'The President Was Not Encouraging': What Obama Really Thought About Biden

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/08/14/obama-biden-
relationship-393570

The way Joe Biden explained it on the campaign trail in Iowa, he and his
friend Barack Obama had long talked of Biden succeeding him in the White
House, continuing the work of their administration. It was only tragic
fate, in the form of the loss of his son Beau, that intervened. Now, after
four years, the plan could finally go forward, with Biden running as the
administration’s true heir.

Barack Obama, Biden solemnly declared in his campaign announcement in
Philadelphia, is “an extraordinary man, an extraordinary president.” On
the social media-generated #BestFriendsDay, the campaign posted a picture
of “Joe” and “Barack” friendship bracelets. Biden relabeled himself an
“Obama-Biden Democrat.”

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But behind all the BFF bonhomie is a much more complicated story—one
fueled by the misgivings the 44th president had about the would-be 46th,
the deep hurt still felt among Biden’s allies over how Obama embraced
Hillary Clinton as his successor, and a powerful sense of pride that is
driving Biden to prove that the former president and many of his aides
underestimated the very real strengths of his partner.

Happy #BestFriendsDay to my friend, @BarackObama.
pic.twitter.com/JTd1t7NtyL

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 9, 2019
“He was loyal, I think, to Obama in every way in terms of defending and
standing by him, even probably when he disagreed with what Obama was
doing,” recalled Leon Panetta, Obama’s secretary of Defense. “To some
extent, [he] oftentimes felt that that loyalty was not being rewarded.”

Next week, Barack and Michelle Obama are each headlining different days of
Biden’s convention, a lineup meant to display party unity and a smooth
succession from its most popular figure to its current nominee. But past
tensions between Obama’s camp and Biden’s camp have endured, forming some
hairline fractures in the Democratic foundation. Some Biden aides boast
that they wrapped up the nomination faster than Obama did in 2008. They
tout that Biden’s abilities at retail, one-on-one politics are superior to
those of the aloof former president. And they don’t easily forget the
mocking or belittling of their campaign during the primary and revel in
having proven the Obama brainiacs wrong.

Some have gotten caught in this crossfire—including Ron Klain, Biden’s
former chief of staff, who has been working to regain Biden’s trust after
having ditched the VP for Hillary Clinton’s campaign back when Biden still
hoped to contend for the 2016 nomination.

Interviews with dozens of senior officials of the Obama-Biden
administration painted a picture of eight years during which the president
and vice president enjoyed a genuinely close personal relationship, built
particularly around devotion to family, while at the same time many senior
aides, sometimes tacitly encouraged by the president’s behavior, dismissed
Biden as eccentric and a practitioner of an old, outmoded style of
politics.

“You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen
Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House
aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in
comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden,
like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended
monologues that everyone had heard before.

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Former administration officials treated Biden dismissively in their
memoirs.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, who was known
for his mind-meld with the president, wrote in his memoir that “in the
Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”

Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would
have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply
in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask
something, Mr. President?’”

Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his
expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10
minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and
patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back
on course.”

Meanwhile, Biden loyalists stewed, aware that the vice president, who had
gotten himself elected to the Senate at age 29 in the year of President
Richard M. Nixon’s landslide reelection and served 36 years, had a range
of Washington political skills Obama lacked. The president and his closest
allies seemed unaware of how he would alienate potential allies with his
preachy tone, particularly in Congress, where Biden excelled.

Biden, for his part, felt Obama too often let his head get in the way.
“Sometimes I thought he was deliberate to a fault,” he wrote in his 2017
book Promise Me, Dad.

But, as is sometimes the case in a troubled marriage, there were three
people in the Obama-Biden relationship.

And the person who ultimately came between Obama and Biden was Hillary
Clinton.

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Obama Connects With Hillary
Back in 2008, when Obama was struggling to close the deal on the
Democratic nomination, he engaged in a legendary duel with then-Sen.
Clinton, sparring with her for months in one-on-one debates in which the
two matched wits like law professors in a mock courtroom.

Despite the exhaustive battle, Obama admired how she made him earn it
(“backwards and in heels,” he said at her convention in 2016). Clinton and
her husband’s enthusiastic campaigning for Obama that fall helped seal the
respect between the former rivals: Obama wanted Clinton to be secretary of
State and handle world affairs while he tackled the tumbling economy.
Biden’s own 2008 presidential campaign, meanwhile, had barely made a mark
and fizzled after he won less than 1 percent in Iowa.

