Is Barack Obama calling the shots at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Increasingly, it’s a question worth considering.

Throughout Joe Biden’s one-and-done term in office, many of us on the Right have assessed this president’s cognitive state and routinely concluded that someone else is steering the ship of state. On occasion, we’ve even gone so far as to name names: Ron Klain, Susan Rice, Xi Jinping, Joy Behar.

But one name has kept coming up from Day One: Barack Obama. Indeed, how many times have we assessed this administration’s divisive and ruinous policies and said, only half-kidding, “This is Obama’s third term”?

Think about it: In 2020, Joe Biden ran as a steady, sensible, centrist alternative to the volatile, mean-tweeting Donald Trump. Scranton Joe, we were told, would return the American presidency to normalcy.

And how’s that working out?

Answer: It isn’t. The country is a mess, and the American people are more divided than ever and more pessimistic about their future than ever. And there isn’t a single overarching Biden policy we can think of that we’d consider centrist, not a single policy we’d consider an effort to bridge this growing political gap — not on border security, nor social policy, nor fiscal policy, nor foreign policy, nor crime. In each of these areas, Biden’s policies have hewed noticeably to the left of where he’d always been. But why? Does he sense that the country has shifted leftward and that his policies are merely a response to that shift? Or are these policies a strong-armed attempt to drag the American people to a place they seem unwilling to go? We think the latter. And we wonder why Biden would depart so radically from his age-old legislative philosophy — a philosophy of going along and getting along.

Unless maybe he isn’t really setting White House policy at all.

It starts to make sense: Throughout his two terms in office, Barack Obama’s personality always polled ahead of his policies — that is, the American people consistently had a more favorable opinion of him as a politician than they did of his policies. That’s what got him reelected. Yet here we have Joe Biden, who doesn’t have the benefit of Obama’s personal popularity but who does have the detriment of his unpopular policies. As a president, he thus embodies the worst of both worlds.

Obama left office more than six years ago, but, as The Daily Signal’s Jarrett Stepman points out: “Instead of a post-racial America, racial and gender identity are becoming the only things that matter to elite institutions. Those are trends that began in earnest during Obama’s second term and have only accelerated under Biden.”

Lefty David Samuels, writing in Tablet magazine, lends further support to the shadow-presidency narrative with a commonsensical observation:

The Obamas never left town. Instead, they bought a large brick mansion in the center of Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood — violating a norm governing the transfer of presidential power which has been breached only once in post-Civil War American history, by Woodrow Wilson, who couldn’t physically be moved after suffering a series of debilitating strokes.

It’s a great question: Why didn’t Obama, who at various times has expressed his dislike for politics and for the swamp generally, get the heck out of Dodge as soon as his term in office was up? Why isn’t he living full time in Hawaii? Or on Martha’s Vineyard? Or in some tony suburb of Chicago? Answer: Because he’s still deeply engaged in Democrat politics.

Writing in The Spectator, Ben Domenech reminds us of something Obama said to late-night also-ran Stephen Colbert back in 2015:

I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony. I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.

Seen in this latter-day light, these comments don’t seem quite so tongue-in-cheek, do they?

Regarding all the activity at the Obamas’ DC mansion, Domenech concludes by asking, “Assuming that there is truth to this tale, why is the DC press corps so incurious about it?”

Indeed, why aren’t any wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins staking out that Kalorama neighborhood to see who’s coming and going? Why is it they were so interested in the palace intrigue of the Trump administration, but so disinterested now that decrepit Joe Biden is in office?

Could it be that they’re afraid of what they might learn?