Life's tough for the ever-vacationing former President Obama.

As if the licking flames of the Mueller report's aftermath, getting ever closer to him, weren't enough, there's also the 2020 presidential race. Via his media buddies at CNN, he's got word out that he's not happy with the extreme leftward turn of his fellow Democrats in the 2020 race. Here's what Grabien has about it:

Here's the transcript:

SCIUTTO: “Joining us now, CNN’s Rebecca Buck. CNN has reporting that President Obama himself was not pleased by the criticism of some of the Democrats. What are you learning?”

BUCK: “Well, that’s right, Jim. As you know, Obama has been trying to stay out of this primary as much as possible, keeping quiet and not making any endorsements. Even with his former Vice President Joe Biden in the race. But privately, Obama, our CNN colleagues are reporting, is expressing exasperation at how far left the party is moving on some policy issues, and of course, breaking with some of the things he did when he was president. Now, of course, primaries are all about the legacy of the last president, where the party is moving and it’s no secret that the Democratic Party right now has been moving far to the left policy-wise relative to the Obama Administration. And it is for many of these candidates a balancing act, because Joe Biden of course is running essentially as a third term of President Obama, but a lot of these other Democratic candidates look at what happened in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was essentially running as a third Obama term and lost to President Trump and they see this as more of a balancing act. How can they embrace President Obama, who remains very popular personally among many Democrats, while also charting a new course forward for the party, taking a more progressive direction. And that’s what we’ve seen from many of these other candidates.”

All the Google Camp and billionaire vacays and Netflix deals and Goldman Sachs paydays in the world aren't going to salve this.

And actually, Obama's right. Democrats are going to lose the next election based on their crazed leftwing proposals to upend health care, education, immigration and more. Obama's as left-wing as any of these Democrats running for president, and for that reason, the Democratic candidates are all slavering for his endorsement, especially Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. But unlike them, Obama was smart enough to lie about what he stood for, casting himself as Mister Moderate and a sort of vacuous human palimpsest for anyone to project their own ideas onto to get himself elected the first time. The second time, in 2012, he went off against a real moderate (Mitt Romney), and with little to distinguish between the two of them labelwise, won as the devil the voters knew. 

At a minimum, he's a guy who knows how to win elections by hook or by crook, so he knows they're going to lose. What's more, you can bet he's on the phone to them, passing around Fox News polls around like this, and maybe some even harsher Democratic internal polls. Here is Reason's take on the bad news for Democrats from that Fox poll:

 One of the questions asked Democratic voters whether they will vote for a candidate with a "bold, new agenda" or one "who will provide steady, reliable leadership." Fully three-quarters of respondents want the latter, with just 25 percent interested in the sort of "bold, new agenda" that virtually all Democratic candidates are peddling so far. This finding is consistent with other polling that shows that Democratic voters are far more moderate than their candidates. Even allowing for a doubling of self-described Democrats who identify as liberal over the past dozen years, Gallup found last year that 54 percent of Democrats support a party that is "more moderate" while just 41 percent want one that is "more liberal."

Yet with the exception of Joe Biden (more on him in a minute), all of the Democratic candidates—certainly the leading ones—are pushing a massively expansionist agenda, thus putting themselves at odds with their own base. 

 They're going to lose. Why should Obama endorse a loser?

And more to the point, why endorse someone whose run to the left of even Obama (who was so left-wing he triggered the Trump reaction) means attacking the Obama legacy as well? We can already see some of this going on as Democrats attack Obamacare and Obama's deportation record as not good enough. For Obama, that's a problem for his ego.

That's the big one, actually. Why endorse a loser whose real agenda is to throw a blow to his ego anyway?

Image credit: Obama Library, public domain