From the start, Obama’s personal style meshed better with Clinton’s—in the
sense that they were both very disciplined and cerebral—than with Biden’s
much more free-wheeling approach. Even if Obama sensed that Biden provided
a much-needed complement and contrast, he naturally gravitated toward
Clinton.

Obama and Clinton both viewed themselves as pioneers who worked their way
through America’s elite colleges. Obama went to Columbia University and
Harvard Law School, where he headed the law review; Clinton went from
Wellesley to Yale Law School. They shared a work style as well, always
sure to do their homework and arrive at a meeting prepared to get to the
crux of an issue. “They do the reading,” said one former Clinton aide. “In
Situation Room meetings, she had the thickest binder and had read it three
times.”

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Biden’s own academic career was unimpressive—he repeated the third grade,
earned all Cs and Ds in his first three semesters at the University of
Delaware except for As in P.E., a B in “Great English Writers” and an F in
ROTC, and graduated 76th in his Syracuse Law School class of 85 students.
He’s the first Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale in 1984 not to have
an Ivy League degree. He was not a binder person, Clinton and Obama aides
said.

Biden admitted as much in his 2007 memoir Promises to Keep, writing “It’s
important to read reports and listen to the experts; more important is
being able to read people in power.”

Biden’s tendency to blurt out whatever was on his mind rankled Obama, who
wasn’t afraid to needle him for it. In his first press conference in 2009,
the young president quipped “I don’t remember exactly what Joe was
referring to—not surprisingly,” when asked about Biden’s assessment that
there was a 30 percent chance they could get the economic stimulus package
wrong.

The gaffes were only one side of the story, though. Obama warmed both to
Biden’s effusive personality and his skill in implementing the
administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package, which the
president had delegated to him.

“Biden doesn’t come from the wonky angle of leadership. It’s different
than the last two Democratic presidents.”

—A SENIOR OBAMA ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL
Aides recall that Obama and Biden took almost polar-opposite approaches to
policymaking, Obama always seeking data for the most logical or efficient
outcome, while Biden told stories about how a bill would affect the
working-class guy in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. When a
deal was finally made, Obama would bemoan the compromises, while Biden
would celebrate the points of agreement.

“Biden doesn’t come from the wonky angle of leadership,” said a senior
Obama administration official. “It’s different than the last two
Democratic presidents. Biden is from a different style. It’s an older
style, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson of ‘Let’s meet, let’s
negotiate, let’s talk, let’s have a deal.’”

Republicans who negotiated with the administration often came away finding
Obama condescending and relying on Biden to understand their concerns.

“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that
he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House
majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it
so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had
come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said,
understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some
things.”

A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as
“mansplaining, basically.” The person added that Biden “may not be sitting
down talking about Thucydides but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a high
level of political intelligence.”

Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s close adviser and family friend, bristled at any
suggestion that Obama’s negotiating style was responsible for tensions
with members of Congress: “Obama was younger than many of them. He was the
first Black president. He wasn’t a part of that club,” Jarrett said.

But Obama would often convey a weariness with the traditional obligations
of political leadership: the glad-handing, the massaging of egos.
Sometimes he couldn’t hide his disdain for part of the job he signed up
for.

At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2013, in front of a roomful
of journalists, Obama joked, “Some folks still don’t think I spend enough
time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they
ask. Really? ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ I’m sorry,
I get frustrated sometimes.”

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Biden, former aides say, didn’t get why that was funny. Biden wrote in his
2007 memoir that likely “the single most important piece of advice I got
in my career” came from the late Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-
Mont.) who told him, “Your job here is to find the good things in your
colleagues—the things their state saw—and not focus on the bad.”

Mansfield added: “And, Joe, never attack another man’s motive, because you
don’t know his motive.”

Thus, Biden invested time in developing those relationships that Obama
never did.

Denis McDonough, Obama’s former chief of staff, said Biden “always wanted
to have had two conversations with someone before he would ask that person
for something. … Once in a while you’re like, ‘Hey, can we get through
those two touches so you can make the ask here,’ but he just wouldn’t do
it. That’s the kind of operation he runs.”

