Obama lends a helping hand
US president is plunging deeper into the 2016 election
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama is fond of saying he has run his last election, but Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings and Donald Trump’s shock assent are drawing him ever faster into the 2016 race.
Still, inside the White House, the panic is starting to ease.
In the early days of the Democratic primaries, Team Obama watched in horror as heir apparent Hillary Clinton stumbled and fumbled her way through contests against unlikely rival Bernie Sanders.
The former First Lady, former Secretary of State, former Senator – one of the most qualified presidential candidates in modern history – seemed uninspired and uninspiring, awkward on the stump and seen with suspicion by key swathes of the electorate, including, incredibly, women.
There was talk of an early presidential endorsement to prod the election-winning “Obama coalition” – African Americans, Latinos and college-educated whites – into getting behind her.
But that was a last-ditch nuclear option, one which risked fracturing the party and would inject Obama into the centre of the election when he still had a year of governing left to focus on.
Instead, Obama more subtly put his hand on the scales.
“She’s extraordinarily experienced – and, you know, wicked smart,” Obama told Politico in a January interview.
“(She) knows every policy inside and out – sometimes (that) could make her more cautious and her campaign more prose than poetry, but those are also her strengths. It means that she can govern and she can start here, day one, more experienced than any non-vice president has ever been who aspires to this office.”
Even before that glowing appraisal, it had been an open secret that the Obama White House saw Clinton, whom he beat in 2008, rather than Sanders as the guarantor of his legacy.
So there was relief when Clinton hugged Obama hard, improved her pitch, won big among black and Hispanic voters in southern states and began a relentless marching toward the 2,383 delegates needed to secure the party nomination.
Today the Democratic race continues, but the outcome seems in less doubt.
Now it is the vitriolic no-holds-bared Republican race that has drawn Obama into the election race faster than expected.
As the White House’s concerns about Clinton have ebbed, its concerns about Donald Trump have grown.
Obama has gone from expressing confidence that the bombastic real estate tycoon will not been elected to warning Trump is hurting America’s standing in the world.
Lashing out at “vulgar and divisive rhetoric” Obama has attacked Trump’s plan to force Mexico to pay for a border wall as “half baked” and his views on East Asia as those of someone who “doesn’t know much about foreign policy, or nuclear policy, or the Korean peninsula, or the world, generally.”
Obama was always going to find Trump objectionable. As so often in American politics, popular new candidates appear to be the antithesis of the incumbent.
Where Obama is eloquent and ponderous, Trump is rambling and instinctive. But observers say Obama’s sharper tone represents a real fear, as well as a real sense of opportunity.
“I think he feels the stakes are pretty high and the threat of Trump very real, as well as (Texas Senator Ted) Cruz,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University.
“If the Democrats were not as divided I think he would step in even more aggressively.” — AFP