How Does Obama Feel About Biden's Candidacy? It's Complicated. [View all]

[TexasTowelie]

Early on the April morning when Joe Biden announced his latest presidential run, Barack Obama’s spokeswoman issued a rare statement. The message praised the former vice-president’s “knowledge, insight, and judgment,” and highlighted the pair’s “special bond.” But it stopped short of endorsing Biden’s campaign. Just a few days earlier, Biden had responded to a reporter’s question about his ideology by categorizing himself as an “Obama-Biden Democrat, man,” and when he launched his campaign, his political team — having discussed the plan with Obama’s staff to lean on this message and imagery — posted a photo to Instagram of Biden laughing with Obama and plastered Facebook with ads featuring the former president.

Just as those ads were surfacing, however, members of Obama’s inner circle were quietly insisting to anyone who asked that the ex-president — who’s among the most popular public figures in the country, who’s not eager to turn back into a political football, and who’s also long been loath to publicly wade into intra-Democratic Party fights — was highly unlikely to pick sides in the primary at all, let alone so early in a process overflowing with candidates.

One month into Biden’s bid, the uncomfortable sense that his wholehearted embrace of his beloved former boss is not entirely reciprocated has only intensified, and is now a central unspoken psychological drama of the early Democratic primary as the former vice-president invokes “Barack” daily and the former president remains silent. No one doubts that the two men remain extremely close, but their relationship has also always been personally, politically, and philosophically tangled. (One former senior Obama aide whom I asked about it sighed and said, “The relationship is steeped in complication. They’re obviously close, and there’s trust. But it’s complicated.”) And while Obama’s insistence on neutrality is consistent with his commitment to sticking to post–White House tradition, it inevitably hits his sidekick of eight years harder than anyone else in the race — the former vice-president’s implausible, and uncorroborated, claim that he asked Obama to stay out notwithstanding.

People close to Obama often note that he only rarely weighs in on Democratic primaries at any level, being genuinely wary of overtly handpicking winners. We know, though, what it looks like for him to try and steer a race toward a given candidate from behind the scenes. In public, Obama remained mostly quiet about the buildup to the 2016 election, but late in 2014 he called Hillary Clinton for a talk that’s seldom mentioned, and little known, even among leading Democrats now. The pair had already started discussing the upcoming race that spring, but now he had a message for the former secretary of State, according to four senior Democrats briefed on the conversation at the time. You should, at this point, really think seriously about running, he told her. And you should let me know what you’re thinking, because you’re Democrats’ best bet at keeping the White House. Meanwhile, Obama’s political brain trust was following the president’s lead — that fall, his top political adviser David Plouffe visited Clinton’s D.C. home, privately briefing her on what it would take.

Read more: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/joe-biden-and-barack-obamas-one-sided-embrace.html