Obama Humiliates Biden
W.J. Astore
In a sad spectacle, former President Barack Obama visited the White House and humiliated his former VP, Joe Biden, as this video shows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4eKEvIO3Rc
Who cares, right? But I do want to say a few things about this:
Obama stands revealed here as a total narcissist as he basks in the applause and approval of White House political operatives while Joe Biden stands outside the circle of joy, looking lost and insignificant.
Obama's "joke" of addressing a sitting president as "Vice President" was unintentionally revealing of Biden's lack of power within the White House and his own party.
I'm not surprised Obama treated Biden in this humiliating manner. Obama intervened in 2020 and made Biden the nominee for the Democratic Party. Recall how he got both Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg to drop out before Super Tuesday, thereby boosting Biden's vote in his race against Bernie Sanders. Without Obama's intervention, Sanders would have been the likely winner of the nomination process. But Obama and the DNC could not stomach the idea of a progressive like Sanders winning the nomination, so Biden was propped up as the candidate who could win, i.e., the candidate who could be controlled by corporate forces.
Here's my biggest concern. Biden isn't a complete dummy, and no man truly wants to be a puppet of others. So I wonder if we'll see Biden increasingly go off-script, in increasingly angry ways, that contribute to an increasingly dangerous world.
Biden has already gone dangerously off-script in calling for Vladimir Putin's overthrow in Russia. To Biden, Putin is a "war criminal" who must not remain in power. It's possible this heated, somewhat unhinged, rhetoric is that of an emasculated man who knows he's little more than a figurehead.
Biden turns 80 later this year and says he wants to run again in 2024. Yet, at this Obama celebration at the White House, he looked like a man lost, a bit player in his own house, diminished to the point of irrelevance.
And that's not a good thing when the U.S. needs effective, sound, and determined leadership.