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As an incumbent president running for re-election against a twice-impeached, multi-indicted Florida Man, Joe Biden will have plenty of surrogate support. Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Raphael Warnock, Maxwell Frost, Victor Shi, and other young voter advocates will be actively stumping on the ground and airwaves. The campaign will also enlist celebrities like LeBron James and Taylor Swift. But the most important surrogate may be his old boss, Barack Obama.

Of course, Obama and Biden have a multilayered relationship that contains elements of profound trust (being the last in the room, Obamacare history, the Beau bereavement process) and complexity (the Hillary of it all, Obamas refusal to back Biden in the early days of 2020, etcetera). Meanwhile, ever since Obama left the White House, his political posture has been calibrated to optimize scarcity for maximum impact. In a typical campaign cycle, after all, Obama will parachute in during the final weeks of the election, hold a half-dozen rallies, record a bunch of robocalls, collaborate with influencers, and usually sit for several broadcast TV and podcast interviews.

This post-presidential strategy, as everyone knows, has been a source of occasional frustration and even resentment among Democrats, who still get chills recalling his eloquent vivisection of Herschel Walker heading into the 2022 midterms. While Obama didnt have the best track record of endorsements as a sitting president, he remains a generational political icon to millennials and the younger Gen X crowda singular figure whose command of the Black, Hispanic, and college-aged vote fueled his historic election victory.

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