With Joe Biden now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, there is one president Americans will be seeing a lot more of in the months ahead—and his name is not Donald Trump.
In the three years since he vacated the White House, Barack Obama has largely kept to himself. The former commander in chief is following the golden-rule of his own predecessor, George W. Bush: let your successor govern the way he or she wants to govern, and don’t constantly criticise those decisions or be a nuisance from the sidelines. Obama is keeping to that script, with some notable exceptions—his defence of the Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic legislative achievement, and his 2017 condemnation of Trump’s tone-deafness during the violence in Charlottesville, when a white nationalist killed a protester with his car. Other than those two instances and a few months of campaigning on behalf of Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections, Obama has been perfectly happy maintaining a low profile and working on his memoirs.
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With the 2020 general election season now in its infancy, Obama’s passivity will soon be replaced with a kind of passionate intensity Americans haven’t seen since his own re-election campaign against GOP nominee Mitt Romney nine years prior.
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