Barack Obama reportedly often advises President Joe Biden and his aides, expressing deep concern about Donald Trump's ability to deliver a comeback.
The post Report: Obama Regularly Advises Biden, ‘Always’ Worried About Trump’s Comeback appeared first on Breitbart.
President Biden, without being specific, has warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel about invading Rafah, in southern Gaza.
A Ukrainian Army soldier in a forest near Russian lines this month. A C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases has been constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border.
Just how desperate are the Democrats to get Biden off the ballot?
I don’t want to vote for Michelle Obama.
Joe Biden is, as a candidate, a dead man walking. Forget about doctors; anyone who has cared for an aging parent with cognitive decline can see all the signs and knows what is coming next. Joe can’t remember words, names, or dates, and walks stiffly with his arms locked. He falls often. He gets angry and cusses. It is all there.
We all know what is being hidden, just like when Mom refuses her food or rages someone is after her money. It is not a pleasant thing to watch, this infantilization of a person you may have once looked up to, but the decline is obvious, and decline is a one-way street. It hurts, it really does, whether it is Mom or Joe Biden, to watch it all knowing there is nothing that can be done.
Of course, the problem is that Joe Biden is the president of the United States. He is charged with running the nation on all of our behalf, a job like no other. Special counsel Robert Hur’s nearly 400-page report is full of damning evidence of Biden’s carelessness with vital national-security secrets.
His defense of Biden is that the man is just too old and forgetful to be held responsible for his actions. It is one thing to explain away Mom’s behavior at the dinner-table, another when addressing national security. There is room at family gatherings for “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” but not in the White House. If Joe is unfit to stand trial for his casual misuse of classified documents, then he is unfit to be president.
The public seems to be catching on. Nearly every poll shows Biden behind, often by several points. His approval rating is stuck in the high 30s. He is losing to Trump; even Nikki Haley beats Biden one-on-one in some polls. “President Biden’s poll numbers seem set in quicksand,” wrote one commentator. A recent ABC News poll found 86 percent of Americans think Biden is too old to serve another term. We might feel bad for Joe, but we’d all feel better if he was retired to a beach chair in Delaware eating ice cream instead of standing poised above the nuclear button (and you worried about Trump.)
Problem is, bound by tradition, Joe Biden is “entitled” to run for a second term—which he is in theory doing. No primaries, no public discussion, just an assumption that Joe is allowed two cracks at the ball. Is tradition powerful enough to hand the White House over to a senile old man for four more years? Or is Joe Biden’s legacy among Democrats to be the guy who put Trump back into power? Consider Barack Obama’s infamous assessment: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up.”
The obvious alternative is Biden steps aside on some pretext and Vice President Kamala Harris steps up to be the Democratic candidate. Harris, who found her way into office as the DEI sweepstakes winner after humiliating Biden to his face in the 2020 debates, has none of Joe’s public appeal and, on her bad days, little of his cognitive abilities. Poll after poll shows her losing, her lack of experience (among other things) a hindrance to her ascent to the Oval Office. Harris has a 37 percent approval rating, even lower than Biden’s 39 percent.
But what if Harris got that experience via the 25th Amendment? It is doubtful that ploy is even possible. The 25th lays out presidential succession when the Chief Executive is “incapacitated.” It requires a mini-coup of sorts, as the process involves the VP herself initiating things alongside the Cabinet. They would need to declare the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and notify Congress the vice president intends to take over. If Vice President Kamala Harris could get eight Cabinet officers to go along with a letter to Congress, her status as the “Acting President” would likely be short-lived anyway. Biden would only have to declare “no inability exists” and then resume his office.
Harris would then have to send another declaration within four days to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House, rejecting Biden’s claims. Congress would have 21 days to vote on the removal, which would require two-thirds majorities in both houses. If Congress did not vote within 21 days, the president would resume power. As with the many demands that the 25th be invoked during the first Trump administration, the amendment designed to deal with presidential death or true temporary disability such as surgery just cannot be squeezed and tickled into a vice-presidential mutiny to save her party defeat in November.
As constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley wrote, invoking the 25th Amendment “would require more than just memory lapses and ‘get off my lawn’ press conferences…. The sole question is whether he can carry out the duties of his office. The standard is not whether he can carry out those duties well.” The concern over Biden (and Harris) is real, but the 25th Amendment is not the solution.
That leaves the nuclear option: Michelle Obama, the September Surprise.
Imagine a mediocre spring dragging into a lackluster summer. Ukraine drags on Biden. Israel drags on Biden. The economy drags on Biden. The Democratic National convention is without spirit and the calendar yields to autumn. Trump leads in most every poll and, while the Never Trumpers still take their share of skin, it looks more like Democrats will stay home from the polls and hand over the White House. If only there was someone not named Harris who could step up as the Great Hope.
