Barack Obama spent most of the midterm campaign on the sidelines, and the joke he told at the end of it has the White House still arguing about a chain restaurant.
Obama, America’s first Black president, answered Republican criticism of that joke by name-checking the middle-class restaurants he patronized with his daughters — California Pizza Kitchen, Cheesecake Factory and Chuck E. Cheese — in the closing days of a midterm campaign that ended Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026, with Democrats winning control of both chambers of Congress.
That result hands Democrats the House and Senate for the rest of President Donald Trump’s second term. Voters decided all 435 House seats and 35 of the 100 Senate seats. Nonpartisan analysts had generally favored Democrats to capture the House before the vote and saw the fight for the Senate as very close.
Those stakes pulled Obama back onto the campaign trail after Democrats kept their most formidable orator on the sidelines for most of the race. Trump’s answer to the closing run of speeches was an impression of a lettuce leaf. Neither man was on the ballot, and both took prominent roles in the campaign’s final week.
Obama headlined a rally in Morrow, Ga., near Atlanta, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, for Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms. Trump stumped in Chillicothe, Ohio, the same day. Obama hammered tariffs and the war in Iran, mocked what he called Trump’s autocratic pretensions and derided his foreign policy misadventures in the Middle East.
“This election is our last, best chance of at least reining him in, reining in some of the foolishness of this administration,” Obama said in Georgia. The suburban Atlanta arena crowd revived the chant of his 2008 campaign. Ossoff went on to win reelection over Republican Rep. Mike Collins.
Saddam Hussein and a Chain Restaurant
Obama’s farthest-traveling line came at a rally in Cleveland, Ohio, where he said Trump’s gold-encrusted renovations left the White House looking as if “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
Right-wing media turned the remark into a mini-culture war, though the fight was not about the name-check of a murderous Iraqi dictator. Commentators objected instead to the idea that a popular restaurant chain is shorthand for vulgar excess. Trump waved his arms to mimic a lettuce leaf and accused Obama of snobbery. “Every piece of lettuce he eats has to be perfect, and I’m not that choosy,” he said. The president defended his gilded decor and said Obama had left the executive mansion deteriorated.
A French-Dip Cheeseburger Answers Back
The rebuttal moved to the sidewalk, where a wealthy former hedge fund manager, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, staged a photo-op outside a Cheesecake Factory in Washington. His order was a French-dip cheeseburger, in an apparent attempt to knock down accusations of elitism, and he urged critics to sample the chain’s multi-page menu.
The whole episode became evidence for Obama in Atlanta. He told the crowd the administration had mounted a government-wide response to a joke rather than to inflation. “These are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems,” he said, adding that Republicans would rather have “phony outrage.” Of the president, he said: “The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison.”
The Knucklehead Line in Detroit
Obama also campaigned in Detroit for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan’s Senate seat and will become the first Muslim U.S. senator. The former president acknowledged that El-Sayed had criticized aspects of the Obama presidency, then defused it: Michelle Obama does not agree with everything he does either, he said, and about five times a day his wife calls him a knucklehead and asks why he did whatever he just did.
Laughter followed from the crowd. Two versions of the Democratic Party, the old and the new, were what the moment tried to stitch together on one stage.
Why Democrats Waited to Deploy Him
The 2026 campaign ran on anti-incumbent sentiment, with some candidates shrugging off party labels and casting themselves as outsiders against the Washington establishment. Against that backdrop, a 65-year-old former president out of office for nearly a decade was not the obvious closer, and party strategists treated his late deployment as a calculated gamble. A new generation of Democratic candidates got room to build their own identities because Obama stayed relatively quiet in public until the closing stretch, when the star power finally arrived.
Trump spent the weeks before the vote holding grievance-filled rallies in traditional Republican strongholds. That blitz underlined how much Republicans feared losing Congress for the last two years of his presidency.
A former Obama White House speechwriter, David Litt, said the former president still carries credibility and can drive turnout in a close race, particularly among young voters and Black voters, because he arrives to back candidates who emerged on their own. Attention is scarce in modern politics, Litt added, and Obama can still command it — including from his successor, who keeps relitigating his own White House renovations instead of selling his record.