It’ll never happen because he’s too big of a coward to go to any venue where attendees would seriously challenge his worldview and warped versions of history, but it would be nice if someone could fact-check Barack Obama in real-time. I’d pay money to see it. Hell, I’d pay money to do it.
Obama went to Salem State University this week and told the students that one of the world’s great challenges is old men clinging to power. They’re afraid of irrelevance and death, he explained. Young voices need platforms. Don’t encourage the old ones. He said this in 2026, having left office in 2017, to an audience that was in elementary school when he did.
There is no version of that sentence that doesn’t indict him. Obama has spent a decade refusing to leave the stage: the podcasts, the campaign swings, the convention speeches, the reported behind-closed-doors sessions with House Democrats earlier this month pitching them on how to handle artificial intelligence. Every Democratic presidential nominee since he left has been someone he blessed or someone he pointedly didn’t. No former president in modern memory has exercised this much ongoing control over his party’s direction, and none has done less to develop a successor who could operate without him.
But the hypocrisy gets even worse, and it has a name. Joe Biden was 81 years old and visibly failing when he tried running for reelection, and the man who stood beside him fundraising was…Barack Obama. There is footage of him taking Biden by the arm and guiding him off a stage at one of those events, footage that circulated for months while the White House press corps was assuring Americans their eyes were malfunctioning. Obama had more standing than any person alive to say the quiet thing out loud. He had the relationship, the stature, the party’s ear. He said nothing publicly until the June debate made silence impossible, and then the reporting began to emerge about how privately concerned he had supposedly been all along.
That’s the ballgame. An old man clung to power, did real damage doing it, and Obama helped him do it — right up until the polling made a different position more convenient. Now he lectures college students about the phenomenon as though he’d observed it from a distance, in some other country, involving people he’d never met, or an event he’d taken no part in.
And look at the party he built. Chuck Schumer is 75 and fighting off his own left flank to keep a leadership post. The Democratic bench below the septuagenarians consists largely of communists. The gerontocracy Obama is describing isn’t a global abstraction. It is the organization he led for eight years and has informally run for the nine since.
While we’re at it, the other line from that speech deserves a moment. He suggested the world would be better if women ran every government for a couple of years. Fine sentiment. He was the man who cleared the field for himself in 2008 against Hillary Clinton, and who a decade later watched his vice president push Kamala Harris aside in favor of another term for himself.
It’s time to say this: Shut up, Obama. Sit down. Be quiet. Stop harming the country that has been better to you than you deserve.
