There’s a reason presidents are wary of campaigning actively to elect their successor. Presidents are the past. Presidential candidates are the future. Presidents can raise money and draw crowds at campaign events. But speeches? That’s asking for trouble.
President Obama thinks otherwise. He speaks at far more campaign events for Hillary Clinton than any president has for his party’s nominee in recent decades. And in interview after interview, he plugs her and trashes Donald Trump. If he’s helping Clinton—and that’s doubtful—he’s also creating controversy.
He criticized the FBI (without singling out director Jim Comey) for disclosing it had reopened its investigation of Clinton’s emails. So did the entire Democratic party. But Obama did so in particularly clumsy fashion.
“There is a norm that when there are investigations, we don’t operate on innuendo and we don’t operate on incomplete information and we don’t operate on leaks, ” he said. But there was no innuendo, only a letter that was publicly released, not leaked. True, the information was incomplete. That’s because the revived investigation had just begun.
“We operate on concrete decisions that are made,” Obama added, as if the FBI had violated that rule. But there was a concrete decision to reopen the investigation, which Comey had declared “completed” in July.
In a TV interview, Obama said sexism was dragging down the Clinton campaign. If there’s evidence of this, he didn’t offer any. He ignored the fact that men vote Republican more frequently than women do, a longstanding phenomenon in presidential races. It happens when both candidates are male. This year’s “gender gap” is slightly larger in some polls, not in others. If there’s sexism, it hasn’t changed much.
That didn’t stop the president from repeating his claim in a speech in Ohio directed at “you guys out there.” He said Clinton is “consistently treated differently than just about any other candidate I see out there.” Obama had a point, except he cited the wrong candidate. It’s Trump who is treated far differently, especially by the press.
The low point for Obama (so far) came when he invoked fears of the Ku Klux Klan. He said that because Trump had “hesitated” before repudiating the support of a Klan leader, Trump would “tolerate that support once in office” in the White House. His Klan comment was widely reported, as Obama must have expected.
Edward Luce of the Financial Times wrote: “There is poignancy to the fact that America’s first black president is having to cite what most people thought was a dormant, if not extinct, post civil war outfit to defeat a man who pushes “all the progress of the last eight years out of the window.” That “man” is Trump.
The subhead for the story said: “First black president warns that republic and everything he stands for is at risk.” The gist was the country is at risk. And this was attributed to Trump’s hesitation before disavowing the support of a Klansman.
Use of extreme language is only part of Obama’s problem on the stump for Clinton. The president was highly effective when he campaigned for himself in 2008 and 2012. But he’s been far less effective when speaking on behalf of other candidates or his own programs such as Obamacare. Indeed, first lady Michelle Obama has been a bigger crowd pleaser than her husband at Clinton events.
In Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Friday, Obama faced the embarrassment of a crowd that wouldn’t quiet down to let him speak. The crowd was heckling a Trump supporter and seemed to be enjoying it.
“I told you to be focused and you’re not focused right now,” Obama told the crowd. But the roaring continued. “Listen to what I’m saying. You’re not listening to what I’m saying right now. Everybody sit down and be quiet for a second.”
This went on for several minutes as the crowd made its decision quite clear. It preferred heckling a Trump voter to being heckled by the president.
