Ben Shapiro of National Review Online explains why President Obama looms large in Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s current White House run.

Hillary Clinton is in serious trouble.

She’s not in trouble because of the massive competence of Donald Trump. She’s in trouble because she is terrible at the game her husband invented: the game of “who cares more about people like you.” In March 1992, Bill Clinton met a member of an AIDS-activism group at an event at a nightclub in New York City. Attacked by the activist for not doing enough for AIDS victims, Clinton famously responded, “I feel your pain, I feel your pain.” Clinton’s false empathy led him from victory to victory; he defeated the out-of-touch George H. W. Bush and crushed the oddly self-referential Bob Dole.

But Bill Clinton’s wife is one of the least empathy-driven candidates in the history of politics. She’s manipulating, cynical, and nasty. She’s instinctively defensive, brutally cutting, and utterly cold. …

… A majority of Americans think Trump is running to help America. They think Hillary is running to help Hillary.

That’s Hillary’s fault.

But more important, it’s Barack Obama’s fault, and the Left’s fault.

Barack Obama has been a highly unsuccessful president by any objective measure. His foreign policy has led to the single most explosive rise in terrorism since the empowerment of al-Qaeda in the late 1990s by Hillary’s husband. His last two years have been plagued by a national increase in violent crime, particularly murder in major cities. The economy has continued to stall under his redistributionist, anti-capitalist watch.

And the Democrats have paid the price. The media that built Obama into a godhead for racial progress couldn’t abandon Obama; instead, they kept happy-talking their way through an increasingly dystopian America. So did Obama’s fellow Democrats. The result: massive Republican gains at the state and local level, and historic elections in 2010 and 2014 in Congressional races.

The media still can’t escape the Obama trap. When Donald Trump rightly pointed out a series of problems facing America at home and abroad, ranging from rising crime and economic malaise to the rise of jihadism, the media and the Obama administration responded by pooh-poohing Trump’s critique. No, they said, Trump’s wrong: Everything’s hunky-dory. He’s just being too “dark.”

Except he isn’t. And Americans know that.

Hillary knows it too, but she’s stuck in a bind.