With two weeks left in his term, President Obama is signaling that he intends to do anything but go quietly once President-elect Trump takes office, rejecting the example set by most every other president. Obama’s failure to emulate the class and deference shown him by President George W. Bush — allowing his successor to lead without interference from the previous occupant — will not work to the Democratic Party’s advantage, nor will it be good for our divided nation.
The moral impact of Obama’s refusal to recede cannot be understated as he’s leaving the nation more politically divided than when he took office, according to polling done by the Pew Research Center. Any post-presidential meddling would undermine Trump’s efforts to unify a country sorely in need of healing.
Obama has announced he’s going to live in Washington after leaving office and caused eye rolls when he said that he would have won a third term if permitted to run again (despite recent polling showing otherwise). It’s Alexander Hamilton’s warning against presidential term limits come to life.
“Would it promote the peace of the community, or the stability of the government to have half a dozen men who had had credit enough to be raised to the seat of the supreme magistracy, wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess?” Hamilton wrote in Federalist 72.
At the time, average life expectancy was just 36. Obama, just 55 years old, could be the nation’s Discontented Ghost-in-Chief for decades, haunting Trump and the next three presidents.
Obama has already presided over what Sam Stein, the senior politics editor of the Huffington Post, called “the destruction of the Democratic Party” since 2009, leaving them “in a much worse position.” On Obama’s watch, Republicans won control of both chambers of Congress, won a record number of state legislative chambers (67 of 98), and control 33 governorships. The liberal site Daily Kos admitted Republicans won more political power in 2016 than in any election since 1928.
Finally, a chance for conservatives to mean it when we say “Thanks, Obama!”
While Obama possessed political skills beyond his opponents in 2008 and 2012, he has since presided over electoral calamities that clearly show voters, however fond they might be of Obama as a person, did not ultimately approve of his policy agenda, or of the general direction of the country under Democratic leadership.
The election results, combined with pre- and post-election polling, tell the tale. Huge swaths of voters that previously supported Obama, especially in the midwest, flipped to Trump in 2016, handing the GOP the election. In an October NBC News/Wall St. Journal national survey, 65 percent said the nation was on the wrong track. But in the same poll taken in December, with an Obama successor elected who will take the country in a decidedly different direction, just 54 percent said the country was on the wrong track.
Obama famously said before the 2014 midterm election: “I’m not on the ballot this fall … but make no mistake: These policies are on the ballot, every single one of them.”
Voters overwhelmingly rejected those policies in two straight elections. Obama would do his party and country a great service by proving Hamilton wrong.
Scott Jennings previously served as an advisor to President George W. Bush and Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. He is a partner at RunSwitch Public Relations. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