Advance staffers recall that Obama’s speeches were arranged to be
delivered alone on the stage with voters behind him, while Biden would
push to include every local elected official up there with him, knowing
they would love the exposure to the vice president—a chit to cash in
later.

Psaki, for one, recalled that the president often saw photo lines as
obligations while they might be the best part of the vice president’s day.

“His background is much more retail politics kind of person, and the
president was very much sort of a wholesale kind of president,” said
former Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden adviser who is now heading up
his presidential transition effort.

Twenty-Twenty Vision
Immediately after Obama’s reelection in 2012, Biden’s team started
thinking about his own 2016 run. His mind wasn’t entirely made up, but he
wanted to focus on a few areas—particularly infrastructure—that could form
the basis of a forward-looking campaign agenda, according to former Biden
officials and Democrats they consulted.

One former Biden aide described the vice president’s thinking as “I want
to find the ways to stay viable to make the decision on my own terms.”

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From early on, however, it became increasingly clear that Obama and many
of his closest aides were helping along a Hillary Clinton succession.

In the past few years, the story of how that happened has taken on a
particular shape. After Clinton’s 2016 loss and a certain amount of
Monday-morning quarterbacking about her weakness as a candidate, many
Obama aides tried to cast the president’s snub of Biden as purely an act
of compassion: Biden was grieving for his son Beau, who died of cancer in
2015, and didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to handle a campaign.

Biden himself has offered this explanation in public, and Jarrett, the
ultimate Obama loyalist, insists that was largely the case: “Vice
President Biden was devastated, as any parent would be, by the loss of
Beau. It was excruciating to watch him suffer the way he did,” she said.

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But numerous administration veterans, including loyalists to both Obama
and Biden, remember it differently: Obama had begun embracing Clinton as a
possible successor years before Biden lost his son, while the vice
president was laying the groundwork for his own campaign.

Just after Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, Democrats turned on their
TVs to see Obama singing Clinton’s praises in a joint “60 Minutes”
interview on the occasion of Clinton’s departure from the State
Department—one that two Clinton aides say was suggested by Obama’s team,
albeit as a print interview.

“Why have them sit together for two hours and have 200 of their words
used?,” recalled Philippe Reines, Clinton’s press aide at the time. “I
always just prefer TV. And I’m like, ‘Let’s go for gold. Let’s do ‘60
Minutes.’ And Ben [Rhodes] said, ‘I love it.’”

“I was a big admirer of Hillary’s before our primary battles and the
general election,” Obama enthused. “You know, her discipline, her stamina,
her thoughtfulness, her ability to project, I think, and make clear issues
that are important to the American people, I thought made her an
extraordinary talent. … [P]art of our bond is we’ve been through a lot of
the same stuff.”

To which Clinton gushed, “I think there’s a sense of understanding that,
you know, sometimes doesn’t even take words because we have similar
views.”

When interviewer Steve Kroft raised the prospect of a Clinton presidential
run, both Obama and Clinton played it coy, saying it was way too early for
such thinking, but doing nothing to discourage the idea.

Then Obama’s political sage, David Plouffe—the man who had dedicated a
year and a half to taking down Clinton in 2008—offered his help in mid-
2013 and met with Clinton, according to a Democrat familiar with the
overture. (Plouffe maintains that Clinton’s team approached him first.)
Obama’s pollster, Joel Benenson, later hopped on board. In early 2015, so
did top Obama aides John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri. Clinton’s campaign
even began interviewing and picking off people from Biden’s office,
including Alex Hornbrook, who became Clinton’s director of scheduling and
advance.

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“It certainly felt like Obama’s world was behind us,” said one former
Clinton campaign aide. “It wasn’t just Plouffe, Palmieri and Benenson.
From the beginning, a lot of key Obama aides came over and helped stand up
our campaign.” It was so blatant that some Clinton aides wondered whether
Obama had just wrongly assumed that Biden wasn’t interested in running
because of his age.

On January 5, 2015, Biden and Obama privately discussed a White House run
at their weekly lunch. Obama “had been subtly weighing in against,” Biden
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. A campaign
spokesperson added that in the meeting, Obama also said, “If I could
appoint anyone to be president over the next eight years, Joe, it would be
you.”



“The good thing about a Biden run is that he would make Hillary look so
much better.”

