LEADING FROM BEHIND: Obama Has Been ‘Quietly’ Advising Biden Admin — Here’s The 411

Some people have joked (or perhaps not joked) that the Biden presidency is just Obama’s third term and that he’s still running things in the White House — just from behind the scenes.

A lot of eyebrows were raised when Obama broke tradition,  and instead of leaving D.C. post-haste, he kept a home in Washington, and a key staffer, Valerie Jarrett, took up residence with his family there. It’s all kinda weird.

This speculation that the Biden Admin was actually Obama 2.0 ramped up when then-White House Press Secretary Jen “Little Red Lying Hood” Psaki admitted that the current President and his former boss “consult and talk about a range of issues” regularly.

That news, coupled with the fact that the vast majority of Biden’s cabinet members and upper-level staffers are Obama administration alum — including a couple of notable former staffers including ex-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, senior domestic policy advisor Susan Rice, and the aforementioned Jen “Circle Back” Psaki.

What also didn’t help was President Obama telling Stephen Colbert back in December 2020 that although he wouldn’t really want a third term, he’d be OK with a “frontman” with an earpiece delivering the lines as he sat in his basement in his sweats.

Former President Barack Obama quietly advised the White House over the past five months on its strategy to address artificial intelligence, engaging behind the scenes with tech companies and holding Zoom meetings with top West Wing aides at President Joe Biden’s request, according to aides to both men.The joint effort culminated Monday when Biden signed an executive order establishing some government oversight of AI development. It’s the first time Biden has tapped his former boss to help shape a key policy initiative, aides said, and he did it because Obama shares his views on the issue and brings a certain heft that could help move the process along quickly.

“You have to move fast here, not at normal government pace or normal private-sector pace, because the technology is moving so fast,” White House chief of staff Jeff Zients recalled Biden saying. “We have to move as fast, or ideally faster. And we need to pull every lever we can.”
Source: NBC News

On October 30, the Biden Administration released their Fact Sheet on the Executive Order that the President signed with the aim of ensuring that “America leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of artificial intelligence (AI).”

White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients said that Biden asked Obama for help crafting the policy because they’re both concerned about the potential damage that AI could do.

Obama published a piece on Medium released just after Biden signed the AI Executive Order with his thoughts on it — but didn’t mention that he’d been involved in developing the policy outlined in the EO. It must’ve been an oversight. Kinda weird for a narcissist like Barry to overlook that, but OK.

“Those people created platforms that helped us connect in new and exciting ways, but they also failed to anticipate the harm their tools could do. By the time it became clear, much of the damage had already been done,” wrote Obama. “We can’t make the same mistake again.”

NBC News says that the ball got rolling for Obama’s involvement with a phone call between the President and former President in June. Biden then asked Obama to consult with his team to hammer out a policy that would maximize AI innovation but minimize the potential harms, and this was followed with a lunch at the White House.

Throughout the summer and into fall, Obama was in regular contact with Biden’s team — Chief of Staff Jeff Zeints, Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan “to offer input on the executive order,” according to NBC News.

White House staffers said that the two teams were in touch about a dozen times, and as NBC News reports, “including as the administration finalized the order ahead of Monday’s announcement.”

A particularly interesting segment of the NBC News article included three little tidbits…

“The White House is particularly worried about the role AI could play in amplifying misinformation around key elections.”

I’ll bet it is.

And then there’s this:

“Already, former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential race, is amplifying baseless conspiracy theories that imply Obama is somehow secretly still in power, for which there is no evidence.”

Right. Because the White House press secretary admitting that there was constant contact between Obama and Biden from Day 1 and now an admission from the White House Chief of Staff that Obama has been working “quietly” behind the scenes on a critical policy initiative isn’t any evidence that he’s running things, guys. You can take it to the bank because NBC News said it, and the media wouldn’t lie to you, would they?

The last thing is just incredible that it was included in the article:

“A longtime ‘tech skeptic,’ Biden has experimented with ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model, and voice-cloning technology, aides said. He has even seen deepfakes of himself, his aides said, some of which were credible enough that he joked to staff members, ‘When the hell did I say that?’”

These people want you to believe that Clueless Joe Biden — the man who doesn’t seem to know where he is half the time — is playing with AI language models and voice cloning tech, and they follow that up by admitting that he has seen videos of himself that he “joked” he didn’t realize were deepfakes.

Guys… have you ever thought that maybe he wasn’t joking?

But let’s get back to Obama helping craft Clueless Joe’s AI policy.

According to Zients, Barry set the framework “that companies can innovate while also being responsible and that companies need to be accountable.” That pretty much reflects what Obama wrote in his statement posted on Medium.

What does being “responsible” include? Well, setting up standards for AI safety and security, protecting Americans’ privacy, protecting workers’ job security, and solidifying “woke” concepts, of course.

Obama’s involvement would undoubtedly explain the push to embed Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its policy partner, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), into the development of AI.

CRT and DEI have done nothing but divide people by insisting on race essentialism. We’re seeing the result of promoting this idea pathogen on college campuses in the outrageous anti-semitism that is on display in the so-called pro-Palestinian protests. And now they’re embedding it into new artificial intelligence technology. What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like we have dystopian movies about AI eliminating humans or anything…

Oh dear! We’re pretty much screwed, aren’t we?

Well, I don’t believe in giving up. We fight on. We must also prepare the next generation to not become mindless TikTok drones. This will help.

Barack Obama speaks about Joe Biden per Politico:

Yet searing, anonymously sourced quotes from Obama kept appearing through the race. One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Speaking of his own waning understanding of today’s Democratic electorate, especially in Iowa, Obama told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”

Cross-Posted with Clash Daily