Obama and Biden’s Messy Relationship Is Spilling Into Public

One of the most persistent myths of the 21st century is the supposed bromance between Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The outward image projected from the administration was one of an unlikely but loveable friendship, as they had weekly lunches and were often portrayed as just two cool guys putting their heads together to come up with the best way to run the country. They even had friendship bracelets!

This fantasy invented by campaign apparatchiks could not be further from the truth.

Saying they hate each other is probably a bridge too far, but all available evidence on this indicates that they likely don’t like each other, and they definitely don’t trust each other these days. Today, Bidenworld fired a salvo at Barryworld through the current president’s favorite TV show, Morning Joe, over George Clooney’s op-ed in the New York Times excoriating Biden’s reelection chances and demanding he drop out, claiming that the Biden we all saw at the debate is the Biden that Clooney has seen behind the scenes.

Despite repeated WH denials of any Obama-Biden tension and the public bromance displays, Biden friend Joe Scarborough says:

“Joe Biden is deeply resentful of his treatment under not only the Obama staff but also the way he was pushed aside for Hillary Clinton” pic.twitter.com/YMGt4rywg5

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) July 11, 2024

According to Rolling Stone, Clooney sought Obama’s counsel on his op-ed and Obama did not try to stop him from publishing it. Biden has been sounding more and more like Trump lately, and while this conspiracy theorizing is up another Trumpian alley, it may not be totally inaccurate. It is Trumpian to think that Obama’s shadowy hand is influencing elected Democrats to abandon and/or doubt someone who **checks notes** 85% of Americans believe is too old to be president, but it’s also pretty crazy to think that the most popular figure in the Democratic Party doesn’t have any pull behind the scenes.

And Barack has never been Joe’s biggest fan.

Don’t forget that in the 2008 primary, Biden said of Obama, “You’ve got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” for which he later apologized. This actually is not the genesis of the tension between the two, as all available reporting indicates that this has been a long simmering feud which really began in earnest around Obama’s second-term.

Barack Chose Hillary Over Joe

This is as succinctly as you can summarize why this feud has endured and become inflamed over the years. While Barack Obama tried to spin his counseling Joe out of the 2016 Democratic primary as the result of Beau Biden’s death in 2015 from an aggressive form of brain cancer, the fact is that he had already laid the groundwork for Hillary Clinton.

Right after he was inaugurated in 2013, President Obama sat down for a joint 60 Minutes interview with departing Secretary of State Clinton, and when interviewer Steve Kroft asked about a Clinton presidential run, neither denied it and both played it coy. Later that year, Obama’s “political sage” David Plouffe jumped to the Clinton team, and Obama’s pollster Joel Benenson later joined him. By 2015, top Obama aides John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri also made the transition to Clintonworld, and she was even able to pick off Biden folks like Alex Hornbrook. One former Clinton campaign aide told Politico “It certainly felt like Obama’s world was behind us.”

Put yourself in Joe Biden’s shoes in late 2015. You have been gearing up to run for president when your eldest son dies. Obama counsels you against running because he believes you do not have the emotional capacity to run a hard-nosed presidential campaign at this moment. Even if Obama genuinely did feel this way…motherfucker we all saw you on TV with Hillary two years ago. Your whole campaign apparatus began shifting towards her long before Beau died. This is not up for debate.

That Hillary lost in 2016, losing the exact type of voters across the so-called Midwest firewall that Joe Biden has been winning his entire career, only served to reinforce the current president’s icy stance towards the power center in the Democratic Party. If you are looking for a reason why Biden is so stubborn about dropping out right now, it’s because he has been hearing this stuff for over a decade, as there were even ideas about replacing him on Obama’s ticket in 2012. Yet here he is, President of the United States.

“Obama Would Be Jealous”

That quote is reportedly what Joe Biden will often say when speaking about one of his perceived accomplishments. I have written the phrase “Joe Biden’s domestic agenda is who Barack Obama sees when he looks in the mirror every day” a few times in new Splinter‘s short history, and before writing this column, I thought of it largely as just a joke. Turns out I found Barry’s nerve!

I knew about their longtime icy relationship and Biden’s obsession with besting his Democratic predecessor, but I did not know that Obama reportedly is extremely jealous of Biden too. It bugs him that Biden was able to get “transformative” legislation through Congress while the best he could do with his popular mandate in 2008 was pass Mitt Romney’s health care plan. In 2022, CNN’s Alex Burns explained this jealousy by the former president on CNN’s New Day:

“Pelosi said, and, again, this is — to bring you back to the spring of last year, Pelosi told a friend that she believed that Barack Obama was jealous of Joe Biden. And this is after the passage of the American Rescue Plan. It’s when he has unveiled his plans for, you know, infrastructure spending, more social welfare spending, climate spending. And there’s all this coverage of, you know, Joe Biden, more transformational even than Barack Obama.

And we heard over and over again that really bothered Barack Obama and, you know, that he would call up people and say, listen, you’ve got to understand, I was dealing with a different Democratic Party, that I had more conservative Democrats.”

One of the enduring characteristics of the Obama administration was his technocratic aloofness and inability to cultivate relationships with Congress, while Biden was the opposite. He is an expert at the relationship-building aspect of politics, and Obama’s inability to move Congress in the direction he wanted with his oratory skills while Biden got a bunch of his priorities through the Senate speaks to the skillset needed to effectively govern in our nation’s capital.

My armchair political psychologist diagnosis is that this simply just reflects a part of their relationship that Obama has always envied. Biden was brought on specifically for his experience and their two presidencies are an object lesson in the value of it. Obama can complain all he wants about how he had a different Congress (which is true in the sense that America has moved left since his administration, but it is a pretty big stretch to suggest that his filibuster-proof Democratic trifecta hampered his ability to pass what he wanted), but it’s not like Biden had the easiest path either. Joe Manchin was basically the lone determinant on whether anything good could get passed in a narrow Congress these past few years, yet Biden was still able to convince him to sign off on policies he never would have endorsed on his own.

Ultimately, this is a story about two galactically large egos whose worldviews are largely incompatible with one another. Biden has long resented elite Washington D.C. due to his hardscrabble blue-collar background, while former editor of the Harvard Law Review Barack Obama represents elite D.C. as well as anyone. By all accounts they formed an amiable working relationship, but the fact that Vice President Biden never visited President Barack Obama’s private White House residence and the two avid golfers barely golfed together over eight years gives you an idea of where that partnership ended. Obama and Biden are two very different people whose presidencies have reflected their abilities and lack thereof, and now that the Democratic Party finds itself in crisis, these longstanding fissures in this made-up bromance are finally starting to burst into public.