"Old soldiers never die, they just fade away." 

The famous phrase, paraphrased from an old Army ballad, was spoken by retired General Douglas MacArthur before a joint session of Congress on April 19, 1951.

While Barack Obama, America's 44th president, neither served in the U.S. military nor is particularly old, I thought about MacArthur's words as I began to write this article — but with a significant twist: Obama's words and actions during the waning months of the 2024 presidential election likely signaled the end of the Obama mystique and his role as the unquestioned Democrat Party power broker. 

But unlike Douglas MacArthur, Barack Obama isn't fading away; he bears much of the blame for engineering both cognitively declining Joe Biden becoming the 2020 Democrat presidential nominee and also Biden being kicked to the curb in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris and her ill-fated 2024 presidential campaign.

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As author and conservative political commentator Victor Davis Hanson put it: "Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Joe Biden nomination — and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years." 

VDH continued:

As such, he and his coterie proved the virtual architects of the Biden administration, one of the most unpopular and failed presidencies in American history.

Recall earlier that after a flailing candidate Biden lost the first three 2020 primaries and caucuses, his inert campaign was headed nowhere.

Obama and fellow Democratic insiders abruptly engineered the withdrawal of his rival 2020 presidential candidates: hard left but likely sure-loser candidates including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg.

The Obamas ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia.

Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third-term, “phone it in” administration.

Or, as wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term: “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in ...”

VDH's take on a veritable Obama third term, shared by many others, was given credence by the former president himself while speaking to a fellow Democrat about Biden being the party’s nominee in 2020. Obama famously warned: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” 

There exists no legitimate claim that Obama's warning about Biden was wrong. While unfortunate for the Democrat Party, the Biden-Harris years were an abject disaster for the American people and this country's standing on the world stage.

Be Careful What You Wish For

VDH nailed the following, which I read with a smile on my face, save for the part about wrecking the nation.

The Obamaites then got their wish for four years of enacted hard-left directives that they could only have dreamed of while in actual power.

But their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation — hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare and weaponization of the government.

And the ruling radicalism beneath the Biden facade eventually cost the Democrats nearly everything — the presidency, the House and the Senate.

By the time Kamala Harris lost the election in spectacular fashion, VDH noted, "Voters had tuned out a nagging and patronizing Obama — and his stale, now-dated, hope-and-changey, boilerplate speeches."

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The Bottom Line

So while General Douglas MacArthur "faded away," haughty Barack Obama will be remembered by untold numbers of Americans as the guy who stayed at the party too long — and by some of us who have long thought Obama should never have been at the party in the first place.