From the standpoint of pure political self-interest, it makes sense for Obama to insert himself into the election at this point. He thinks a blue wave is coming and he wants some credit. If it doesn't happen, no one in media or Dem politics would dare blame him.
It's much less clear why Democrat strategists would welcome Obama's presence. If there's a blue wave rolling in and their base is juiced into a delirious frenzy, they don't need him. He fires up Republican voters and doesn't do much for independents.
Obama presided over one of the most sweeping crash-and-burns a U.S. political party has ever suffered. HE won re-election, but his party lay in ruins behind him.
Presumably Democrats think his time away from office and the constant fireworks around Trump will make voters forget why they turned against Democrats under Obama and welcome him back as an elder statesman.
In other words, they're banking on the short memory of American voters and the power of the media to conjure halos around Obama's head. Neither of those bets are entirely irrational, but I think they're badly misinterpreting how persuadable voters feel.
Obama's hypocrisy, his tedious lectures, his endless moralizing, and his outright worship of government as a divine force are going to rub people the wrong way all over again.
The media is accustomed to writing history. They can frame Obama as a wistful memory, but the flesh-and-blood reality of the man is that he's fingernails on a blackboard to all but his devoted faithful.
Who knows how Obama will play to the current schism in the Democrat party between the old-guard Clinton types and the brash young socialists? Do they resent him for the Clinton debacle or revere him as the revolutionary vanguard who sabotaged private-sector medicine?
But he's definitely a unifying force for Republicans. His emergence on the stage will remind feuding GOP factions of happier times when they were united and energized. He'll remind them of what Democrats do when they gain power.
Obama taking the stage and burbling about $32 trillion socialized medicine schemes is a bucket of icewater in the face of nominal Republicans who advise, "vote Dem in 2018 to teach Trump a lesson!" Obama is a reminder of how much that rank idiocy really costs.
Obama is a very useful reminder that Democrats do not, at all, ever, fall for the insipid arguments they like to push about "limited mandates" and "asterisk presidencies." They grab power and ruthlessly use it to reshape the electorate. They don't "reach across the aisle."
And the media does not, at all, ever hold Democrats accountable for below-the-belt street-fighting partisanship. None of them are going to pick apart Obama's speech today and remind you how divisive he was, or how he led the league in exploiting resentments.
So don't listen to any nominal Republican who tells you the party needs a light drubbing in 2018 to serve as a mild rebuke. Obama is a living reminder that Dems don't DO mild rebukes. They turn the full power of government against enemy voters every chance they get. /end
