Thursday, May 29, 2025

More On Obama's Impotence

Barack Obama's inability to control Joe Biden was evident nearly a year ago, on July 12, 2024:

Chris Whipple, an author and filmmaker who biographed the life of President Biden, indicated Friday that former President Obama may not even be able to convince Biden to exit the 2024 presidential race.

Whipple, in an interview with NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas Friday, said it was “nonsense” to think Obama would be the sole person to persuade the president to step aside.

“I just talked about reports that Obama is worried that Biden can’t win,” Vargas said. “The relationship between these two men is really complicated. A lot of people have been saying ‘The only person who could tell Biden to step aside is former President Obama.’ Not quite true.”

. . . The question around Obama’s influence was also brought up Thursday by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who signaled that the president’s campaign believes Obama is behind increasing calls for Biden to withdraw from the White House race.

This appeared the day before the Butler, PA assassination attempt on Trump and several days before Joe's "COVID disgnosis" in Las Vegas, which sent him home to Delaware. But more recent reporting indicates that Obama himslf didn't think he could convince Joe to drop out, but maybe Sen Schumer could:

Following last June’s disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden, Barack Obama urged then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to be the bearer of bad news and convince Biden to drop out of the race, saying his own “fragile relationship” with the president prevented him from being the “best messenger.”

According to a deep-dive investigation by The New York Times, which was adapted from an upcoming book by reporters Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, Schumer sat down with Biden in the president’s Delaware house last summer and told him he’d “go down in American history as one of the darkest figures” if he stayed in and lost to Donald Trump.

“The roughly 45-minute conversation, which took place on a screened-in porch overlooking a pond, was more pointed and emotional than previously known, and helps to explain how Mr. Biden came to the decision just over a week later to end his campaign,” the Times reported.

Mevertheless, if this took place "just over a week" before Joe's July 21 announcement that he was withdrawing from the race, this must have put the meeting with Schumer on July 11 or 12, before both the Butler episode and the Las Vegas "COVID diagnosis". It wasn't until the call from Pelosi the following weekend that Joe made up his mind. I think I'm still correct in my view that Obama was never in a position to tell Joe to drop out -- he appears to have acknowledged this to Schumer himself -- and neither, as things fell out was Schumer. Pelosi was the last one standing, if only briefly.

David Manney at PJ Media comes closer, but he still overestimates Obama:

For more than a decade, the Democratic Party operated like a palace, ruled not by consensus but by decree. Its monarchs were familiar: President Barack Obama with his golden tongue and cool detachment, Nancy Pelosi with her iron gavel, and a press corps that never met a Democrat it couldn’t describe as “historic.”

Together, they built something. Not a movement but an illusion.

. . . There was a time when Barack Obama could end primary campaigns with a sentence and turn congressional tides with a smirk. His approval alone anointed candidates, even as his own policy legacy, Obamacare, Iran, and record-setting deficits, faded into dysfunction.

But in 2024, the man who once promised that oceans would stop rising could not even convince Joe Biden to step aside.

Reports now confirm Obama privately urged Biden not to run again. But he lacked either the courage or the leverage to say it publicly. He blinked. He defaulted to the back-channel whispering and careful leaks. And that hesitation was costly.

Biden stayed. The campaign withered. The debate disaster happened. Trump’s victory followed. Obama’s influence didn’t just wane; it evaporated.

Isn't this just the long way around of saying Obama never had the power to convince Joe to drop out? Both he and Schumer had to defer to Pelosi. So far, Pelosi has said she'll never disclose exactly what she said during the July 20 call to Biden, but I strongly suspect it was a message that the donors were going to cut him off. Since she basically controlled the party as a major fundraiser, it was a message only she could deliver.

Meanwhile, other people are claiming they know who was actually in control. David Hogg says it was Dr Jill's chief of staff, Anthony Bernal:

Hogg's claim is that Bernal ran the White House -- but his power came from Dr Jill and indirectly from Joe. As soon as Pelosi took Joe out of the picture, Bernal was a lame duck just as much as Joe was. Nancy Pelosi, at least as of last july, ran the country. Remember, not only did she take Joe out, she named Joe's successor. Bernal could never do that.

Next we hear that Elizabeth Warren ran the country, because she had the autopen:

At this point, we're in murky territory with which signatures done with the autopen are or aren't consitutional. but I'm not sure it matters. Elizabeth Warren, whatever she might have been able to do with the autopen, lost that ability pretty much as soon as Nancy Pelosi told Joe to drop out of the race. She was in exactly the same position as Anthony Bernal; as soon as Joe Biden's signature wasn't the president's signature, neither had any power at all. It was Nancy Pelosi who could take away any power they held.

The big difference is that right now, there's no issue over who is the shadowy power behind the throne.

posted by test @ May 29, 2025   0 Comments