Imagine, says Heather Higgins at RealClearPolitics,
should Biden be incentivized to suddenly declare a new health issue that leads him to announce a week or two after the convention that he will continue his term but will not be running, suddenly we have one of those crises that should not be wasted. Rising above it all and quelling the haggling, Michelle—with her 91 percent popularity among Democrats and 68 percent nationally when she left the White House, and with the Obama fundraising and political network and experience—can accede when pressed, for the good of the country, to graciously accept her grateful party’s nomination.
Who else could it be? Gavin Newsom? Hillary?
Michelle Obama has the popularity and name- and face-recognition to step in at the last minute for a tired placeholder Joe. September is “the last minute,” given the 50 sets of laws governing how much time is needed to add a candidate to the ballot and still make mailing deadlines for absentee votes. Her own lack of experience is tempered by Barack’s eight years, and, indeed, a quiet selling point among Dems would be that this is indeed a third term for some sort of Obama administration.
With Obama’s popularity and bullet-proofing against accusations of racism, no one will worry at all about sweeping Kamala Harris aside, perhaps with the promise of a nice university job to show no hard feelings. Celebrity endorsements would pour in headlined by Oprah and Taylor Swift and someone near immune to Trump’s personal insult style of campaigning would take the rostrum against him. It would be a close election.
The former GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy said,
If race and gender are your basis for selecting someone for a job, and the identity of your party is tied to that temple of identity politics, then they will risk looking hypocritical if they sideline her [Harris] after they sideline Biden. And I do think Michelle Obama offers them a convenient path out of that problem, somebody who checks the boxes that they need to have checked per their own ideology, while also selecting an alternative to Biden that they may view as more palatable in a general election…. It’s looking increasingly like it’s not going to be Biden as the nominee. And I think that it should not be shocking to see someone like Michelle Obama take the role of the nomination.
Obama, for her part, said she’s “terrified” about the potential outcome of the 2024 election, listing November’s presidential contest as among the fears that keep her awake at night. How’s that for motivation?
The Democratic National Committee rules that apply are actually simple, saying “The Democratic National Committee shall have general responsibility for the affairs of the Democratic Party between National Conventions…. This responsibility shall include filling vacancies in the nominations for the office of President and Vice President.” The chairman confers with Democratic Congressional Leadership and the Democratic Governors Association and takes a decision to all 483 DNC members to vote on.
RCP reminds the reader that it has been done before. In 1972, Democrats realized weeks after their convention the man they had nominated for vice president, Senator Thomas Eagleton, had undergone shock therapy a decade earlier. Eagleton withdrew from the ticket and left it to the DNC to choose a replacement. They got Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver to agree to what became a “suicide mission.”
So the real question is: Would you vote for Michelle Obama? A lot depends on the answer.
The post Michelle Obama: September Savior or ‘Suicide Mission’? appeared first on The American Conservative.
A Ukrainian Army soldier in a forest near Russian lines this month. A C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases has been constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border.
A movie produced by the former president tries and fails to grasp the consequences of American empire.
Before alien invasion stories, there were just invasion stories. At the height of the British Empire, the British public was addicted to novels about their beloved homeland being attacked and occupied. H.G. Wells’s 1879 novel, The War of the Worlds, was famous because it replaced Germans with aliens in an otherwise familiar story.
Invasion literature was always about the anxieties of power. Britons were masters of the world, yet they understood how fragile their domination was and how powerful their rivals were growing. Perhaps one day they would receive the same treatment they had meted out to the rest of humanity.
“The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years,” Wells wrote. “Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”
A century later, during the War on Terror, American audiences filled theaters to watch themselves become victims of the same science fiction dystopia their government was imposing on the Muslim world. The 2009 film Battle: Los Angeles cast Iraq War veterans as the ragtag resistance against an (alien) invader with overwhelming airpower. The TV series V, released the same year, had an FBI counterterrorism agent try to warn humanity about the (alien) foreigners who brought mass surveillance in the guise of development aid.
Leave the World Behind, the apocalypse flick produced by former president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama, is an inversion of the new style of American power. Over the past decade, the United States has learned to turn its influence over global financial and telecommunications networks into hard power. Obama himself laid the groundwork for a campaign to destabilize Iranian society through economic sanctions, cyber warfare, and covert operations. Now, with U.S. power faltering, he wonders what would happen if the same methods were turned against Americans in a dramatic and decisive way.
The movie is based on a novel by the same name. Written before the coronavirus pandemic, it was published just as pandemic-induced social breakdown was reaching its peak, making it an instant hit. The protagonists, Clay and Amanda Sanford, are a cliche upper-middle-class couple with pointless jobs—English professor and advertising executive—who rent a vacation home outside New York City for the weekend. They are joined unexpectedly by the homeowner, George Scott—a financial analyst fleeing a blackout in the city. The couples and their children must work together as they are isolated by a bizarre series of disasters. Banking and communications fail, planes fall from the sky, and self-driving cars crash themselves.
