Considering the kind of craptastic president he’s been, Barack Obama is the last person in the earth who should be dispensing advice to future “leaders of the free world.” Nevertheless, he did just that today.
So which candidate did he single out as the beneficiary of his sage counsel? Was it his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who, despite losing ten percentage points in the polls in less than a week, is still the Democratic frontunner? Or was it socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been steadily chipping away at that lead, demonstrating how desperate the Democratic party is heading into its first televised debate this coming Tuesday?
It was neither. Appearing at San Francisco’s historic Warfield Theater today for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, he shared with donors who paid as much as $10,000 several pearls of wisdom for — drum roll — hip-hop star Kanye West, who has set his sights on a 2020 run.
According CBS News, Obama prefaced his remarks by noting:
In case Kanye is serious about this whole POTUS thing — or, as he calls it, ‘peezy’ — I do have advice for him. There’s some stuff I’ve picked up along the way.
He then offered three recommendations, one of which was a piece of self-deprecating humor:
Do you really think that this country is going to elect a black guy from the South Side of Chicago with a funny name to be president of the United States? That is crazy.
He should have quit while he was ahead, but instead he proffered a suggestion — “you’ve got to spend a lot of time dealing with some strange characters who behave like they’re on a reality TV show” — that might have been funnier coming from someone whose own performance as president hadn’t fit that description.
His funny line of all, albeit unintentionally so, came when Obama shifted gears to his own achievements:
[W]e’ve made extraordinary progress,” Mr. Obama said, ticking off a laundry list of what he considered his legislative successes. He touted Obamacare’s expanded health care coverage, a nuclear deal with Iran, normalized relations with Cuba and the “longest uninterrupted job growth streak in our history.”