The sage Michael Doran adds two notes to a New York Times story about President Biden’s possible or pending departure from the 2024 presidential race. Doran highlights the New York Times story “Secluded in Rehoboth, Biden Stews at Allies’ Pressure to Drop Out of the Race,” by Peter Baker, Michael Shear, and Katie Rogers.
This NYT article about Biden edging closer to dropping out of the race contains two nuggets. First, Biden thinks that, with respect to the campaign to oust him, Obama is "a puppet master behind the scenes." Well, who am I to argue with the president of the United States? I have… pic.twitter.com/OmWDuSaVy2
— Mike (@Doranimated) July 20, 2024
Here is the text of Doran’s comment on the Times story.
I get the gist of Doran’s point regarding Netanyahu and Obama. Doran to the contrary notwithstanding, Biden seems to have exerted significant control over Netanyahu with respect to Israel’s war on Hamas. At the least, it appears that Netanyahu has succumbed to such control.
With respect to Obama as puppet master, see David Samuel’s 2023 Tablet column “The Obama Factor,” conveying Samuels’s conversation with Obama biographer David Garrow. I thought it was last year’s column of the year and is worth revisiting now. The current UnHerd column “The 2024 political war is just beginning” is Samuels’s most recent (see also his Tablet column “The portal”). It concludes:
What we will witness over the next four months will be an election campaign pitting the hero figure of a bloodied but unbowed Trump, a man despised by nearly half the country, against the anti-democratic manoeuvrings of the country’s institutional elite, as exemplified by whichever hand-picked candidate Democratic Party insiders choose to field against him. The resulting campaign will be a game without limits, in which the level of violence seems likely to escalate — which will further diminish the interest or ability on either side to acknowledge a victory by the other. Americans are about to find out what it feels like to live in a country at war with itself — no matter who wins the presidency in November.
The Obama factor is not calculated to recede any time soon.
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