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It wasn’t long ago when Tucker Carlson was the preeminent voice in conservative media. This week, on his social media show, Carlson used his platform to talk to a convicted fraudster who claimed to have had sex with Barack Obama in 1999.
My first thought was to marvel at what’s become of the former Fox News host, but it wasn’t long before a more important question came to the fore: Why focus on Obama?
Or more to the point, why are so many on the right still focused on Obama?
The day before Carlson’s interview was posted online, Megyn Kelly, another prominent conservative media personality, told an on-air audience:
“There are a lot of people who think the Obamas are already running the government and that there is some sort of shadow puppet situation going on that they’re controlling.”
Kelly didn’t elaborate as to who, exactly, believes such nonsense, but the group apparently includes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich: Two weeks ago, the Georgia Republican appeared on Fox News and said he has a “hunch” that Barack Obama is secretly “making decisions in the White House.”
If this truly weird conspiracy theory sounds at all familiar, the general idea has been percolating in far-right circles for a while. In fact, not quite two months into Donald Trump’s presidency, Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania said that the former Democratic president continued to live in the nation’s capital in order to run a secret “shadow government.”
Now, evidently, conservatives are supposed to believe Obama isn’t just running a shadow government, he’s graduated to running the actual government.
These absurdities are far more common than they should be. As recently as last year, Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo suggested that the former president might be secretly “running the country,” to which Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee replied that Obama’s meetings with President Joe Biden led people to believe that the former president was “the de facto leader in the White House.”
Just two months ago, Republican Rep. Greg Murphy of North Carolina said during a Fox Business interview that Biden is merely “a puppet for a progressive left committee, as it were, headed by Obama.”
We could spend a few paragraphs stating painfully obvious facts and explaining that the former Democratic president is not secretly controlling the White House, but let’s agree that such nonsense does not warrant a meaningful fact-check.
What I find more interesting is the fact that so much of the right remains fixated on Obama.
For Republicans and their media allies, a campaign against Biden at least makes sense to the extent that he’s the incumbent Democratic president preparing to seek a second term next year.
Obama, on the other hand, has been out of office for nearly seven years. He cannot seek a third term, and there’s no reason to believe his name will ever appear on another ballot.
It’s possible, of course, that the right sees Obama as a popular figure whom they’re eager to tarnish in the hopes of some kind of partisan benefit for the GOP. But even if that were the goal, does anyone seriously believe the former Democratic president’s favorability ratings will be affected by Tucker Carlson’s interview with a fraudster?
Yes, I realize that the bonkers claims about Obama pulling secret strings is intended to smear Biden — the idea being that the president is old, so someone else must be doing the real day-to-day work — but the idea is obviously too outlandish to be taken seriously.
Old habits die hard, but the right’s Obama fixation is nearly as misguided as the right’s Hillary Clinton fixation.