The Democrats’ Obama dilemma: They need a new leader, but no one has stepped up

When Democrats say they need a generational change in their party’s leadership, they usually aren’t referring to former President Barack Obama. Although the 63-year-old has been out of the White House for eight years, he retains his grip on the Democratic imagination.

Perhaps last year loosened it some, however. Obama took it upon himself to rescue Democrats as his erstwhile vice president, former President Joe Biden, faltered. He helped nudge Biden, who was trying to hold on to the presidency at 82, out of the 2024 race. Obama took to the campaign trail for Biden’s replacement, then-Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Democrats tried hard to recapture the magic of the 2008 campaign. The “joy” initially associated with Harris was billed as the successor to the “hope” represented by Obama. But it proved difficult to put the lightning back in the bottle. The Obamas themselves often seemed anything but joyful while campaigning, as if they knew a loss could be coming.

A loss came indeed. President Donald Trump returned to the White House, this time with a national plurality behind him many Democratic operatives believed was impossible. The Obama coalition lay in tatters, with Hispanic men especially joining the white working class in deserting Democrats in droves. Florida and Ohio, once battleground states that voted for Obama, went for Trump by double digits.

Obama might have, in another time, called it a “shellacking.” 

Yet the Democrats have a leadership vacuum during Trump’s second term. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has not been able to replicate former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) episodic success at keeping the party’s left flank in check. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), 74, is an exception to the rule of Democratic senior citizens giving up their congressional leadership roles. Harris has now lost to Trump and is a two-time loser if one counts her ill-fated campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Biden began receding from view before he left office in January. 

Obama has been more than willing to fill the void as much as anyone term-limited out of the presidency under the 22nd Amendment can. He has remained an active Democratic leader and will presumably try to maintain this position until a younger or more fashionable alternative bypasses him. Obama’s younger deputies from the 2008 and 2012 campaigns are now in their political prime.

The Biden administration was dominated by Obama alumni. USA Today estimated that about three-fourths of Biden’s top 100 staffers had previously worked for Obama. Alejandro Mayorkas, Antony Blinken, Susan Rice, and Tom Vilsack were among the Obama retreads who held top Biden jobs, and they have remained a sort of shadow Cabinet in Trump’s second term. 

Rice has been especially vocal in criticizing Trump. She called the Oval Office confrontation in which Trump and Vice President JD Vance sparred with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “setup.” She was less pleased to hear speculation about herself, angrily denying rumors she had advised Zelensky before the meeting.

“For the record, I have never met Zelenskyy and never spoken to him,” Rice wrote on X. “Ever. Or advised him or anybody around him. It’s a shame that you contend that it is in the U.S. national interest to sell out Ukraine and suck up to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.”

Obama alumni Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor are top liberal commentators, hosting the influential Pod Save America podcast. They advertise their program as a “no-bulls*** conversation about politics.” They are ardent Trump critics and outspoken about the direction of the Democratic Party.

But the boss is seldom far away. In 2019, Obama announced a new initiative to make the drawing of congressional maps more favorable to Democrats. That is naturally not how he described it, however. “The movement for fair maps will determine the course of progress on every issue we care about for the next decade,” he said at the time. “And we can’t wait to begin organizing when the redistricting process starts in 2021. We need to build this movement from the ground up — right now.”

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee was still trotting Obama out for Martha’s Vineyard fundraisers four years later. 

“The only danger is that we get complacent,” he told the crowd. “Because one thing we’ve learned is that the other side doesn’t quit.” The group is run by Obama’s longtime wingman Eric Holder, the former attorney general.

“It’s been five years since Eric Holder and I launched All On The Line, a grassroots movement to fight gerrymandering and advocate for a fair redistricting process to protect our democracy,” Obama said on social media last year, adding that he and Holder had “been working with organizers and volunteers across the country to make the redistricting process more transparent.”

Obama has remained in Washington, D.C., since leaving office, moving to the tony Kalorama neighborhood rather than returning to Illinois, where he began his political career. He briefly represented the state in the Senate but has now been politicking from the capital for 16 years.

There are many reasons for Obama’s unusual position. Elected president at 47, he was young and healthy enough to stay politically active for decades after leaving office. His much older, and less rhetorically gifted or inspiring, vice president was the next Democrat to reach the White House, drawing a contrast most in the party did not regard as favorable. 

There were a variety of factors that prevented other similarly situated two-term presidents from enjoying similar influence after the White House. Ronald Reagan was more admired in his party than George H.W. Bush. He campaigned for Bush, his vice president, and delivered a prime-time address at the 1992 Republican National Convention. After Bush was defeated, Reagan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times opposing the tax increase proposed by Bill Clinton, the victorious Democrat. But Reagan mostly retired. Most importantly, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994 and ceased all political activities soon afterward.

Detractors who bemoan the 40th president’s continued relevance to the Republican Party ignore the fact that venerating past presidents is a long-standing Democratic Party tradition. In Obama’s case, it has happened while he is still alive.

