The Barack Obama Presidential Center opened with much fanfare today, bringing discussions about the former president front and center, but Dan Foster, on today’s edition of The Editors, pushes back on the notion that Obama “is in our faces.”

“I actually think Obama is a podcaster, a content creator, and a producer for Ted Sarandos at Netflix,” says Dan, “and that those are all very grubby and small ambitions and that they’re beneath any sort of grand ambition.”

Dan points out that “if you think about Obama’s interventions in the Democratic Party, in electoral politics, in important cultural issues, in sort of the defining issues of our time, they’re very minimal.”

Obama didn’t “set for himself any . . . important, legacy-defining task,” Dan says, “nor did he see it as his part to play in preventing the worst-case scenario for the future of the Democratic Party or shaping a more desirable future for the Democratic Party.”

According to Dan, Obama has “had no post-presidency ambitions, as far as I’m concerned, beyond making the mortgage payments on his Martha’s Vineyard house. And I think it really says a lot about the guy — I mean everyone knows how disastrous his presidency was for the infrastructure of the Democratic Party.”

“He has taken a complete back seat in an era that his own co-partisans define as a hinge point on the future of the American experiment, and he’s done precisely nothing of any use.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.