The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Obama, fearing a Biden loss, begins to strategize
As the election approaches, President Joe Biden is making regular calls to former President Barack Obama to catch up on the race or to talk about family. But Obama is making calls of his own to Jeffrey Zients, the White House chief of staff, and to top aides at the Biden campaign to strategize and relay advice.
This level of engagement illustrates Obama’s support for Biden, but also what one of his senior aides characterized as Obama’s grave concern that Biden could lose to former President Donald Trump. The aide, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that Obama has “always” been worried about a Biden loss. And so, the aide added, he is prepared to “eke it out” alongside his former vice president in an election that could come down to slim margins in a handful of states.
Perhaps for the first time, the two are on the same page about Biden’s future. In a sign of things to come, they are to appear together, with former President Bill Clinton, at a major fundraiser for the Biden campaign at Radio City Music Hall in New York on Thursday.
It was not always this way.
In 2015, as Biden was grieving the loss of his eldest son, Beau, and contemplating running for the presidency, it was Obama who gently suggested that it was not his time. In a memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden wrote that Obama told him that if he “could appoint anyone to be president for the next eight years,” it would
have been Biden. The vice president wrote that “the mere possibility of a presidential campaign, which Beau wanted, gave us purpose and hope — a way to defy the fates.”
But after discussing the stakes with Obama, he took himself out of contention and stepped aside for Hillary Clinton, seen by the Obama White House as the far stronger candidate. The decision bred distrust and lasting resentment among some of Biden’s aides. Several of them work in the White House today, and they believe that Obama and his advisers sidelined Biden, whom they think could have changed the course of history and beaten Trump in 2016.
In 2019, when Biden entered the race against thenpresident Trump, Obama withheld his endorsement until after the Democratic primary, although he privately worked to clear a path for Biden. He also gave his blessing for the Biden campaign to use their interactions in the Obama White House in campaign materials, including footage of when Obama surprised his vice
president with the Presidential Medal of Freedom shortly before leaving office.
In the 16 years since their first campaign together, the relationship has been defined by its odd-couple characteristics: The Harvard-trained professor and the guy from Scranton. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair who went on to serve a former junior member. The cool head and the Irish temper.
It took Obama time to warm to Biden, who was brought on as the Washington elder to help the exciting but inexperienced young president-to-be. Biden struggled with being second-in-command from the moment he joined the ticket.
The Obama brain trust, Biden and his allies felt, had no interest in taking strategic advice or additional requests from Biden, who had lost two prior presidential primary campaigns.
On occasion, members of the Biden team — including Biden himself — groused about his secondclass treatment by the Obama team.