Clinton is another former president who had the star power to overshadow other Democratic leaders. Like Obama and unlike Reagan, he departed the Oval Office while he was still young enough to wield this soft power. But Clinton had to pass the baton to his wife Hillary, who hoped to become president herself. This also required him to recognize the Clinton fatigue many observers believe cost Al Gore, his vice president, the 2000 presidential election. Clinton didn’t exactly go away, but he did at least take a step back.

Obama’s rise came as liberal purists began questioning the devil’s bargain they struck with the triangulating centrist from Arkansas in the first place. It is no coincidence that Obama won the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination by defeating Hillary Clinton. While not as successful as Obama, much of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 anti-Hillary campaign was animated by her husband’s transgressions against progressivism, which Trump went on to exploit in the general election in an early assault on the Obama coalition.

George W. Bush was also a two-term president and, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, boasted job approval ratings in excess of 90%. But Bush’s political capital was steadily eroded by the unpopular war in Iraq. The financial markets and wider economy tanked during his final years in office, dropping his once sky-high approval ratings below 30%.

Republicans took a pounding — or “thumping,” as Bush put it — in 2006 and 2008. Bush gave way to unified Democratic control of the federal government, including a short-lived filibuster-proof Senate majority. Trump, the next Republican president, actively rejected Bush’s legacy and continued influence over the party. But perhaps most significantly, Bush didn’t want to keep leading the party. He campaigned on rare occasions and spoke out on current affairs from time to time. He was mostly content to cede the spotlight to others, however. Republicans seemed happy with that arrangement, preferring to move on quietly from the president they once revered. 

When Bush spoke out during his sleepy post-presidency, he generally preferred to try to rehabilitate his image with the people who hated him while he was in office. Trump has proved helpful with that project, too, as has Bush’s candy-sharing pal Michelle Obama.

Obama had no successor to whom he was trying to hand over the reins. He did not endorse Biden until he had practically wrapped up the 2020 Democratic nomination. Obama discouraged Biden from running in 2016. He always outclassed both Biden and Hillary Clinton as an orator. Obama was willing to use either of these lesser politicians to serve as his third term and accepted Harris as a flawed vessel who might make it a fourth.

Except Obama’s feeble heirs kept screwing it up. As early as 2023, there were press accounts of Obama staging interventions with Biden to improve the aging incumbent’s reelection efforts. At a private lunch that June, Obama warned Biden that Trump would be a formidable opponent in 2024. Much tougher than in 2020. Biden’s campaign was “shaky,” Obama advised, and the old man “needed to move more aggressively to make the race a referendum on Trump.” According to the Washington Post’s account of the meeting, Obama also “promised to do all he could to help the president get re-elected.”

“The former President left believing the current one had gotten the memo,” Time reported about the Obama-Biden conversation. “But over the next six months, Obama saw few signs of improvement.”

Thus, Obama trekked back to the White House in December 2023. “This time, Obama’s message was more urgent,” Time reported. Biden’s “insular group of advisers clustered in the West Wing” was mucking up the field operations. Obama then summoned his Carnac the Magnificent-like powers to predict that unless Biden got his act together soon, Trump would sweep all seven battleground states.

Obama appeared at a star-studded Biden fundraiser in Los Angeles. The event brought in $30 million, but that was quickly overshadowed by footage of Obama gingerly leading Biden off the stage — which soon became an apt metaphor for the 2024 campaign.

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up,” Obama famously said of Biden, according to Politico. Obama apparently took his own advice. 

After Biden attempted to debate Trump, hardly anyone in the Democratic Party could underestimate it anymore, and they looked to Obama for what to do next. Obama initially offered Biden public support, likening the octogenarian’s face-planting to his own surprise debate loss to Mitt Romney in 2012. But this was followed by a steady trickle of stories saying that Obama was deeply concerned about Biden’s prospects.

“Obama’s decision not to make any public comment for two weeks has left a number of leading Democrats feeling like he has left them flailing by holding to the same posture that has largely defined his post-presidency,” CNN reported last year, about 10 days before Biden dropped out.

This line is revealing about why Obama’s reign may finally be coming to an end. Yes, Biden was led off the stage by Democratic leaders, including Obama. Trump won the election anyway. Since 2008, Democrats have been looking to Obama to save them. He has not done so.

While Democrats defend Obamacare from Republican attempts to roll it back, they no longer treat it as the “big f***ing deal” Biden described it as when it was first enacted. They talk about the healthcare system in much the same way they did before Obamacare became law.

Obama’s transformation of the Democratic Party into a haven for college-educated white suburbanites once looked like a winning formula. Two Trump terms later, not so much. Harris tested the limits of how far these voters could take Democrats. Obama himself had to lecture black men testily about the need to turn out for Harris, suggesting their reluctance was due to sexism, but Biden’s numbers with this demographic were worse.

DEMOCRATS COUNTING ON TRUMP MISTAKES TO FUEL THEIR REVIVAL

The socially liberal, upwardly mobile politics of the Obama era elicited a sharp backlash on both the Left and the Right. Sanders was protesting Obama as much as the Clintons, even if it wasn’t yet safe to say so in 2016. Trump’s electoral success speaks for itself.

During the Trump era, the progressive mood has darkened considerably from the good old days of “hope and change.” Still, nobody has emerged to replace Obama. Until they do, he will hang around.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.