In the former president’s hands, Leave the World Behind is a much more pointedly political story. (Film director Sam Esmail said in an interview that the former president “read multiple drafts and gave excellent notes,” especially on the U.S. government’s disaster preparedness.) The disasters are revealed early in the film to be the result of a cyberattack. The area is then stricken by a Havana Syndrome-esque sonic weapon. At one point, a drone drops menacing leaflets in Arabic, and Clay speculates that Iran was behind the attack. The messages say “death to America” and include a thinly-veiled threat of nuclear annihilation.
Later on, the families meet Danny, a survivalist neighbor, who was able to gather scraps of news from before the Internet failed. He explains that Russia had pulled its diplomats out of Washington right before the attacks, and similar flyers in either “Korean or Mandarin” (which Danny can’t tell apart) were dropped on San Diego. “We made a lot of enemies around the world,” Danny says. “Maybe all this means is a few of them teamed up.”
If that wasn’t too on-the-nose, George delivers a long soliloquy about his views on the situation, another line not found in the book:
Because my primary client works in the defense sector, I spend a lot of time studying the cost-benefit analysis of military campaigns. There was one program in particular that terrified my client the most: a simple-three stage maneuver that could topple a country’s government from within. The first stage is isolation. Disable their communication and transportation. Make the target as deaf, dumb and paralyzed as possible, setting them up for the second stage: synchronized chaos. Terrorize them with covert attacks and misinformation, overwhelming their defense capabilities, leaving their weapon systems vulnerable to extremists and their own military. Without a clear enemy or motive, people would start turning on each other. If done successfully, the third stage would happen on its own: coup d’etat. Civil war.
Just like H.G. Wells’s line about the Tasmanian genocide, George is describing the imperialist playbook turned back against the empire. Ironically, the plot of Leave the World Behind is a terrible execution of that playbook. The chaos is clearly enemy action, and the enemy’s “disinformation” announces itself as scary and foreign. (What is the point of spreading propaganda in a language that almost none of the locals can understand, anyways?) The enemy does not try to play off warring American factions or set up front groups calling for America’s “liberation.”
As if by magic, the fighting starts anyways. In the closing scene of the film, Amanda watches with George’s daughter Ruth as fighter jets pummel the New York City skyline. Meanwhile, the Sanfords’ daughter Rose stumbles upon an abandoned doomsday bunker, where a computer screen warns of “rogue armed forces” attacking the White House and “elevated radiation levels” detected in major cities.
The U.S.-led campaign against Iran has been far more subtle. The United States used sanctions to manufacture an economic crisis in Iran while blaming Iranian leaders’ own “corruption and mismanagement.” Covert operatives carried out bombings in the name of mysterious “Iranian resistance” groups, and Washington cultivated real opposition figures that would be willing to cheer on attacks against the government. Hackers disrupted Iranian gas stations and stole bank customers’ private data—the former was a suspected Israeli operation, the latter a confirmed CIA scheme—while also leaking scandalous information about the government. The U.S. military used fake social media accounts to promote both radical pro-government and radical anti-government rumors.
Meticulous care was taken to ensure that Iranians would blame each other for each individual catastrophe. And Iranians have plenty of reasons to do so. There is indeed rampant corruption, incompetence, and hypocrisy in their elite. The government has indeed tortured and killed citizens in order to enforce unpopular morality laws. There are indeed secular Iranians willing to cheer on violent revenge against the religious conservatives who have held them in thrall for four decades. Psychological warfare does not work by conjuring social problems out of thin air, but by aggravating ones that already exist. The same goes for countries like Venezuela facing similar U.S. pressure.
The United States has its own divisions and traumas waiting to be exploited; Leave the World Behind glosses over them. Although the novel delved much deeper into race and class, the film treats the subject briefly and heavy-handedly. Amanda is initially skeptical that George, a black man, could be the homeowner. The closest thing to a working-class character is a Spanish-speaking worker Clay tries to communicate with, then abandons in a panic.
If not misunderstanding, all the conflicts in the movie are caused by stubbornness or distrust. There is no sense of clashing material interests, of real competition over the necessities of life. Everything can be resolved by inspiring talks. Amanda, trying to find her missing daughter and get medical attention for her ill son, has time for a heart-to-heart with Ruth about anger and compassion. Danny, a gun-toting small business owner, learns the virtue of cooperation from Clay’s tearful pleas.
In other words, it’s exactly the kind of fairy tale that Obama would produce for his followers. And where does Obama see himself in all this? After George reveals that his client seemed to have advance warning of the attack, Amanda asks whether the client could have been in league with the attackers. George scoffs at the conspiracy theory:
A conspiracy theory about a shadowy group of people running the world is far too lazy of an explanation, especially when the truth is much scarier. No one is in control. No one is pulling the strings. Sure, there are those like my friend who might have the right kind of access to the right kind of information. But when events like this happen in the world, the best even the most powerful people can hope for is a heads-up.
