Michelle Obama is not coming to save us
Here we go again. I’ve always imagined that those who’ve tried for more than a decade to convince former first lady Michelle Obama that she should run for president are a lot like people who go to a fancy restaurant and attempt to pressure the staff into serving them food that’s not on the menu.
Since she left the White House when her husband’s second term ended in 2017, not once has Obama hedged or wavered about her political future because, beyond making the rare campaign appearance for a candidate she supports — like President Biden — she has never expressed a desire for a political career of her own.
In an interview on Netflix last year with Oprah Winfrey to promote her most recent book, “The Light We Carry,” Obama was unequivocal.
“I’ve never expressed any interest in politics. Ever,” she said. “I mean, I agreed to support my husband. He wanted to do it, and he was great at it. But at no point have I ever said, ‘I think I want to run.’ Ever.”
Exactly a year ago, speculation went into overdrive that if Biden stepped aside, Obama might consider a run in 2024. That included a claim from Tucker Carlson — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s new ventriloquist’s dummy — that Obama’s book tour could be interpreted as “the beginnings of a presidential campaign.”
It wasn’t. But even before primary season began, Republicans have reportedly been concerned that Obama will jump into the race to keep the White House under Democratic control. And Democrats never stop wishing and hoping that she will somehow contradict everything she’s ever said about not wanting a political career.
“As former First Lady Michelle Obama has expressed several times over the years, she will not be running for president,” Crystal Carson, Obama’s director of communications, said in a statement. “Mrs. Obama supports President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ reelection campaign.”
If current polls are to be believed, most Democrats aren’t stalwart in their support for Biden’s reelection. Last year, only 37 percent of Democrats wanted Biden to run for a second term; a recent CNN poll showed the president’s approval rating at a measly 38 percent.
Those relentless but futile hopes that Obama will renege on everything she’s ever said about entering politics aren’t just about her evergreen popularity. It’s also a worrying sign of Biden’s lack of it with Election Day less than eight months away.
Democratic dissatisfaction with Biden as the party’s standard-bearer isn’t flagging. There is, at best, ambivalence about the incumbent president. And concerns about his age have been there since even before he was elected in 2020 at the age of 77.
When Biden was finally declared the president-elect on Nov. 7, four nail-gnawing days after the 2020 general election, spontaneous celebrations erupted nationwide. That revelry really had less to do with the man who would move into the White House than it did with gleeful relief that the miscreant who’d wreaked havoc for four years wouldn’t remain there for a second term.
Perhaps some were also celebrating that Biden, the oldest person ever elected as this nation’s president, would take a page from one of his Democratic predecessors, Lyndon Johnson, who declined in 1968 to run for a second full term. In 2019, Politico reported that Biden, then a presidential contender, “signaled to aides that he would serve only a single term” if elected.
At the time, anonymous sources told Politico that “it is virtually inconceivable” that Biden would run for reelection in 2024 in his 80s. There was even talk of a possible one-term pledge from Biden to reassure especially younger voters who were less than enthusiastic about the possibility of a chief executive born during World War II.
That pledge never came.
There’s nothing Obama can do to change that. Once Biden gets the nomination as expected, she will do her duty and campaign for him and Harris. She will deploy her star power to counterbalance concerns about Biden’s age — as well as the Biden administration’s culpability in the staggering death toll and deepening miseries of Palestinians in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war.
But that’s all that should be expected of the woman who told Oprah that politics is “not in my soul.” Democrats can continue to wish for what will never be or they can focus on what they will do in an election that is less a popularity contest between two old men than a battle between two opposing political ideologies — democracy and authoritarianism.