If you lose donald trump in November, president Joe Biden will see much of his legacy—on green energy, social justice, international leadership—vanished by an administration determined to move the country sharply to the right. But his former boss, barack obamahe will also see his years in office in a different light: the last gasp of democracy, as opposed to the renewal of democracy.
That could explain why Obama is working with Democrats who think the longer Biden stays in the race, the harder it will be to defeat Trump. Obama has reportedly been “in touch” with George Clooney, the incendiary New York Times article called for Biden to drop out of the presidential race. “While Obama did not encourage or advise Clooney to say what he said, he did not oppose it either.” Politician reported on Thursday.
If accurate, this development stands in stark contrast to what Obama said after Biden's disastrous performance in last month's presidential debate. “Bad debate nights pass,” Obama wrote to X about the man who was his vice president for eight years. The rest of the message made it clear that Obama believed Biden deserved eight years in the Oval Office.
Contradiction and struggle have long ruled how the two men see each other. Their differences today are enormously consequential. But they are hardly new.
The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Obama was in his third year as a junior senator from Illinois when he announced he was running for president in 2007. By then, Biden was already a three-decade pillar of the upper chamber. His first candidacy for the presidency, in 1988, had been destroyed accusations of plagiarism. Now he was running again.
Biden's campaign got off to a bad start, with an assessment of Obama that seemed to touch on racism, when he referred to Obama as the “first dominant African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice guy.”
“I mean, this is a storybook, man,” he said. The inevitable apology came quickly. Biden was still Biden, loquacious and undisciplined, ambitious but lacking in gravitas. He dropped out later a disheartening showing in the Iowa caucuses.
However, when it came time for Obama to select a vice president several months later, Biden seemed like the perfect choice. Obama was young and black; Biden was old and white. Obama had gone to Ivy League schools; Biden was Scranton Joe.
As journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann revealed in their best-selling “Game Change,” a compulsively gossipy book about the 2008 presidential campaign, “a chill set in” between Obama and Biden after the senator, very older, he mused, with his characteristic lack of discretion, that he was the superior political talent (Biden has made a similar assessment of his own Vice President, Kamala Harris). “Joe and Obama barely spoke on the phone, rarely campaigned together,” according to Halperin and Heilemann.
Like all vice presidents, Biden had his portfolio. And like all vice presidents, he resented the limitations of his position. Obama had his own advisers, many of them (Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod) from his days in Chicago. He also had his own ideas about how to run Congress.
There were also cultural differences. Washington became fashionable thanks to the Obamas. Mick Jagger played at the White House. Hollywood actors he came to work for the administration. The city exploded with new restaurants, and reporters obsessively chronicled those that Obama and First Lady Michelle sponsored. Tellingly, Biden he was almost never invited in the residence of the White House. He and Jill lived on the fringes.
When it came time for Democrats to choose their 2016 nominee, Obama followed the wisdom of the Beltway: Hillary Clinton. Biden's son Beau had died of brain cancer in 2015, and Biden was grieving as he tried to decide whether to run. Obama convinced him against it. “The president was not encouraging” Biden would later say.
During the Trump years, Obama mostly stayed out of politics. He did a podcast with Bruce Springsteen. Signed a development deal with Netflix. And he often left Democrats wondering why he didn't speak more often, more forcefully.
Then, in the first two years of the Biden administration, Obama watched as his often clueless former surrogate racked up victories that were drawing comparisons to FDR and LBJ. Obama had his “Big Fucking Deal” (as Biden called the Affordable Care Act a hot mic moment). Obama had billions in infrastructure and green energy investments, lower drug prices, the CHIP Act and, at least during the early stages of the war in Ukraine, the kind of world leadership Obama never achieved.
“President Biden is being hailed as a transformative, once-in-a-generation progressive champion,” said Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. he wrote“while Obama has become a cautionary tale of what happens when Democrats get the car keys but don't put their foot on the gas.”
Now, with Trump on the rise once again, Obama and Biden have complex calculations to make. If Biden survives the calls to resign and trumps Trump in November, he will once again prove all the smart people in Washington and New York wrong. But if he loses, he could be blamed for setting the nation on the path to authoritarianism.
If, in the coming weeks, Obama succeeds in convincing Biden to resign, and if his successor succeeds in winning the presidency, the former president will almost certainly be seen as the quiet savior of the Democratic Party, and perhaps of democracy. . But that path, if he chooses it, is a fraught one, paved with layers of bitter feeling that have hardened over the years.
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