How convenient. Having said that America “made a lot of enemies around the world,” and hinting at which chickens are coming home to roost, the film lets the country’s leaders shrug their shoulders, pleading powerlessness. Perhaps the “three-stage maneuver” that George mentions was a mirror of U.S. regime change efforts elsewhere. Perhaps it was not.
Although it winks at a subversive message, Leave the World Behind stops short of putting America in the place of its enemies. A real regime change campaign would involve Americans coming to blows over painful domestic issues, and a foreign regime learning to exploit those divides. Unwilling or unable to imagine what that kind of humiliation looks like, the filmmakers instead invent a fantastical story, one that is less unsettling because it is so far-fetched.Of course, the same could be said about any science fiction. War of the Worlds, after all, involved aliens from outer space. Yet it actually depicted how Britons would feel in the place of Tasmanians, and made the comparison explicit. H.G. Wells could imagine the masters of the world and their victims switching places. Obama, it seems, cannot.
The post Obama Flinches at His Own Legacy appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Harvard tends to overcorrect when it gets rid of a president.
When Harvard University gets rid of a president, it has a tendency in its choice of successor to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. If that pattern holds, Barack Obama could, unironically, be the perfect choice to succeed Claudine Gay.
Neil Rudenstine was president of Harvard from 1991 to 2001. The son of a Jewish prison guard and an Italian Catholic waitress, he grew to be a gentle English professor with an oddly thin scholarly output. He may have had the paltriest resume of any Harvard president before Claudine Gay; like her, he had not authored a single book.
His main vocation was fundraising. He threw himself into it “with an enthusiasm that couldn’t have been faked,” according to journalist Richard Bradley in his excellent book Harvard Rules: Lawrence Summers and the Battle for the World’s Most Powerful University. The problem was that he liked asking rich people for money a little too much. “His wet-noodle handshake, the ease of his bended knee,” according to Bradley, came across as ingratiating and weak.
In 1994, Rudenstine suffered a mental breakdown and disappeared for three months. After ten years under a president whom Newsweek described as “a frail Renaissance scholar,” Harvard decided it needed someone tougher. So it picked Larry Summers.
Unlike Rudenstine, Summers was self-assured—too much so. He alienated practically every liberal constituency with his impolitic remarks and refusal to pander. When comments about the underrepresentation of women in hard sciences made headlines, every faction he had crossed leapt at the opportunity to get rid of him.
It was assumed by everyone that the president after Summers had to be a woman, just as it was assumed when Lawrence Bacow stepped down that his successor had to be a racial minority. Drew Gilpin Faust, the female hire, was fine. Claudine Gay was not.
Gay lost her job because of her disastrous congressional testimony on antisemitism and because of the plagiarism allegations, but her real problems ran deeper. As dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, she had used the pretext of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” to build a personal empire within the Harvard administration, as Chris Rufo explained in City Journal. Lacking the authority that comes with personal charisma or intellectual accomplishment, she had to build a power base using patronage, and she protected it zealously.
The thing that struck me most, back when her appointment was first announced, was how few people were willing to state the obvious about how intellectually unimpressive this woman was. I saw one article about it, and that was it. Why? Racial taboos were part of it, but I also detected an unmistakable sense of fear. I wondered, is Gay known by everyone in academia as a vindictive and petty person whom you crossed at your own peril? Sohrab Ahmari offered evidence to that effect here at TAC.
Barack Obama does not have that problem. He doesn’t need to be paranoid about shoring up his internal power base. His power base is external and untouchable. He doesn’t need to protect an army of loyalists; everyone at Harvard is an Obama loyalist by default.
He has something else, too. Think back to Rudenstine. His problem was that he was too much of a striver, too insecure. But every meritocrat is like that. It’s the type of person the system selects.
Not Obama. He is, in his own way, aristocratic. He has the effortless ease of a person to whom everything in life has come easily. He has had a charmed career dating back to his time at Harvard Law when his peers already assumed he would be president of the United States someday. He does not have to worry about what he will be doing for his next job.
The advantage of aristocrats is that they can say no to people. They can be relaxed. They don’t have the anxiety that characterizes everyone in a meritocratic system, the winners as much as the losers. In that sense, appointing Barack Obama president of Harvard would be a return to the institution’s ancient roots.
The post Barack Obama Would Be Perfect for Harvard, Actually appeared first on The American Conservative.
The letter affirms President Biden’s opposition to a cease-fire, challenging demands from hundreds of officials that Israel halt its military offensive in the Gaza Strip.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at a news conference with President Barack Obama at the White House in 2015.
Ron Dermer, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, and current member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet, in the Knesset last year.