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Free Beacon reporter/humorist Andrew Stiles has suffered through two public appearances of Barack Obama this week so you don’t have to. In “Obama Takes Another Victory Lap” he catches Obama interviewing Angela Merkel at an event sponsored by Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. this past Monday evening.

Tickets for the sold-out event — the marked price ranged from $75-$125 — included an unsigned copy of Merkel’s doorstop memoir Freedom (see the brutal Financial Times commentary on her and it here). They didn’t throw in the book with a ticket for the live stream. You had to be there. Stiles conveys the excruciating quality of this event. You didn’t have to be there. The four-minute clip below may be a few minutes too many.

On Thursday Obama spoke at his own Democracy Forum event in Chicago (video below). Stiles comments on it in “Alexander Hamilton Tried to Warn Us About Barack Obama.” Stiles cruelly quotes Obama denouncing “our current polarized environment” — “which he helped create,” Stiles notes — and stressing the importance of building coalitions that make room “not only for the woke but also for the waking.” Deep stuff.

The story is worth reading if only for the quotation from Federalist No. 72:

Free Beacon reader Barry J. from Arizona reached out to remind us of Alexander Hamilton’s opposition to presidential term limits, as outlined in Federalist No. 72, which reads at times like a specific warning about Barack Obama. Hamilton imagined future presidents who might be “vain and ambitious, as well as avaricious,” who, upon reaching the end of their allotted time in the “seat of supreme magistracy,” would be forced to assuage their considerable ego by “wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess.” Our astute reader observed that Obama appears to have “a roaring case of discontented ghosthood.”

Obama has posted the text of his remarks here for posterity. Obama’s native language is cliché. His tone is condescending. His theme is “pluralism.” He presents potted history and pure projection:

Can the idea of pluralism work in the current moment? And, for that matter, is the concept even worth saving? I believe the answer is yes. I am convinced that if we want democracy, as we understand it, to survive, then we’re all going to have to work towards a renewed commitment to pluralist principles. Because the alternative is what we’ve seen here in the United States and in many democracies around the globe. Not just more gridlock and just public cynicism, but an increasing willingness on the part of politicians and their followers to violate democratic norms, to do anything they can to get their way, to use the power of the state to target critics and journalists and political rivals, and to even resort to violence in order to gain and hold on to power. We have seen that movie a lot.

More projection:

What happens when the other side has repeatedly and abundantly made clear they’re not interested in playing by the rules?”

It’s a problem. And when that happens, we fight for what we believe in. There are going to be times, potentially, when one side tries to stack the deck and lock in a permanent grip on power, either by actively suppressing votes, or politicizing the armed forces, or using the judiciary or criminal justice system to go after their opponents. And in those circumstances, pluralism does not call for us to just stand back and say ‘well, I’m not sure, that’s okay’. In those circumstances, a line has been crossed and we have to stand firm and speak out and organize and mobilize as forcefully as we can.

As we used to put it, Obama is about as funny as rubber crutch. However, this is the funny part. He doesn’t seem to be talking about his own administration or that of President Biden.