President Obama and Hillary Clinton are telling different stories about the state of the country, but broadly speaking their interests are aligned. PHOTOGRAPH BY SOE THAN WIN / AFP / GETTY

In 2008, during a debate before the New Hampshire primary, Barack Obama dismissed Hillary Clinton as “likable enough.” It is a small irony, perhaps, but not an insignificant one, that he is now making the case that he likes her a lot. Over the past several months, in public and private appearances, Obama has been touting her credentials (“she would make an excellent President”), vouching for her personal qualities (“she’s really warm and funny and engaging”), and defending her against critics who say she is overly cautious and artificial (authenticity, he told a group of Democratic donors in March, is overrated in politics). At times, he has made a stronger case for Clinton’s candidacy than she has herself. Obama today might be the best friend—and the most important one—Clinton has in the political arena.

Obama has been careful, given the tenacity of Bernie Sanders’s campaign, not to antagonize progressives by endorsing Clinton before she clinches the nomination. But the President has clearly been eager to get in the fray. He has been jabbing—with increasing force—at Donald Trump, and last week he travelled to Elkhart, Indiana, to road test a new stump speech. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Obama began, “but this is an election year.” The crowd of two thousand, packed into a high-school gymnasium, cheered as Obama denounced the “anti-government, anti-immigrant, anti-trade” agenda of Trump and the Republican Party. On Monday, a few hours before the Associated Press declared that Clinton had secured enough delegates to win the nomination, the Times reported that Clinton advisers and the White House were in “active conversations” about how to deploy the President on the campaign trail. But the President, for his part, has already deployed himself.

Elkhart was a reminder of just how effective Obama is on the stump. And his rising approval rating—now at fifty-one per cent, up six points since January, according to Gallup—has increased expectations that he’ll send some of his likability in Clinton’s direction (and save a little for the rest of the Democratic slate across the country). Last week, on the Web site The Ringer, Obama’s former speechwriter, Jon Favreau, described the President as the star player on her “Democratic Dream Team.” Chuck Todd, of NBC, has predicted that Obama will serve as Clinton’s chief “character witness.” Others have suggested that Obama will focus on the economy, as he did in Elkhart, or on baiting Trump, or wooing Sanders’s supporters, or all of the above.

At the most basic level, Obama’s and Clinton’s interests are aligned. To protect his policy achievements, Obama needs Clinton to win. In order to win, she needs him to energize young voters, Latinos, African-Americans, and independents—all groups that view Obama far more favorably than they do Clinton. That common interest helps explain why the Obama and Clinton camps have been able, so far, to avoid the sort of sniping, second-guessing, and public displays of ambivalence typically seen between eighth-year Presidents and their preferred successors. At a similar stage of the 1988 election, for example, aides to Vice-President George H. W. Bush were fretting openly and a bit mournfully about Ronald Reagan’s indifference to their campaign; on May 11th of that year, when Reagan endorsed Bush at a black-tie dinner in Washington, he delivered remarks so perfunctory that he had to issue a reëndorsement the next day. And, during the 2000 campaign, Vice-President Al Gore distanced himself not only from Bill Clinton, whom he considered politically toxic in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, but also from the record of the Clinton Administration as a whole. Gore’s staff went so far as to block Clinton from campaigning for Senate candidates in strongly Democratic states like New Jersey.

No psychodrama attends the relationship between Obama and Hillary Clinton. But, over the coming months, that relationship is almost certain to be tested and strained. There is already a big difference between the stories that Obama and Clinton, respectively, are telling about the state of the country. By Obama’s reckoning, the U.S. has “the strongest, most durable economy in the world.” In Elkhart, he acknowledged that wage growth is too slow, and the gap between rich and poor too wide, but he vigorously rejected the narrative of national decline being peddled by Trump, the Republican Party, and right-wing media outlets. Obama said he was out to “do some quick myth-busting.” He rattled off statistics on job creation, clean energy production, health-care coverage, deficit reduction—a ticker tape of progress made possible, he said, by “a series of smart decisions” that he made early in his tenure with the consent of a briefly coöperative Congress. “By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the beginning of my Presidency,” Obama said.

In Clinton’s stump speech, her standard line about the economic recovery is this: “I don’t think President Obama gets the credit he deserves for getting us out of the ditch that the Republicans put us in.” That, in fact, is her only line about the economic recovery. Like Obama, she cites statistics, but of an earlier vintage: “Go back to when my husband was President,” Clinton said at a rally in Salinas, California, on May 25th. The Clinton Administration’s policies, she said, “set us on a course that led to twenty-three million more jobs. Incomes rose for everybody, not just people at the top. Median family income was up by double digits. . . . We were on the right track, my friends.” Then came George W. Bush and his Administration, which “cut taxes and . . . took their eye off of the financial markets and the mortgage markets, and you know what happened.” Clinton’s mention of Obama and the ditch, which comes next in this narrative, is what is called, in speechwriting parlance, a “drive-by.” Clinton speeds past the Obama Presidency, turning her attention to the many families today who “worry about how to keep the lights on and the rent paid,” who are “up against pressures and problems too big for them to solve on their own,” as she told a union audience in Detroit on May 23rd.

It’s anybody’s guess how Obama feels about all this, but it’s hard to argue with Clinton’s calculus. She is running for President at a time of acute discontent. Obama’s job-approval rating might be rising, but sixty-five per cent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls. By this measure, the nation is substantially more pessimistic than it was in either 1988 or 2000. So Clinton cannot expect to ride her predecessor’s coattails the way that Bush did—or Gore could have. If Obama can convince voters that the economy is stronger than they think it is, Clinton will benefit. But if he presses his story line too hard he might find himself on the margins of the campaign, trying to convince fewer and smaller audiences that his record is laudable. Or, as Clinton might put it, “laudable enough.”