WASHINGTON — I once loved Barack Obama, but don't see enough of him anymore. Is he writing pensive — and expensive — thoughts for his artful memoir? "Solo Artist" is the working title.

He's so cool it's tragic. Not for him, but for us. He left us in a pretty fix.

Somebody tell Obama we're in the political equivalent of civil war at the moment. He campaigned in Nevada, good job. Donald Trump went to Texas for sore GOP senator Ted Cruz, whom he once called "Lyin' Ted," and then to Montana. Trump flies to rallies as fast as Air Force One can take him. It's bad form for a president, but what does he care?

Democrats need their last winning general out on the battlefield. Obama's firepower and oratory skill is the best answer to Trump mocking Democratic "mobs" in the current congressional cycle. Trump has turned the 2018 races into a raucous national referendum, awakening more anger in his white base.

Democrats have strong House candidates breaking a sweat out in the open field. How high the stakes are, riding on their shoulders. They can create a new House turned blue, making the president see red. The Senate is another story.

America's volatile landscape looks like Gettysburg, writ digital. Note the decisive Union victory was no sure thing. The grand cannonball fury blasting between blue and gray armies took three summer days in 1863, midway in the Civil War.

History rhymes at times. Here we are, at the midterm of Trump's presidency, full of broken treaties, ugly words for women and immigrants, and tax breaks for the fabulously wealthy.

And you can color me blue, too, as in bittersweet. After a breakup, you see sharper. Obama, the solo star who rose young, avoided being a team player in the contact sport of politics. He played singles.

Obama's chemically cool reason became a fatal flaw for his party in the 2016 election. This was a historic and heartbreakingly close loss for Hillary Clinton and her majority of voters. As the president about to lose his legacy, Obama took it with aplomb, never raising anything amiss or wrong.

And Obama never publicly regretted not telling the American people the full story, in good time, of the Russian plot to attack our democracy.

(He let the FBI cloak the Russian hacking investigation, while stridently pushing Clinton's email status in the public eye.)

When Obama's name was not on a ballot, he failed time and again. The Russian hacking secret was an egregious error of historic proportions and may have tipped the election. (Obama said he told Russian President Vladimir Putin to "cut it out.")

The reason why is even worse. Obama asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to be part of a joint statement. McConnell flatly refused.

Then there's his rogue FBI Director James Comey, and a Supreme Court opening Obama let languish for nearly a year.

If Comey tried to thwart Clinton, he could not have done a better job. Ten days before the election, he preened before the press — again — saying there was nothing to investigate. Still, she tumbled in the polls.

What possessed Obama to pick a partisan Republican, from the George W. Bush Justice Department, as FBI director? He never reined in Comey's excesses, as when he spoke out of school and called Clinton "extremely careless" at a July press conference he had no right or reason to hold.

Most think Obama's futile nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court is spilt milk. But Obama let him hang for months while McConnell's Senate Republicans froze him out. Any other popular president would have spent capital to jam Garland through the Senate.

Obama lazily presumed Clinton would win. So he signaled to McConnell that he'd weakly bow to his will in an election year, 2016. You never do that in an uncivil war.

Now Trump relentlessly stumps for every contested Senate seat. Granted, he's a formidable opponent, like Confederate General Robert E. Lee: wily, reckless, going for broke.

The evidence is in and tells tales. I love him not anymore. Strangely, Barack cracked my liberal heart, not Trump.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit creators.com.