama era. Barack and Michelle are now mostly celebrities, subject to divorce speculation as intense as for any Hollywood couple. No one in the Democratic Party seriously thinks a retired president can lead them out of the wilderness. …

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