—NEERA TANDEN IN 2015
Panetta, who had known Clinton from his days as her husband’s White House
chief of staff, recalled that “Both she and her staff worked at that a
great deal in trying to build that support.” Among Obama and his aides,
Panetta said, “I think there was a certain attraction to someone that
would certainly break ceilings and kind of create the same kind of
precedent that he created when he became president … as opposed to
supporting somebody who’s kind of your more traditional politician and,
you know, a white Irish Catholic guy.”

There was also dismissiveness of Biden in Clinton’s orbit that echoed
Obama aides. “The good thing about a Biden run,” Neera Tanden, Clinton’s
close aide who also advised the Obama administration on health policy,
wrote to Podesta in 2015, in an email later exposed by WikiLeaks, “is that
he would make Hillary look so much better.”

Obama tried to remain above the fray, even as his closest staffers largely
rallied around Clinton—which they likely would not have done if there was
a chance he would support Biden. “I knew a number of the president’s
former staffers, and even a few current ones, were putting a finger on the
scale for Clinton,” Biden wrote.

Pressed on whether Obama ever expressed a preference between Clinton and
Biden, Jarrett demurred, saying, “that’s a conversation you’ll have to
have with him.”

Obama declined to be interviewed through his spokesperson. “President
Obama has been unequivocal in his respect for Joe’s wisdom, experience,
empathy and integrity,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Even if he did express preference for Clinton, some Obama officials
characterized it more as an acknowledgment of her strength than an attempt
to undercut Biden.

“There was a feeling of inevitability about Hillary Clinton in every
aspect,” recalled Psaki. “So it never felt to me like it was Obama
choosing Hillary Clinton over Joe Biden. It was a feeling like it’s
inevitable after Hillary Clinton left the State Department that she will
be the Democratic nominee, and she will become the next president. So
Obama … was trying to play a part in being helpful.”

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Reines said Obama “was always very encouraging” of Clinton and that after
serving as president, “he believed there was no one better prepared to do
it.”

It was in the midst of the handoff to Clinton that Beau Biden’s health
began deteriorating. Joe Biden had had an especially deep bond with his
eldest son since Beau’s mother and sister died in a car accident that
seriously injured Beau and his brother Hunter. Before the 46-year-old Beau
passed away that May from an aggressive form of brain cancer, he had been
a firm advocate for his Dad to run and, even in intense grief, Biden made
serious preparations in the summer and fall of 2015 to jump into the race.

The Clinton camp took Biden’s deliberations seriously. Podesta told people
he believed Biden would go for it. The Clinton team assembled an oppo-
research book on him with the code name “Project Acela,” according to one
former Clinton official. Negative stories began popping up. The Clinton
campaign denied having had any role, but Biden was skeptical.

“The president was not encouraging.”

—JOE BIDEN
Obama pressed the issue in another private meeting. “The president was not
encouraging,” Biden recalled.

A more direct kind of brushback occurred that fall. Plouffe—the Obama
strategist who had been quietly advising Clinton since 2013—met with Biden
and told him not to end his career in embarrassment with a third place
finish in Iowa, according to multiple accounts of the meeting.

“There just wasn’t an opening,” Plouffe said, explaining why he advised
Biden against the run. “He started asking the question in the 4th quarter
of the contest.” Plouffe argued that Biden hadn’t done the necessary
legwork before 2015 that previous vice presidents had done before their
runs.

Clinton’s campaign conducted a survey around the same time showing Biden
in third in Iowa. In a foreshadowing of Biden’s 2020 performance, the
analysis also showed his tremendous strength among African American
voters.

“With Biden in the race, our support among African Americans drops by 23
points,” an internal Clinton memo noted ominously. “While we still lead,
it is not the overwhelming, commanding lead we hold in a one-on-one race
with [Bernie] Sanders.”

The most stinging rebuke, however, came when Klain—Biden’s former chief of
staff who went back decades with him to when he was chief counsel on
Biden’s Judiciary Committee in 1989—defected to Clinton.

“It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise,”
Klain wrote to Podesta in October 2015, a week before Biden gave in and
announced he would not run. “I am definitely dead to them—but I’m glad to
be on Team HRC.”

According to the email, which was released by WikiLeaks in what American
intelligence officials have concluded was a Russian-backed effort to hurt
the Clinton campaign, Klain added: “Thanks for inviting me into the
campaign, and for sticking with me during the Biden anxiety.”

