As he approaches the end of his career in elected office, Barack Obama is in a truly precarious position: He is going to exit the White House having accomplished almost nothing substantive on the policy front — his health-care program is not going to survive, Gitmo is not going to be closed, we are not leaving Afghanistan, and he is sending troops into Iraq — and outside of his perch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, his party is in ruins: In Congress and the states, the Democrats are in their weakest position in modern political history. If the Democrats do not win the presidency in 2016, there are going to be some very uncomfortable questions about what exactly Obama & Co. accomplished, and at what price. What to do? Throw Herself to the wolves, of course.

Barack Obama isn’t a policy guy; he’s a personnel guy. An underappreciated aspect of Barack Obama’s politics is that he has been trying to convert the Democratic party from a party that lives in Congress to a party that lives in the White House. The Democrats owned Congress, and especially the House of Representatives, in the postwar era, with unbroken control of the speakership from 1955 to 1995. Until Newt Gingrich came in with the 1994 tsunami, the last Republican speaker had been a man born in 1884 who rode into office on the coattails of Calvin Coolidge. Except for a few brief interludes (January 3, 1947 to January 3, 1949; January 3, 1953 to January 3, 1955; January 3, 1981 to January 3, 1987), the Democrats ran the Senate, too, from the Great Depression until the Gingrich years. That version of the Democratic party was a lawmaking party. (It made a lot of bad laws.) Barack Obama’s Democratic party, the one he is giving birth to, is a different animal. He didn’t give a hoot what was in his signature health-care law — just so long as it empowered him to start putting his people in positions to make health-care decisions. His patron saint is Roy Cohn, who proclaimed the gospel “Don’t tell me what the law is. Tell me who the judge is.” Barack Obama doesn’t want to write laws — he wants to appoint judges. He doesn’t want finely crafted legislation — he wants “The secretary shall issue.”

Read the article “Obama Using Biden to Block the Clintons from Regaining the White House” on nationalreview.com.