Since before he even took office, it has been speculated that President Joe Biden is not the person calling the shots in his administration from within the White House but rather is being guided by others behind the scenes.
Those others are reportedly an "army of Obama administration alumni" that fill key positions and receive their orders not from President Biden but from their old boss, former President Barack Obama, according to Breitbart.
In that way, Obama has achieved something that no other modern president since World War II can claim -- a third term of managing the nation's affairs and setting its political agenda, albeit quietly from an exclusive neighborhood in Washington D.C. instead of from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
This speculative theory of former President Obama secretly running the show in President Biden's White House is not particularly far-fetched for those who pay close attention to the political goings-on in and around the nation's capital, and Obama himself even half-jokingly remarked upon his desire to be the president behind the scenes shortly after Biden was elected in 2020, according to Deadline at that time.
In an interview with late-night talk host Stephen Colbert, Obama admitted, "I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front-man or front-woman and they had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating."
That quip, dismissed as humor or outright ignored by so many, has in so many ways seemingly been proven as prescient in the nearly three years that have elapsed since Obama first made it.
In a recent lengthy article from Tablet magazine titled "The Obama Factor," author David Samuels interviewed historian and Obama biographer David Garrow, and the notion of former President Obama exerting substantial influence over the agenda and operations of President Biden's administration came up repeatedly within the discussion.
The above quote from the Colbert interview certainly garnered a mention, but so too did the fact that Obama, unique among virtually all of his predecessors, did not leave town after his presidency ended but rather encamped himself in a mansion in D.C.'s elite Kalorama neighborhood.
That was done ostensibly at first so that his youngest daughter could finish school but then the reason shifted to a necessity to lead the anti-Trump "resistance" and now, apparently, to serve as a barely-seen guiding hand for the Biden White House.
And, though the mainstream media has gone out of its way to try to avoid covering it, there nonetheless have been reports of top Democratic influencers and officials coming and going from what increasingly seems to be the real center of power in D.C. in Kalorama.
At another point in the wide-ranging discussion between Samuels and Garrow, it was noted that there was a confluence of prominent figures from the Obama administration who now fill key roles in the Biden administration -- and how the media, again, seemingly deliberately fail to see or dismissively overlook the connected dots.
"There are obviously large parts of White House policymaking that belong to Barack Obama because they’re staffed by his people, who worked for him and no doubt report back to him. Personnel is policy, as they say in Washington," Samuels observed.
"Which to me is a very odd and kind of spooky arrangement. Spooky, because it is happening outside the constitutional framework of the U.S. government, and yet somehow it’s been placed off the list of permitted subjects to report on," he added. "Which is a pretty good indicator of the extent to which the information we get, and public reactions to that information, is being successfully controlled. How and by whom remain open questions, the quick answer to which is that the American press has become a subset of partisan comms."
Whether and to what extent Obama is controlling, or at the very least influencing, the current administration nominally led by Joe Biden, is likely something that will not be fully made clear for quite some time, if ever, but is nonetheless a deeply consequential topic that requires legitimate scrutiny.
