Barack Obama’s crocodile tears for rule of law could drown Joe Biden

Barack Obama spent two terms treating Republicans as enemies rather than the loyal opposition. Picture: AFP

His foray into the 2020 election this past Friday was pure Barack Obama — pointedly partisan, sometimes entertaining and displaying an amazing lack of self-awareness.

In what was likely a pre-planned manoeuvre, a friendly reporter received a recording of the former president’s 30-minute pep talk to his administration’s alumni association and posted the juicier nuggets online.

Obama used the webcast to encourage former staffers to “feel the same sense of urgency that I do” and join in “spending as much time as necessary and campaigning as hard” as they can to elect former vice-president Joe Biden.

He unleashed on President Donald Trump’s handling of COVID-19, calling it as “an absolute chaotic disaster”. There have been mistakes and cringe-worthy statements, but surely there has been progress, too — for example, on vaccines — and good early decisions, such as restricting travel from China. At odds with the facts, Obama’s uncalibrated condemnation of Trump is also at odds with the praise the administration has received from Democrats in the know such as California Governor Gavin Newsom (“Promise made, promise kept”) and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (“The federal government stepped up and was a great partner”).

You’d think Obama, whose administration couldn’t get a website to work during the Affordable Care Act rollout, might be more reticent about criticising his successor amid the worst pandemic in a century. Especially since Obama failed to replenish the Strategic National Stockpile’s supply of N95 masks after it was depleted on his watch.

Joe Biden and Barack Obama in 2016. Picture: AP

Obama also said that “what we’re fighting against” in the election are “long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life”. Yet he helped America become more polarised. Obama spent two terms treating Republicans as enemies rather than the loyal opposition, referring to them as champions of “social Darwinism” and their proposals as, in so many words, unpatriotic and un-American. When he left office, more than 70 per cent of Americans said he left the country more divided or no more united than in 2009.

Obama’s Friday talk also included his claim the Justice Department’s decision to drop charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn means “our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk”.

Here’s another possibility: The department dropped the charges to defend the rule of law. It noted the charge “requires a statement to be not simply false, but ‘materially’ false with respect to a matter under investigation”. Having found no collusion with Russia, the FBI moved in December 2016 to end its investigation of Flynn. Only a paperwork snafu allowed FBI deputy assistant director Peter Strzok to have Flynn interviewed on January 24, 2017, an action the department now says had no “legitimate investigative basis”. Further, the government was likely to lose the case.

President Donald Trump at the White House this week. Picture: AP

It turns out Strzok and his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, edited the Flynn interview report. The original notes haven’t been found, but the agents involved said at the time that they felt “Flynn was not lying”.

Where was Obama’s concern about the rule of law when he consulted with FBI director James Comey about Flynn while the acting attorney-general was kept out of the loop?

Then there’s Obama’s dismissal of Hillary Clinton’s private email server as a national security issue while she was under active FBI investigation. Did that show proper respect for the rule of law?

Still, Obama’s appearance to rally the Democratic faithful helped boost his party’s presumptive nominee. There are risks, however, to being too visible too often during the campaign. Obama reminds voters of how comparatively feeble Biden’s talents are and the peripheral role he played as his vice-president. Having Obama speaking frequently could overshadow Biden, who’s already hard to find. At the end of the day, Obama isn’t on the ticket: Biden is. That alone gives Trump a good chance to win.

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The Wall Street Journal