Most Democrat candidates don’t want Joe Biden to campaign for them but Barack Obama is always welcome. Obama is hitting the campaign trail for Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock in Georgia and Mandela Barnes and Tony Evers in Wisconsin.

On October 28, Obama will go to Atlanta. The next day he will be in Detroit and Milwaukee for events to help get out the vote. He was interviewed for the podcast Pod Save America. The podcast is hosted by four former Obama staffers – Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor. Obama took aim at Democrats and advised them to stop obsessing over Trump and to instead focus on what voters are really concerned about. He said Democrats should stop obsessing over ‘the latest crazy thing’ Donald Trump does. Their energy should focus on issues like inflation and gas prices.

‘We spend enormous amounts of time and energy and resources pointing out the latest crazy thing he said, or how rude or mean some of these Republican candidates behaved,’ Obama said.

That’s probably not something that in the minds of most voters overrides their basic interests — Can I pay the rent? What are gas prices? How am I dealing with childcare?’

For once, Obama is right. Democrats have gambled that the issue of abortion alone will bring their voters out to the polls. They continue to be obsessed with Trump and never fail to deride a Republican candidate as a Trump supporter because to them, Trump is the ultimate boogeyman. Voters are responding to Republican messaging because they know Democrats control Congress and the White House and the country is in the dumpster. Republican candidates are focused on everyday issues that people from across the economic spectrum have to deal with, like the high price of groceries, the price of a gallon of gas at the pump, violent crime in their neighborhoods, the Biden border crisis, and the state of public schools.

We are just about two weeks away from election day and Obama is waiting until the very end to get involved, which is telling. He sees the writing on the wall. His former vice president is deeply unpopular and is dragging down candidates of his party. They don’t want to be seen on the same stage as Biden. Candidates dodge the question from reporters as to if they will invite Biden to campaign with them. The answer is no, no they are not asking him to campaign for them. Obama’s appearances in Georgia and Wisconsin, two states that will greatly affect the outcome of the midterm elections, are a Hail Mary attempt to get Democrats fired up to show up at the polls. I look for him to appeal to younger voters and black men who have so far shown indifference to midterm campaigns.

Obama said the rhetoric needs to cool down. It seems to me that he should be telling that to Biden, who has increased his heated rhetoric against Republicans and the name-calling, too.

He said: ‘Sometimes Democrats are [buzzkills]. Sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells, and they want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way, make mistakes.’

Obama added that his fellow Dems should learn from what he felt were his mistakes as president, saying: ‘I used to get into trouble whenever, as you guys know well, whenever I got a little too professorial and, you know, started … when I was behind the podium as opposed to when I was in a crowd, there were times where I’d get, you know, sound like I was giving a bunch of policy gobbledygook.’

He noted: ‘That’s not how people think about these issues. They think about them in terms of the life I’m leading day to day. How does politics, how is it even relevant to the things that I care the most deeply about?’

That’s amusing. Obama had 99 problems and being a policy wonk wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t delivering the fine points of policies when he was filibustering reporters during press conferences. He was killing time so that he wouldn’t have to answer too many questions. We saw through that time and time again. He wasn’t known for spouting policy, he was known for filibustering to stall.

Obama will draw big crowds, the kind that Biden can’t on the campaign trail. Does that mean that Democrats will show up to vote in November? No. It does ironically show Biden as unpopular and voters are frustrated with his policies that have brought on historically high inflation and made their lives worse, not better, than two years ago. Biden’s only solution is to throw money at problems without fleshing out details. That is why we are in the mess we are. Massive federal spending has accelerated inflation. Voters aren’t stupid. They know what they see when they go to make purchases. That discontent will be reflected in November. Obama knows it.