Barack Obama, the serial memoirist and Netflix producer who owns a $20 million estate on Martha's Vineyard and also served as the 44th president of the United States, has yet to embrace his irrelevance in the field of American politics. He keeps trying to reinsert himself into the national conversation despite the fact that no one cares what he has to say. Earlier this week, Obama interviewed talked about himself while sitting next to former German chancellor Angela Merkel. On Thursday, the former president gave a (ridiculously long and vapid) speech at the Obama Foundation's Democracy Forum in Chicago, where he denounced "our current polarized environment," which he helped create, and stressed the importance of building coalitions that make room "not only for the woke but also for the waking." Whatever that means.
"We have to be open to other people’s experiences and believe that, by listening to these people and building relationships and understanding what their fears are, we might actually bring some of them, not all of them, but some of them along with us," Obama told the crowd of adoring fans. He made similar remarks during his appearance with Merkel in Washington, D.C., where he urged a different crowd of adoring fans to "listen actively and be curious about and learn from the experiences of those who are not exactly like you." Obama routinely complains about "cynicism" and "division" in politics, yet his most memorable contribution to this year's election was lecturing black "brothas" who were reluctant to vote for Kamala Harris and denouncing them as misogynists. He backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and was "enamored" with Beto O'Rourke in 2020. Nevertheless, he continues to regard himself as a political genius.
Free Beacon reader Barry J. from Arizona reached out to remind us of Alexander Hamilton's opposition to presidential term limits, as outlined in Federalist No. 72, which reads at times like a specific warning about Barack Obama. Hamilton imagined future presidents who might be "vain and ambitious, as well as avaricious," who, upon reaching the end of their allotted time in the "seat of supreme magistracy," would be forced to assuage their considerable ego by "wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess." Our astute reader observed that Obama appears to have "a roaring case of discontented ghosthood." He certainly does.
If Hamilton's view had ultimately prevailed, would Obama even have wanted to continue serving as president? Unlikely, given his fondness for accumulating wealth and insatiable thirst for hanging out with celebrities. If he could run again, would he even win? He's become so boring to listen to it's hard to believe he ever did, until you consider who his opponents were—Hillary and John McCain (the embodiment of George W. Bush at the lowest point of his presidency) and Willard Mitt Romney. During the Democratic primary in 2020, Obama's legacy was attacked or swept under the rug. Notwithstanding his widely praised (by journalists) speech at the Democratic convention, he was a non-factor in 2024. Another meaningless celebrity endorsement. The ghost of politics past, slouching towards oblivion with the massive fortune he "didn't build," lecturing his few remaining acolytes about how to understand and connect with their "bitter" neighbors who "cling to guns and religion and antipathy" to "explain their frustrations."
Meanwhile, Obama still hasn't finished part two of his third memoir. (He's the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to require multiple volumes.) If it never gets published, would anyone care?