A new report claims that former President Barack Obama is running the administration of President Joe Biden - which, in turn, would mean that Obama is running the United States.
The report - a lengthy one - comes from Tablet magazine.
It is titled The Obama Factor, and it is authored by David Samuels and David Garrow. It is worth noting that Garrow is not only a civil rights historian but he is also a biographer of Obama.
The report is split into two parts. The first part is written by Samuels. And then, after that, a transcript is provided of an interview with Garrow.
Samuel, at one point in his part of the report, recalls the time when Obama once revealed that he would like to be the person calling the shots behind the scenes while a figurehead makes appearances.
Samuel quotes Obama - during a 2015 interview with Stephen Colbert - as saying:
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.
Samuel argues that this, more or less, is what is currently happening.
Samuel writes, "Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps—fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin—seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government."
He continues:
Instead, every few months a sanitized report appears on some aspect of the ex-president’s outside public advocacy, presented within limits that are clearly being set by Obama’s political operatives—which conveniently elide the problems that are inherent in having a person with no constitutional role or congressional oversight take an active role in executive decision-making.
Samuel, in the piece, takes aim at the media for not doing more to expose the situation with Obama.
Samuel writes, "[T]he D.C. press was no longer in the business of maintaining transparency. Instead, they had become servants of power, whose job was to broadcast whatever myths helped advance the interests of the powerful."
There is certainly a lot of truth in this statement.
Samuel goes on to write:
In the absence of what was once American journalism, it is hard to know which portrait of Obama’s post-presidency is truer to life: Obama as a celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or as a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society from his basement, in his sweats.
The answer is likely both.
