President Joe Biden would be enraged if his former boss advised him to exit the presidential race, Barack Obama biographer David Garrow told Newsweek.
In the aftermath of his troubling debate performance last month, Biden has faced an onslaught of criticism from members of his own party and even his allies who have publicly questioned his ability to serve another term. As the list of Democrats calling for Biden to step aside grows, former President Barack Obama has remained silent.
Privately, however, Obama has reportedly expressed concerns to his former vice president about the future of his 2024 campaign. Politico also reported that actor and donor George Clooney had consulted the former president before publicly calling for Biden to step down in a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday.
But Garrow, the author of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, told Newsweek in a Friday email that those conversations are not likely to go over well with Biden, who would likely become enraged by such a suggestion from Obama.
“I don’t think I’m the only person who believes that any attempt by Barack, even if gentle & implicit, to suggest to Biden that it would be best for him to step aside would *backfire*, eliciting an explicitly *angry* [and perhaps obscene] response from Biden,” Garrow wrote.
Although he has conceded that the debate did not go well for him, Biden has defiantly refused to step aside as the party’s nominee. He insisted in an extended sit-down interview, in a letter to congressional Democrats and at a solo press conference that he will continue to run for a second term and that he’s the Democratic Party‘s best bet to defeat former President Donald Trump in November.
Most of the time, he has struck an angry and frustrated tone. In a nationally broadcasted interview Monday, Biden threw down the gauntlet to his critics, telling them: “Go ahead. Challenge me at the convention.”
But there have been Democrats who warned that Biden’s candidacy could present challenges for the party in 2024, even before the president stepped on the debate stage. Among them was David Axelrod, chief strategist for both of Obama’s successful presidential campaigns.
Axelrod suggested that Biden should drop out of the race eight months before the June 27 debate, writing in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that while it was late to “change horses” and that there were risks associated with doing so, “there is a lot of leadership talent in the Democratic Party, poised to emerge.”
“The greatest concern is that his biggest liability is the one thing he can’t change,” Axelrod wrote in November 2023. “Among all the unpredictables there is one thing that is sure: the age arrow only points in one direction.”
Those comments reportedly prompted Biden to call Axelrod a “prick” in private.
“I think we’ve all seen this last week-plus that Biden & his White House inner circle manifest an attitude of resentment towards ‘Obama world’ [e.g. Axelrod #1] because of a perception that they’re haughty & have always looked down on Biden, & I believe that’s Biden’s private attitude towards Barack as well,” Garrow said.
As the Democratic Party’s recent intraparty drama plays out, many have recalled the tense relationship between Obama and Biden. It has been widely reported that Biden regrets listening to Obama and others in the party who urged him not to run for the White House in 2016, when Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee.
But their complicated relationship dates to the long-reported personality clash between the two when Biden served as Obama’s vice president that resulted in a wider rivalry between the two camps and their staffers.
Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told Politico in 2020 that Obama aides would often poked fun at Biden’s gaffes. The former president himself joked about Biden’s first White House press conference in 2009, telling members of the press: “I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to—not surprisingly.”
Garrow said he would “love” to know how Obama feels in retrospect about his 2008 decision to pick Biden as his running mate but said “we are NEVER going to know this!”
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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