What Happened To Obama?

As a followup to my last post, where I asked why nobody seems to think Nancy Pelosi was running the country under Biden when she clearly was, I've got another puzzle: the conventional wisdom after Obama left office and bought a house in Washington was that he was just going to keep on running the country from there, rather than the White House. But the biggest news out of that new house, ever, had nothing to do with Obama:

The leafy Kalorama neighborhood normally wakes to the soft whir of motorcades, not the crack of knuckles. Yet in the predawn darkness of Wednesday, May 21, two members of the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division allegedly dispensed with protocol and settled a staffing dispute with fists outside the home of America’s forty‑fourth president. Sources inside the agency tell USA Herald the quarrel began when Officer A—whose name has not been officially released—waited nearly thirty minutes past her scheduled relief. When Officer B finally arrived, a verbal barrage escalated; Officer A keyed her encrypted handset and barked, “Send a supervisor immediately before I whoop this girl’s a**.” The handset was recording, as required under Secret Service policy, preserving a snippet of raw rage now ricocheting across X.

The same link then brought up a previous, similar episode:

In April 2024, agent Herczeg, then assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris’s protective detail, melted down in the Joint Base Andrews terminal. According to an internal incident report later leaked to Congress, Herczeg shoved her superior, hurled menstrual pads at colleagues, seized a fellow agent’s cell phone, and attempted to delete personal applications before three officers wrestled her to the floor and removed her firearm. She was handcuffed and transported by ambulance for psychiatric evaluation.

It's hard to avoid thinking the quality of Secret Service personnel quickly diminishes outside the presidential detail, and this suggests Obama as just one mere ex-president among several is no longer surrounded by the crème de la crème. And lately, his wife has been in the news more than he has:

Even after leaving the White House eight years ago, Michelle Obama continues to complain about how difficult it was to follow Barack as he rose to the top of the national hierarchy, as quoted in a report by The NY Post.

. . . Given that the Obamas have hardly been spotted together for months, Michelle Obama's grievances raise concerns about the state of their marriage.

Obama's role in the 2024 nomination process gives an idea of how far he was from any effecctive influence among Democrats:

How Obama handled the implosion of Joe Biden is a study in political malpractice. In interviews over their new book, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” authors Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen paint a poor picture of the former president.

According to Parnes and Allen, Obama mounted a campaign to shunt Kamala Harris aside in some ersatz quickie primary, which he probably thought he could control. But there’s opinion and there’s political reality. The reality is and was (recognized far in advance) that pushing Harris aside was always a fool’s errand.

From the day she became vice president, Harris was the prohibitive favorite to be the next nominee. The idea that any VP could be passed over — much less the first black woman to serve as VP — was crazy. Only if Harris was going to meekly accept the lofty judgement of Obama would that work, and why would she do that?

Yes, she’s not that great a politician. But there are not exactly a ton of all-stars in the Democratic Party. According to Parnes and Allen, Obama was thinking that the next ticket should be Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He seemed to think that these little-experienced, unfamiliar pols were going to blitz Harris and grab the nomination.

The fact that the mediocre Harris easily sunk this buffoonish plan shows how truly weak it was.

Obama advisers have also fallen into disrepute:

David Plouffe, long hailed as the brilliant architect of Obama’s 2008 victory, served in a key role in Harris’ campaign and is now among those tagged with a devastating defeat.

“The shine’s off Plouffe now. He was the golden boy,” [Democrat megadonor John] Morgan said. “Now he’s just an old broken-down boy, who lost. Big.”

. . . DNC Finance Chair Chris Korge lashed out at Plouffe in an interview with NBC News last week, saying he and other Obama alums shared the blame, chiding them as the “so-called gurus.”

“It’s time to re-evaluate the use of consultants and bring in new forward-looking people,” Korge also said in the interview. “The old Obama playbook no longer works.”

On one hand, we've been asking who really ran the country under Biden -- but it might be worthwhile also to raise the question of who really ran it under Obama. And was someone like David Plouffe a brilliant strategist, or did Obama just get lucky with two terrible Republican opponents? And it's looking less and less as if Obama was the "transformative" president he announced he would be. Charles R Kesler wrote in 2015:

He intended to be a president who made a big difference. “Let us transform this nation,” he demanded in 2007. “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he proclaimed as Election Day approached in 2008. With a year and a half to go, Obama knows (he admitted as much to the New Yorker, his favorite confessional) that a fundamental transformation will not happen on his watch. But he remains hopeful that it is underway and will continue long after his presidency.

He isn't fading as badly as Biden, but he's definitely fading. And it's hard to argue that he was ever in a position to run the country from his Kalorama mansion.