Barack Obama has entered the fray of the 2020 presidential campaign with a series of thinly veiled criticisms of his successor as he prepares to help his former vice president, Joe Biden, win back the White House for the Democrats in November.
President Trump has responded by stepping up his own criticism of Obama, which has been plentiful over the past four years. Biden has, by contrast, hugged Obama tightly since entering the race, making his service under the 44th president a key part of his argument to Democratic primary voters — a strategy that paid dividends as the 77-year-old revived his once-moribund campaign and became his party’s presumptive nominee.
All this combines to set up the 2020 race as a Trump-Obama proxy war, a fight Democrats are confident they can win. “Obama is nothing but an asset to Biden,” said Democratic strategist Tracy Sefl. “His preternatural calm is a welcome sight in a time of turmoil and uncertainty.”
“This pandemic has fully, finally, torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Obama said in a virtual commencement address to historically black colleges and universities on Saturday. The remarks were widely interpreted as a rebuke of the Trump team. Previously, in a call with 3,000 alumni of his own administration, Obama left no room for interpretation as he called the Trump White House coronavirus response politically self-interested and “an absolute chaotic disaster.”
Pressed by reporters, Trump responded: “Look, he was an incompetent president. That’s all I can say. Grossly incompetent.” Jibes about Obama’s competence have been a common Trump refrain since he became active in politics.
“This is a good example of Trump’s personal grudges interfering with his political judgment,” said Democratic strategist Brad Bannon. “Obama is a popular former president and Trump, an unpopular incumbent. Trump is helping Biden make the comparison between a successful presidency and a failed administration.”
Obama remains a beloved figure among the Democratic base, and he managed to turn out younger and minority voters at a rate that eluded Hillary Clinton in 2016. That was a major factor in why he won twice but was succeeded by Trump, with Rust Belt voters who switched from Obama to Trump especially important to the outcome. At the same time, many progressives view Trump’s election as backlash against the first black president.
“Anything that reminds voters of eight years of stability, competence, and a general respect for science, data, and human beings is a good thing for Biden,” said Democratic strategist Stefan Hankin. “You can probably count on one hand the number of voters who would have voted for Biden but now won’t because Obama is in the news.”
Obama had hesitated to get involved in the presidential contest until after Biden became the presumptive nominee. Some Republicans are hopeful that Obama’s interventions will have little impact on the race, pointing to his failure to pull Clinton across the finish line four years ago and the problems down-ballot Democrats faced throughout his presidency. There is also the risk that Obama will upstage the older, rhetorically less gifted Biden — a gamble Democrats are happy to make.
“Trump is latching on to this latest mishmash of evidence-free accusations to change the subject away from his catastrophic mismanagement of the public health crisis,” said Sefl. “We can expect him to just keep tweet-shouting in all caps because that is his sad and reckless comfort zone.”
Trump has devoted much of his administration to rolling back Obama initiatives, such as withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and the Iranian nuclear deal. He has had mixed results with Obamacare, curtailing parts of his predecessor’s biggest legislative success — most notably, the unpopular individual mandate — but failing to repeal and replace the healthcare law in its entirety. Obamacare, otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act, gained in popularity after Trump and congressional Republicans tried to rescind it in 2017.
Obama and Trump have never run against each other in a head-to-head race, but they remain inextricably linked. Trump promoted “birtherism,” which held that Obama was born in Kenya, as he began to make an appeal to Republican voters in the early 2010s, something for which former first lady Michelle Obama wrote she would never forgive him. It has been speculated that Obama’s ridicule of Trump, especially at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, prompted the businessman and reality TV star to run for president. Many Republicans think John McCain and Mitt Romney went too easy on Obama in their losing presidential campaigns, which drew them to Trump’s more combative style.
Trump has most recently argued that Obama and his deputies were behind an effort to spy on his 2016 presidential campaign. This so-called Obamagate controversy has gained traction with new revelations about the unmasking of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and flaws in the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Trump has also repeatedly said Obama left the federal government unprepared to deal with a crisis like the coronavirus.
