Barack Obama’s tacky, hyperpartisan post-presidency is welcome insofar as it serves to remind the public of his tacky, hyperpartisan leadership style.
“Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. . . ,” began Obama’s Sunday evening statement about the gunman who showed up in Washington the night before.
Except by the time Obama got around to acknowledging the attack, the entire world knew why Cole Tomas Allen had attempted to storm the ballroom where President Trump and much of his administration were breaking bread with their ancestral enemies in the Fourth Estate.
“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” wrote Allen in his manifesto.
A few lines later, he explained he would murder hotel guests and employees alike if he needed to in order to succeed in assassinating administration officials.
Obama lied about Allen’s motives to elide his side’s slide toward political extremism and violence. And he did so because he is an immensely cynical political operator.
Voters ought to be keenly aware of his true identity as the former president hits the campaign trail on behalf of his party in advance of November.
After all, the truth has always taken a backseat to 44’s whims.
To this day, the Affordable Care Act remains the signature legislative achievement of his presidency; it was sold using the slogan, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”
In 2013, one year after Obama’s re-election, left-leaning PolitiFact named that mantra its lie of the year, tsk-tsking the commander in chief not only for his erroneous claim, but making “matters worse” by falsely insisting he had “been misunderstood all along.”
Insult to injury, then.
A year later, Obama used his bully pulpit to fan the flames of the civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo., where Michael Brown had been shot by Officer Darren Wilson in August.
The race riots that broke out in the immediate aftermath of the incident inflicted tremendous damage on the city, with many local businesses never recovering.
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After a grand jury declined to indict Wilson that November, however, Obama insisted it was “understandable” that Americans were “deeply disappointed” or “even angry” with the decision before lecturing local authorities “to show care and restraint in managing peaceful protests that may occur” — as if they hadn’t already.
A dozen buildings were burned to the ground that evening, and 20-year-old DeAndre Joshua was found dead in his car the next day; no one remembers his name.
Just a few short months later, Obama’s own Department of Justice cleared Wilson and debunked the oft-repeated lie that Brown had already surrendered, hands raised above his head, when Wilson shot him.
Oops.
Obama’s commitment to advancing his own narrative at any cost was on display yet again after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
His initial, three-sentence statement on the deadliest day for Jewry since the Holocaust didn’t come until Oct. 9, and was followed up a couple weeks later by an essay devoted almost entirely to scolding Israel while parroting Hamas’ accusations against it.
Where others saw a moment that demanded moral clarity, Obama saw an opportunity to muddy the waters, as is his custom.
More recently, the former president has emerged as one of the country’s leading advocates of partisan gerrymandering — for Democrats, of course.
In an exceedingly haughty statement issued last summer, Obama managed to at once claim the moral high ground, condemn Republican gerrymanders, and endorse Gov. Gavin Newsom’s carve-up of California.
Then this spring, he threw his support behind Virginia Democrats’ effort to leave purple Old Dominion with just one Republican-leaning congressional district.
He was even featured in an ad on its behalf, in which he accused Republicans of trying “to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election.”
As a schoolchild might put it on the playground: I know you are, but what am I?
Obama has eschewed the honorable, apolitical post-presidential path taken by George W. Bush for the gauche, self-serving one he trods now because an old dog can’t learn new tricks.
He routinely poses as unifier, asserts his own moral authority and then proceeds to speak with reckless disregard for the facts to destructive effect.
And no prospective victim of his mendacious brand of politics — not patients, or Jews, or democracy, or the truth — is too sympathetic to dissuade him from continuing to practice it.
Isaac Schorr is a senior editor at Mediaite.
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