Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

There’s this guy with a funny name and a cool plane and a lovely house who gets talked about a lot in Washington, especially at Republican debates, but the Democratic presidential candidates haven’t been talking about him much lately—even though he’s a Democrat, and he’s the president. But at their debate in South Carolina on Sunday night, they apparently remembered that the name of the guy they hope to succeed is Barack Obama, and that they really like the job he’s doing, because Sunday night they couldn’t stop talking about how much they like him and his policies.

Martin O’Malley, who has often distanced himself from Obama, used his opening statement to credit Obama with saving the country from a depression and vowed to “build on the good things that President Obama has done.” Hillary Clinton, who ran against Obama in 2008, lavishly praised his work on the economy, Obamacare, financial reform, the Iran nuclear deal and the war on ISIL. Even Bernie Sanders, who has been highly critical of the Obama era, went out of his way to endorse the president’s work on gun control, Iran and the drawdown in Iraq. When Clinton accused the Vermont senator of insufficient support for Obamacare, he declared that he helped write it, and that he and the president are friends.


The politics of this warm embrace aren’t hard to understand. Obama’s approval rating has climbed to nearly 50 percent, and nearly 90 percent among Democrats; he’s especially popular among African-Americans, a big part of South Carolina’s primary electorate. With unemployment down by half on Obama’s watch, the deficit down three-fourths, gas at $2, and the uninsured rate at historic lows, what’s harder to understand is why the Democratic candidates have taken this long to embrace him. They’re going to be accused of running for Obama’s third term no matter what they say; it can only help them to make a case for the first two.

Obama dismissed Clinton as “likable enough” when they were rivals for the White House, and their lingering tensions often surfaced in her emails when she was his secretary of state, but she’s apparently ready to put all that in the past. Sunday night, she went out of her way to declare she was “very pleased” that Obama administration officials had visited Silicon Valley to discuss privacy and security, a pretty routine mission. She also praised the president's banal admission of regret about partisan divisions in his State of the Union address as an “important point.” And she made her most full-throated defense of the Affordable Care Act ever, declaring it “one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama,” gushing that his veto of a Republican repeal bill had “saved Obamacare for the American people.”

When Sanders chided her for accepting donations from Wall Street, she pointed out that Obama had accepted them, too, and dredged up an old Sanders quote calling the president “disappointing.” Sanders has criticized the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that Obama signed in 2010 as too weak, so Clinton rushed to its defense as “one of the most important regulatory schemes since the 1930s.” She then shifted into the artificially loud I-am-enunciating tone she deploys when she's trying to score crass political points: “I’m going to defend Dodd-Frank and I’m going to defend President Obama for taking on Wall Street, taking on the financial industry, and getting results!” She boasted that she helped lay the groundwork for the president’s Iran deal and pointedly noted that she has “spent many hours in the Situation Room, advising President Obama.”

The GOP debates have been doom-and-gloom-a-thons, but until Sunday night the Democratic debates also had a whiff of malaise, dominated by earnest discussions about stagnant wages and foreign turmoil and Washington inaction. But Sunday night even Sanders, a socialist who frequently critiques the Obama era from the left, went to great lengths to praise his leadership. “I know President Obama’s been getting a lot of criticism about this,” he said during a discussion of the Middle East. “I think he’s doing the right thing.” When Andrea Mitchell asked him whether Obama had created a vacuum that led to the growth of ISIL, Sanders flatly said no and quickly pivoted to kind words for Obama’s military drawdown in Iraq. “I supported what he did,” Sanders said.

Embracing Obama has risks for Democrats after the Republican midterm landslide of 2014, especially now that only one-fourth of the American public believes the country is heading in the right direction. But since Democrats are likely to be held responsible for the dramatic changes of the Obama era no matter what they say about it, they might as well own the legacy, and act as if they believe it’s been an era of progress. That’s especially true if the nominee turns out to be Obama’s former secretary of state, no matter how much bitterness she may harbor about 2008. With Republicans gleefully trashing Obama as a “petulant child” who hates the Constitution and cowers before our enemies, Democrats needed to provide some counterprogramming, and Sunday night they at least tried.

In any case, in a Democratic primary dominated by Obama fans, it seems wise for Democratic candidates to at least pretend they’re Obama fans, too. The winner of the Obama coalition is going to win the nomination. And that nominee's most daunting task will be getting the Obama coalition to come to the polls in November. Because the guy with the funny name and the cool plane won't be on the ballot anymore.