President Obama, who has yet to endorse anyone for president, has one piece of advice for voters: pick a Democrat, any Democrat, doesn't matter whom.

PJMedia captures the sense of panic in one of Obama's addresses to the barons of Silicon Valley:

"Everybody needs to chill out about the candidates, but gin up about the prospect of rallying behind whoever emerges from this process," Obama told the millionaire techies, according to far-left news channel CNN. "There will be differences" between them, he added, "but I want us to make sure that we keep in mind that, relative to the ultimate goal, which is to defeat a president and a party that has ... taken a sharp turn away from a lot of the core traditions and values and institutional commitments that built this country," those differences are "relatively minor." "The field will narrow and there's going to be one person, and if that is not your perfect candidate and there are certain aspects of what they say that you don't agree with and you don't find them completely inspiring the way you'd like, I don't care," he went on to say. "Because the choice is so stark and the stakes are so high that you cannot afford to be ambivalent in this race."

This is nuts advice to that audience, given that several of the candidates are all but pledging to put those companies out of business. Should Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, go vote for Elizabeth Warren, who can't stop singling him out as her model bad guy? It's not exactly in tune with what Silicon Valley is up against. How about Bernie Sanders? Should they vote for a guy like that? Some will, but probably not the ones who know that the Sanders idea is annihilation.

What we have here is Obama being Obama, always looking out for himself.

The only real reason he could really be so tin-eared toward his audience is that a Democrat in place instead of a Republican would be his best hope of saving his legacy.

President Trump's been dismantling that piece by piece, and any president who manages to stay in power is going to leave a mark.

The problem with Obama is that his legacy is built on water. Having rammed through signature legislation such as Obamacare on strictly partisan lines, and having enacted regulations such as DACA by executive order after Congress refused to pass his proposed legislation, dismantling his one-man rule is pretty much a given, a matter of time, given that pendulums swing for a reason. President Trump's unusual election was likely a bid to correct Obama's nonpartisan rule by fiat at least in part; he was possible only because Obama was so extreme. Historically, only bipartisan bills stand the test of time as power shifts from one side of the political aisle to the other. Unless your party's rule is permanent, unpopular fiats are going to get swept aside in favor of better stuff. That's the real way democracy works. Obama's legacy, as I noted here, was all but certain to be erased as the pendulum swings, and doubly so if voters give the next party a stronger mandate on a second term.

Obama always dismissed bipartisanship as Republican recalcitrance and never attempted to cut deals with them. He was always the holy one, calling his one-man rule things such as "core traditions and values and institutional commitments that built this country," as he said above. It's a laughable statement if there ever was one, given his far-left and Marxist past and associations.

In any case, the ex-president can see the writing on the wall as Trump surges in the polls and most Democratic presidential candidates fall flat on their faces. (How's Joe Biden doing these days, Barack?) They're all a disaster, and he knows they're a disaster, yet they're his only hope for keeping a scintilla of his legacy intact. So he throws out that desperate plea to vote for anyone, for nothing more than to beat Trump.

For all of George Bush's shortcomings, we never saw the man do that.

But Obama's a bit different.

Color me doubtful that anyone listens to him.

Image credit: My Hobo Soul via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.