Former President Barack Obama claimed Thursday that Washington runs cleaner now than through most of its past, pointing to a collapse in bribes, patronage, and favor-trading.
The former president made the argument in the third episode of A Great Book with Barack Obama, a six-episode series that premiered Thursday on Amazon’s Audible, Axios reported. The episode pairs Obama with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore for a discussion of Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men.
Obama suggested the assessment catches listeners off guard.
“People are always surprised when I tell them the federal government is so much less corrupt than probably it’s ever been, in terms of just pure bribes or patronage or favors,” he said.
The 44th president argued that the reforms behind that decline also stripped lawmakers of tools they once used to assemble coalitions. He pointed to the Lyndon B. Johnson era, claiming reforms passed on either side of Watergate wiped out most of what party bosses once used to swap favors for votes.
He described the loss in mechanical terms.
“It’s part of the reason why things got a little harder to get done because that was sort of some lubrication … to help to bridge some of the ideological differences that were out there,” Obama said.
A record 89 percent of U.S. adults told Gallup that government corruption is widespread, according to results released Sept. 2. That figure climbed ten points from last year and sits well past the 72 to 79 percent range recorded between 2010 and 2025. Among Democrats, it reached 91 percent, up from 57 percent in former President Joe Biden’s final year in office. Republicans registered 83 percent.
Democrat officials have spent the month pressing the issue. Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) claimed on ABC’s This Week that President Donald Trump’s presidency is “the most corrupt presidency that we’ve seen in our lifetimes, maybe ever in the United States.”
“So that is one of the things that I think Democrats can run on in ’26,” the Illinois Democrat added.
Corruption ads are running in more than a dozen House races and in nearly every competitive Senate state, the Washington Sun reported. Republican pollster Robert Blizzard said frustration with politics-as-usual is “at a fever pitch.”
Obama has been shaping his party’s midterm message directly. At a private fundraiser this month, he urged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to put artificial intelligence oversight at the center of the Democrat agenda.
The podcast is the sixth release under Higher Ground’s exclusive first-look deal with Audible, and the first the former president hosts himself.
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