“This should not be a close election, but it will be,” Barack Obama told Democrat donors over the weekend. “And the reason it will be is not because of Hillary’s flaws, but rather because, structurally, we’ve become a very polarized society.” Actually, it most certainly is because of Hillary Clinton’s flaws, which are manifold. It wasn’t that long ago that Obama was pretty confident that Clinton had the election in the bag. She certainly shared the overconfidence, but her flaws have caught up with her and the race is closer than ever. Thus, Obama made the calculation to jump into the race with what Bloomberg calls “a presidential campaign blitz for Hillary Clinton unprecedented in the modern era.” Bloomberg reports that Obama is “pledging a dramatic commitment of time and resources to a contest he now unabashedly frames as a referendum on his personal and political prestige. Obama plans to devote at least one to two days each week in October to campaign for Clinton through rallies, targeted radio and television interviews, social media outreach and fundraising.”

As Obama put it to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Saturday night, he’d consider it “a personal insult, an insult to my legacy” if black voters don’t show up for Clinton in sufficient numbers. Indeed, Obama’s legacy is the sole reason he takes any interest in this election at all. He knows Donald Trump is a direct result of his own disastrous policies over the last eight years. And he knows Clinton is the only way to stop a serious and embarrassing repudiation.

Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned reasons, he can’t trust Clinton to win this one on her own. So, he’s living by the mantra that if you want something done right, you better do it yourself. So we’ll see if the man who’s bankrupted the country, run the economy into the ground and made the U.S. far less safe by creating the Islamic State can make the case that a lying, corrupt old woman is worth trusting to continue all those policies.