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In the years since Clinton’s loss, Democrat operatives have chuckled at
Klain’s attempts to earn his way back into Biden’s good graces, including
lots of Twitter praise for the former vice president. Klain is not on the
campaign’s payroll but remains an adviser, and observers assume he’s
hoping to be chief of staff in a Biden White House. Klain refused to
elaborate on the situation: “I’m not going to comment on a story that uses
Russian intelligence measures.”

In a sign of the raw feelings, Biden’s aides declined to comment on the
fallout from Klain’s defection but said they are happy he is on board in
2020.

Biden, Past and Future
Lingering tensions between the Biden and Obama camps were subtly visible
in the 2020 primary campaign, in which Obama declined to endorse any
candidate.

Many top Obama administration and campaign officials sat on the sidelines
or worked for candidates other than Biden. Top former aides including
strategist David Axelrod and the young hosts of Pod Save America—Jon
Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer—at times ridiculed the
former vice president’s campaign. Biden is one of the few candidates to
have not gone on either of their popular podcasts during the campaign,
despite having been invited: “I can’t speak for his campaign’s scheduling
decisions,” said Vietor, “but the Zoom is always open.”


Biden aides acknowledge that Obama didn’t do nearly as much for Biden in
2020 as he did for Clinton in 2016.

The lack of public enthusiasm for Biden was noticeable enough that former
Obama senior adviser Pete Rouse—who was one of the aides who helped Biden
organize his potential 2016 run—addressed it at a fundraiser of Obama
alumni for Biden last November that he helped organize.

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“I think the turnout tonight demonstrates the high regard in which the
vice president is held in the extended Obama family,” Rouse told the crowd
of about 50 people. “And I think that that message is not out as far as it
should be.”

Yet searing, anonymously sourced quotes from Obama kept appearing through
the race. One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president
warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Speaking
of his own waning understanding of today’s Democratic electorate,
especially in Iowa, Obama told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who
really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”

Biden’s weaknesses were such that even Clinton reconsidered her decision
not to get into the race last fall, according to Reines.

“There were a number of people who decided not to run and then around,
October, before Thanksgiving said to themselves, ‘You know, did I make the
right decision?,’ he said, name-checking Mike Bloomberg and Deval Patrick
who did make late entries. “She went through that exercise.”

But Biden proved them all wrong.

His focus on electability along with a sentimental message about saving
the soul of the nation—“character is on the ballot”—was dismissed by many
pundits and reporters as hokey and uninspiring, but ended up being the
winning one.

One former Clinton aide noted that Biden’s ability to cultivate personal
relationships paid dividends at the primary’s end: Bernie Sanders saw
Biden as one of the few people in Washington who took him seriously before
his 2016 run for president. After it was clear Biden had an insurmountable
delegate lead, Sanders decided not to drag out the fight the way he did
against Clinton in 2016.

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“That relationship is why Bernie got out in March,” said the former
Clinton aide.

“I don’t know who saw him sailing to the nomination,” said Psaki. Biden’s
old-fashioned style of politics, she reasoned, “still taps into something
in the American electorate. And maybe we’re not seeing that because I live
in a suburb of Washington, D.C., with a bunch of upper middle-class white
people.”

“I don’t think he really cares about what a 30-something Pod Save America
host thinks about him, and that honestly might be why he’s the nominee.”

—A FORMER BIDEN AIDE
Or, as one former Biden official put it: “I don’t think he really cares
about what a 30-something Pod Save America host thinks about him, and that
honestly might be why he’s the nominee.”

But even in victory, Biden and his aides often act like they have
something to prove to the Obama team that doubted them. Some Biden allies
noted that Obama’s endorsement of Biden, when it finally arrived, lacked
the effusiveness of his endorsement of Clinton. “I don’t think there’s
ever been someone so qualified to hold this office,” he said of Clinton in
his video message in 2016. Four years later, in his endorsement video for
Biden, he said: “I believe Joe has all of the qualities we need in a
president right now … and I know he will surround himself with good
people.”

Biden aides also fumed at Axelrod and Plouffe penning a New York Times op-
ed that instructed them on “What Joe Biden Needs to Do to Beat Trump,”
according to Democrats who talked with them.

