We’re living through Barack Obama’s third term

One of the big questions in Washington and across the country as Joe Biden’s very public decline has accelerated is: who’s actually running the show at the White House? There have been various answers, including former White House chief of staff Ron Klain and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice; even Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff has been touted as having outsized influence. But the one name we ought to be paying more attention to is obvious – the man who cleared the 2020 field for Joe, tapped Kamala as his running mate and now hosts regular meetings at his 8,000-square-foot house just two miles from the Oval Office he used to occupy: Barack Obama.

Last week’s publication of an interview with biographer David J. Garrow by David Samuels in Tablet magazine went viral for a number of hot-button reasons, but this is the actual headline takeaway Americans ought to have for the piece: they’re living through Barack Obama’s third term.