Former President Obama is back on the political hustings again, this time sounding less combative in his warnings to voters to vote for his chosen Democrats -- and a bit more scared.

Obama said the November midterm elections would give Americans “a chance to restore sanity in our politics” during his 20-minute speech to a crowd of around 900 Democratic faithful at the Anaheim Convention Center, while warning voters of the risks of keeping Republicans in power. “If we don’t step up, things can get worse,” Obama said. “We have a chance to flip the House of Representatives; to say ‘Enough is enough.’”

Ah, yes, the restore sanity "narrative" as if the sanity problem he decries weren't the result of his own Deep State holdouts creating leaks and chaos. Nice try, pal.

But what's really vivid is the nervous, wary, warning tone of his, suggesting that he really really wants Democrats to vote for his minions ... because he himself feels endangered.

Starting with his own tired "narrative" about himself and his progressive values as the fount of all unity and progress, he gives us this:

“It’s always tempting for politicians for their own gain and for people in power to try to see if they can divide people, scapegoat folks, turn them on each other, because when that happens you get gridlock and government doesn’t work and people get cynical and decide to not participate," he said. "That, unfortunately, has been a spiral we’ve been on for the last couple of years,” Obama continued. “If we don’t step up, things can get worse.”

As if those values weren't at the heart of why Obamacare got passed with strongarm tactics and zero Republican votes. Unifier indeed.

As for things getting 'worse,' don't make us gag. Is he trying to tell us that more economic growth is a disaster? More jobs are worse? A 2% unemployment rate instead of a 3% one? A rampaging North Korea instead of a docile one?

When he says 'worse,' it's pretty obvious that, this being Obama and all, he's talking about himself.

Two things are likely driving this.

One, the U.S. economy is soaring precisely because the Obama record of regulation, bureaucrat-hiring, taxes, crony capitalism, and central planning diktats against unfavored industries is being dismantled. That's Obama's legacy, and as President Trump throws it out with the garbage, that's the end of Obama's miserable memory of wrongs against the voters.

His foreign policy record is another area of bad legacy going down the dispose-all. Weakness with Russia, North Korea, China, Cuba and Venezuela is being replaced by strength. And terrorists and religious lunatics from the Middle East are not only being called what they are, they're being checkmated as the U.S. finally stands up for its utterly reliable ally in Israel. More Obama legacy dismantled.

That has got to cheese him off, given the size of his ego. And with his own record of attempting to defend Obamacare, we know he's got a willingness to plot and connive to try to save it. - by any means necessary, as the Alinskyites say. His campaigning for a leftist congress, against all precedent for ex-presidents, is his bid to get Trump impeached, now that he can no longer do it from the inside.

But there's a second thing that has got to be scaring him: The unraveling of his Deep State plots against President Trump, the coup from within, going on as leftists in government continuously attempt to unseat and overthrow President Trump, the better to keep investigations against Deep State from reaching him. The unmaskings abuse, the slovenly issuance of FISA court warrants for surveillance against Americans, the IRS targeting of dissidents, Hillary Clinton's private illegal server, and quickie visas to Russian agents such as Natalia Veselnitskaya, to trap Trump, are all likely probes that can reach him from congressional investigators, such as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes .... unless he is stopped.

Which is why, again, Obama is campaigning for a Democratic Congress - to switch the committee chairs and take the heat off himself. That would match his ominious tocsin tone as he campaigns for Congress in California.

Out on Facebook, the estimable writer and political observer Lisa Schiffren notes the obvious about this Obama campaign:

The Democrats have a problem. They need a 'face of the party.' It can't be the crazy lady who lost the last election. It can't be the clowns in the Senate from whom we heard this week. It can't be their still ambitious gerontocracy: Biden, Kerry, Warren, & Co. And little, unelected Octavio-Cortez is just too dumb. So it has to be Barry. And Barry still sounds reasonable, cool, and as if there is a modicum of probity behind his words. Still, we are all paying a lot, per month, for Obamacare, which was a drug on the economy, the Iran deal, the gutting of the US military, and the international weak posture that were his hallmark accomplishments. And no, we're not haters just because we think 1/3 of the population of Guatemala, and 1/5th of the population of Mexico are quite enough to import...We don't want to be a failed shithole nation. And that nationalism -- no, it isn't dark and hateful. It's about loving our culture and the principles behind it, which remain open to everyone, and not wanting to import more third world culture. So--Dems need someone to rally their troops, and get their millennials off the couch to vote. And we benefit by having it be a man who cannot speak without lecturing and condescending...which is off-putting...who is, after all, the proximate cause of the Trump presidency. For which, many thanks.

Sounds like Democrats have a lot of problems, none more than Obama. No wonder he sounds so scared.