Meanwhile, some senior Democrats credited Obama for Biden’s comeback given
his strength among Black voters, while Biden has emphasized he did it on
his own.

After the South Carolina primary win, he told aides that Obama hadn’t
“lifted a finger” to help him. Anita Dunn, an Obama administration aide
and top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign, said “[Biden] did feel
that he needed to go out and earn it himself, as opposed to having people
see it as an extension of a third Obama term or having it be any kind of
referendum directly on Obama.”

Now, as Reines put it, Biden “might have the last laugh of everybody.”

Street Smarts vs. Harvard Smarts
Biden has long been defensive about suggestions of being dumb or a
lightweight—a narrative that took hold during in his first campaign for
the presidency, in 1988. As a kid, a teacher mocked him for his stutter
(“Bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden,” she went, according to his 2007 memoir). “Other kids
looked at me like I was stupid,” Biden wrote.

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Or, as Richard Ben Cramer wrote in his classic about the 1988 race: “Joe
Biden had balls. Lot of times, more balls than sense.” Biden didn’t seem
to mind that assessment, as he brought on Cramer’s researcher, Mark
Zwonitzer, to help write his books in 2007 and 2017.

“I had to convince the Big Feet [his euphemism for national reporters]
that I had depth,” he recalled about that 1988 race. Striving to answer
his critics, he puffed up his academic credentials on the trail (“I
exaggerate when I’m angry,” he later tried to explain). In a heated
exchange in New Hampshire during the 1988 campaign, he
uncharacteristically snapped at a voter who asked him which law school he
attended and his class rank that “I have a much higher IQ than you do, I
suspect.”

In the less-remembered part of that encounter, however, Biden also decried
the snobby intelligentsia that had taken over the Democratic Party. “It
seems to me you’ve all become heartless technocrats,” he said. “We have
never as a party moved this nation by 14-point position papers and nine-
point programs.”

That sensibility is part of what separates him from Obama. “It really is
the difference between street smarts and, you know, Harvard smart,”
Panetta said.

That’s why even some Republicans believe Biden may be better poised to
fulfill Obama’s promises of restoring unity and civility in Washington
than the “change we can believe in” 44th president was. If Biden wins,
many Democrats and Republicans believe that at least relations between the
White House and Congress will be better than in any other recent
administration, including Obama’s.

“Obama, clearly he was smart, he was bright, he would come up with
proposals, but that second part of then taking those proposals and working
and lobbying members and listening to them and doing all of the things
that need to be done when you’re dealing with the egos on Capitol Hill was
not something that came easily to him,” Panetta said. “He was impatient
with that process. I think Biden understands that process and understands
what it takes.”

Even with Biden as the Democratic nominee, Republican leadership and their
aides can’t help but feel more animosity toward Obama than Biden. In
negotiations, Biden asked them what they could sell to their caucus while
Obama would trenchantly but unproductively lecture leadership about why
their caucus’ worldview was wrong, the aides said.

“Frankly, I came to dread those Oval Office meetings because they were
lost time,” said one such former aide. “Those were hours of your life you
were never getting back.”

Axelrod echoed this view in his memoir. “Few practiced politicians
appreciate being lectured on where their political self-interest lies,” he
wrote of Obama’s style. “That hint of moral superiority and disdain for
politicians who put elections first has hurt Obama as negotiator, and it’s
why Biden, a politician’s politician, has often had better luck.”

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The other advantage Biden brings, according to his advisers, is his nearly
unrivaled Rolodex.

“Obama knew some of these people, but it wasn’t like a deep relationship,”
said Kaufman. “He knows mayors and governors, he knows the members of
Congress much better than Obama did.”

Biden once wrote, “A person’s epitaph was written when his or her last
battle was fought.”

“If he can win the presidency, I think that will say an awful lot to a lot
of people about who Joe Biden really is.”

—LEON PANETTA
Is this battle in part a way to show that Obama favored the wrong
successor?

“I think Joe’s the type that victory makes all the difference,” said
Panetta. “And if he can win the presidency, I think that will say an awful
lot to a lot of people about who Joe Biden really is.”





--
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.

Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump has boosted the economy, reduced illegal immigration,
appointed dozens of judges and created jobs.

Senile loser and NAMBLA supporter Nancy Pelosi got "Trumped" on February
5, 2020. "President Trump, Not Guilty."