NEO: About that David Samuels Piece — Obama’s “permission structures” seem to have gone awry.

But I don’t recall the public being in favor of Obamacare prior to its passage (see the early years in this chart). As for the Iran deal, also discussed at length in Samuels’ article, I don’t think the public ever bought into it. Only the party most faithful accepted any rationale for the Iran deal – and of course the ever-compliant MSM. So Obama didn’t enter into those things by convincing the public, whatever the media said and however the media helped. He accomplished them through Congressional machinations with the help of confederates such as Pelosi, and in the case of the Iran deal by ignoring any requirement that Congress approve it.

Biden was simply not as adept at any of this, even if he’d been in full possession of his faculties (which he was not). And although Obama was pulling strings behind the scenes, it was no longer working.

As with Bill Clinton having much greater political chops and charisma than his would-be successors, Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, the tactics that advanced Obama don’t translate nearly as well when the person behind the podium is Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.