The absence of Barack Obama on the midterm campaign trail can be explained in part by his uneasy relationship with the Democratic Party. Organizing for America, the parallel political organization the president-elect created in 2009, and which later became the activist arm of Obama for America, never sat well with Democratic insiders, who blamed Obama for allowing the party infrastructure to fall into disrepair. “O.F.A. had no faith or confidence in the state parties, so they created a whole separate organization,” Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb told Politico in 2017, summarizing years of frustration felt by state-level Democrats who saw their party wither from the grassroots. “They took money away and centralized it in D.C. They gave us a great president for eight years, but we lost everywhere else.”
Even so, Democrats are perplexed that Obama is continuing to keep his distance in 2018, as the party heads into what could be the most consequential midterm election in a generation. The popular ex-president hasn’t disappeared entirely, turning up for the occasional Democratic fund-raiser and university speech, or sending fund-raising e-mails. But his overall reticence to engage with Donald Trump, even indirectly, is conspicuous. According to the Daily Beast, which spoke to several Obama alumni, he has only tweeted the word “vote” three times this year. “Everyone agrees that he is doing very little. There is just a debate as to whether that is savvy or not,” a former top Obama official said. “I think the people who are closest to him are probably all pretty comfortable with him not being as actively engaged. The people in circles of influences outward wish he was being engaged more.”
Obama’s team is framing his restraint as a calculated move. “We want to be strategic about this for a number of different reasons,” Eric Schultz, a spokesman for the ex-president, told the Daily Beast. “Because we have kept our powder dry we believe he has unique standing in this moment to have impact.” And indeed, there may be something to this strategy. If Obama threw himself into the thick of things, the thinking goes, he might provide Trump with new avenues to attack Democratic insurgents by tying them to his legacy. Instead of doing battle at the local or state level, where Democrats are outperforming, Obama might have made each race a referendum on Trump, potentially energizing otherwise latent Republican voters. Staying above the fray may have appealed to the ex-president on a personal level, too. As New York reported back in June, Obama believes that his achievements would be diminished were he to insist on re-litigating them. “He’s recognizing that the party and our country will benefit from other voices having an opportunity to weigh in, and that opportunity would be all but completely obscured if he were regularly sharing his opinion on these issues,” former White House press secretary Josh Earnest said at the time. “It is far too early to tell whether that works.”
There was a time, at the beginning of the summer, when it appeared as though Obama was ramping up for a resurgence. Reports emerged that he was quietly weighing in on 2020, meeting with Democratic hopefuls across the country to offer advice and encouragement. In late June, in his first public appearance in months, he told an audience that it was “right to be concerned” about Trump, and all but openly condemning the Republican party line: “Telling people that somebody’s out to get you, or somebody took your job, or somebody has it out for you, or is going to change you, or your community, or your way of life—that’s an old story and it has shown itself to be powerful in societies all around the world,” he said—fighting words, as far as his typical rhetoric was concerned. He later offered his endorsement to a laundry list of Democratic candidates, including both progressives and moderates.
And yet, no coordinated offensive emerged. Now, three weeks before the midterms that could determine Trump’s impeachment, the clock is rapidly running down. And while Obama evidently waits for the perfect moment to weigh in, several of his alumni fear that his decision to endorse quietly and locally, while staying mum on a national level, has not been enough:
