Despite the touts of best friend Joe Biden with former President Obama, tensions have remained between the two statesmen over their very different forms of government, according to a Politico report.
To begin with, a number of anonymous quotes from Obama leaked during Biden’s entire 2020 campaign, in which the former president apparently questioned the fitness of his former running mates for office.
“Do not underestimate Joe’s ability to fk things,” said one Democrat who spoke with the former president.
When he complained about his own declining relationship with today’s Democratic voters, particularly in Iowa, Obama told one candidate in 2020: ‘And you know who does not really have it? Joe Biden. ”
Some Biden bystanders pointed out that when Obama’s inauguration of Biden finally arrived in 2020, it did not nearly have the energy of his 2016 distinction from Hillary Clinton.
“I do not think there is ever anyone who is so qualified to maintain this agency,” Obama said of Clinton in 2016 in an approval video. “I believe Joe has all the qualities we currently need in a president … and I know he will surround himself with good people,” Obama said in Biden’s approval video.
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And while some senior Democrats have credited Biden’s ties to Obama for his strong relationship with Black voters, Biden has insisted that he deserves their votes only on his own. He told aid workers after his first win in South Carolina Obama did not “lift a finger” to help him.
Back in 2016, when Obama shook Biden for Clinton when he expressed interest in a presidency, Obama aides tried to frame the president’s snub as an act of compassion: Biden – mourns the loss of his son Beau in 2015 – would not be mentally equipped to handle a campaign.
“But several administration veterans, including loyalists to both Obama and Biden, remember it differently: Obama began embracing Clinton as a possible successor years before Biden lost his son, while the vice president laid the groundwork for his own campaign,” he said. read the Politico report.
Obama “had subtle ways against it,” Biden himself recalled in Promise Me, Dad, his 2017 book.
“I also believe he had concluded that Hillary Clinton was almost certain to be the nominee, which was good by him,” Biden wrote.
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But many credit their differences in leadership style for each perceived tension. Biden-loyalists and some Republicans found the formal, scientific statesman Obama had a hard time connecting with those in Congress.
“Negotiations with President Obama were all about the fact that he felt he knew the world better than you did,” said Eric Cantor, the leader of the Republican House from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt he was thinking so hard about it. , that he did it all out, and no matter what conclusion you came up with the same set of facts, his way was good. “Biden, he said, understood that” you have to agree not to agree on some things. “
A former Republican leader described Obama’s style as “man-complaining, in principle.”
Meanwhile, Obama’s camp rolled its eyes at the plain ghosts, forked Biden.
“You could sometimes see technocratic eyeballs,” said Jen Psaki, the White House’s former director of communications.
White House aides often ridiculed Biden’s frequent slipups and lack of discipline alongside ‘almost clerical’ Obama.
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They would sniff out how Biden, “like an older uncle at Thanksgiving,” would launch into anecdotes that everyone in the room had heard before.
