Barack Obama was never a traditional American president. After all, he was the only president ever to come to the White House manifestly disliking and being embarrassed by the country he was elected to lead. With that as a background, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s publicly meddling in the upcoming election in a way that even Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton didn’t try. (Former Republican presidents have more graciously stayed out of the fray.)

Both of Obama’s lines of attack are serious. First, he’s explicitly saying that Trump is trying to throw the election by putting his managerial skills to work to address a postal system that is in complete disarray. Second, he’s attacking his own former Vice President, who is now waiting in the wings to be officially crowned as the Democrat party’s presidential candidate.

The United States Post Office is a mess. In 2018, the Post Office had a net loss of $3.91 billion. In 2019, the net loss had more than doubled, reaching a staggering $8.81 billion. Even considering the claim that some of that money was a result of bookkeeping changes, the net loss was still almost $2 billion greater than in 2018.

Thanks to the Wuhan virus, 2020 is promising to be the worst year ever. At the end of April, the Post Office said that its first-quarter losses were already $4.5 billion. In the second quarter, the Post Office lost another $2.2 billion. It is a barely functional institution.

Nevertheless, Democrats are insisting that, come November, all voting in America must be done via the U.S. Mail, with states mailing ballots to every registered voter and the voters mailing them back. Others have pointed out that this will be a disaster, so I won’t belabor the point. It’s enough to say that the possibilities of fraud on a hitherto unknown scale are enormous. Moreover, with the Postal union just having endorsed Joe Biden, if Trump voters are forced to vote by mail, they'll have a reasonable fear that their ballots will never get counted.

Donald Trump, looking at this mess, decided to do what he’s done for decades: Install new management to make a business better. This isn’t just his avocation; it’s also his constitutional job.

In June, Trump appointed Louis DeJoy, an experienced businessman, as his Postmaster General. DeJoy immediately set about trying to slow the financial bleeding. Democrats, of course, complained. Things really went “postal,” though, on August 7, when DeJoy reassigned or removed 23 senior postal officials. Management shuffles are a logical step to take when an organization is dysfunctional.

In our politicized age, this was going to be a hot potato under any circumstances. Still, Obama, who should be staying out of things, turned it into a nuclear potato by accusing Trump of deliberately sabotaging the election:

Barack Obama slammed President Donald Trump for trying to ‘actively kneecap’ the postal service to disenfranchise voters.

Obama did not say Trump’s name but did refer to the ‘president’ in his interview on the podcast of David Plouffe, his former campaign manager, in some of his harshest, direct criticism of Trump to date.

‘What we’ve seen in a way that is unique to modern political history is a President who is explicit in trying to discourage people from voting,’ Obama said. ‘What we’ve never seen before is a President say, ‘I’m going to try to actively kneecap the postal service to encourage voting and I will be explicit about the reason I’m doing it.’’ 

‘That’s sort of unheard of,’ he added. 

Ironically, Obama meddled on the same day that Dr. Fauci finally admitted that, if people could shop, they could also do in-person voting.

But that wasn’t the end of Obama’s meddling. There was a leak on Friday (that Obama might have planted) that Obama is unhappy with Biden’s candidacy:

[A] number of anonymously sourced quotes from Obama leaked out throughout the 2020 Biden campaign where the former president allegedly expressed doubts about his former running mates’ fitness for office.

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f--k things up,” one Democrat who spoke to the former president recalled him saying.

When lamenting his own diminishing relationship with the current Democratic electorate, particularly in Iowa, Obama reportedly told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”

It sounds to me as if, with Kamala Harris now in place in the campaign, Obama is attempting to remove Biden from the picture entirely. Obama was never really going to let a senile man head the Democrat party ticket, and he may now be getting his ducks in a row to ease Biden out.

Put simply, Russia couldn’t have done a better job at interfering with a presidential election than Obama has done. Four years ago, his interference was covert and illegal. This year, it’s overt and disgusting.

Image: Obama and Biden, by Obama White House; U.S. Government work, public domain.