Why won’t Barack Obama go away?

In 1921, Woodrow Wilson, the first of America’s four transformative progressive presidents, became the first president to remain in Washington and make the nation’s capital his permanent home after leaving office. In very mild defense of the man who did more than any other to establish the administrative state and thus pervert America’s carefully constructed constitutional design, Wilson had suffered a debilitating stroke two years prior that left him partially paralyzed and nearly blind. He died just a few years later, in 1924.

Barack Obama, the nation’s fourth transformative progressive president (following Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson), had no such excuse when he and his wife, Michelle, decided, like Wilson, to similarly make Washington’s tony Kalorama neighborhood their permanent home after leaving 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Surely, the physical proximity to the White House was one factor in the Obamas’ decision; the 44th president officially visited his former vice president there at least once, with perhaps other unofficial visits as well.

But convenience of his physical proximity to the White House aside, Obama’s residential decision has proven to be even more symbolically potent. The 44th president has declared that he is still here and he is not going anywhere. Some recent presidents, such as George W. Bush, have decided to ride off into the sunset and enjoy a peaceful, private retirement after leaving the Oval Office. Bush even took up painting as a hobby. Obama is a golfer, but he seems to enjoy politicking and punditry more than the links.

Unfortunately, the American people are suffering the consequences of Obama’s insatiable desire to insert himself into the national conversation. He has been vocal in criticizing the Trump-era GOP and boosting Democrats on the campaign trail ever since making the two-mile trek from the White House to Kalorama. Obama soared to the top of political world after his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech vowed there was not a liberal America and a conservative America, but a singular United States of America. It’s a poignant sentiment. But once in power, Obama ruled as divider in chief.

All these years later, he’s still acting the same way.

In March, Obama released a video endorsing Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s aggressive Old Dominion redistricting effort, which would change the state’s 11-seat congressional delegation from a 6-5 likely Democrat advantage to a 10-1 likely Democrat advantage. The redistricting referendum narrowly passed among Virginia voters, although it is now being challenged on procedural grounds at the Supreme Court of Virginia. There is no more blatantly and intrinsically partisan issue in all of American public life than redistricting, but Obama still said Spanberger’s effort was necessary to “level the playing field.” The irony was astounding: Obama himself was a longtime foe of gerrymandering, tweeting in 2020 that the practice “contributed to stalled progress and warped our representative government.” But anything, it seems, to give his party a new advantage.

He might as well have invoked former Peruvian autocrat Oscar R. Benavides: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

Even more maddening was Obama’s interview this week with Stephen Colbert of “The Late Show.” Among other whoppers, Obama excoriated Republicans for not respecting judicial independence and vitiating the rule of law, and criticized Donald Trump for his Justice Department’s alleged prosecution of political enemies. But it was the one-time constitutional law lecturer who, while the Supreme Court was considering the legality of his health care law, delivered a Rose Garden address claiming it would be “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” for the court to do its most basic job: judicial review. It was Obama who, channeling Wilson’s vision for administration, claimed he just needs a pen and a phone to enact his transformative agenda. And it was Obama who willfully ignored the (actually) unprecedented Biden-era Justice Department prosecutions of Trump, despite his physical and symbolic closeness to the White House.

The hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness is galling. But even more than that, we must ask: Why is Obama doing this? He apparently admitted that his politicking is causing “genuine tension” in their marriage. It hardly seems like Obama’s antics are helping his party, either. For starters, the Virginia redistricting referendum was a nail-biter – decided by a far narrower margin (roughly 3%) than comparable recent statewide elections. And the brand problem runs far deeper than that. Obama emerged as the top Harris-Walz presidential campaign surrogate two years ago following the Democrats’ bloodless July 2024 coup of incumbent Joe Biden – and the Harris-Walz ticket proceeded to lose every single swing state. Obamaism, an ur-wokeism of sorts, was emphatically rejected by the American people.

So once again: Why? I’ve given the question some thought.

For more than a decade, Obama lectured at my alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School. A portrait of him teaching still hangs outside one of the classrooms. Once while there, I asked a senior, decadeslong member of the faculty what Obama was like as a colleague. The professor didn’t mince words, telling me Obama was cold, aloof and generally disliked by the faculty because he preferred to immerse himself in his own musings rather than engage with his colleagues or contribute to an atmosphere of collegiality by exchanging ideas.

In other words, constitutional law lecturer Obama exuded arrogance and harbored a thinly veiled disdain for competing viewpoints. That’s how he governed as president: “I won,” as he infamously rubbed it in congressional Republicans’ face just days after taking the oath of office. That’s how he’s still acting today.

Pride goes before destruction, we know from Proverbs. So it is, and so it has always been. Perhaps Obama will open the Good Book and learn that lesson before it’s too late – for his marriage just as much as for his party’s fortunes this November.

Editor’s note: The Virginia Supreme Court has ruled on the redistricting case mentioned herein, deciding its approval process violated the state constitution.