Over the past year, Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama practiced a political distancing of sorts, with Obama maintaining a posture of public neutrality in the Democratic primaries, offering counsel to any candidate who called (most did), and Biden saying he wanted to win on his own.
But with calibrated stealth, Obama has been considerably more engaged in the campaign’s denouement than has been previously revealed.
And for months, he kept in close contact with senior party officials, in hopes of preventing a repeat of the protracted and nasty 2016 primary race.
Then, in the weeks after it became clear that Biden was the party’s near-certain nominee, Obama — telling a friend he needed to “accelerate the endgame” — had at least four long conversations with his former vice president’s remaining rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders. Obama’s efforts to ease the senator out of the race played a significant role in his decision to end his bid and, on Monday, endorse Biden, according to people close to the Vermont independent.
By that time, Biden and Obama had already begun hashing out the thorny questions of how, when and where to deploy a former president thrust into an unfamiliar role as his sidekick’s sidekick.
It is a negotiation between friends, but a delicate one. The terms of the reunion, however welcome, are complicated by an intermingling of political and personal issues, according to interviews with a dozen people close to both men who spoke mostly on the condition of anonymity.
Biden’s team knew better than to ask Obama for his overt support during the primary campaign. But they felt he might have done more to spare them a few tribulations, and were incensed that some former Obama advisers, especially David Axelrod, repeatedly questioned Biden’s viability. When Naomi Biden, the candidate’s granddaughter, took to Twitter in February to describe the former Obama aide as “a jerk with a microphone,” cheering could be heard at the campaign’s headquarters in Philadelphia, according to a person who was present. (Axelrod has said he considers himself an impartial observer.)
Party officials were more direct, prodding Obama to be more active behind the scenes, especially after Biden had begun his comeback by winning the South Carolina primary. But the former president, often communicating through Eric Schultz, a political aide who has also served as a bridge to the Biden campaign, insisted that his best use would be as a passive peacemaker.
“He kept his powder dry, and that gave him credibility, which made all the difference,” said Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee chairman, who served as labor secretary under Obama.
Now, with the primary campaign over, Biden and his aides are eager to deploy the former president as quickly as possible, especially on fundraising, as they race to compete with President Donald Trump’s small-donor juggernaut.
“Biden has obviously achieved something huge here on his own, but the president is a surrogate unlike anyone else anyone can bring to bear — I mean, who has Trump got?” said Joel Benenson, Obama’s longtime pollster and a top adviser to Hillary Clinton in 2016. “Getting to the point where he can get Obama involved, you know, that’s a big deal.”
Obama is open to whatever the campaign suggests, according to several people familiar with his thinking. But he continues to counsel caution, the better to preserve his political capital and to avoid the perception that he is somehow coming in to rescue Biden.
A more immediate matter is the unprecedented logistical challenge of taking on a sitting president during a pandemic and an economic collapse. And Obama, like Trump, is less adept at recording direct-to-camera pitches than at delivering rousing speeches before live crowds, a scenario that social-distancing restrictions have made impossible for the foreseeable future.
So Obama is expected to release an online endorsement of Biden as early as Tuesday morning, on the heels of Sanders’ endorsement, according to Democratic officials — including one who said the goal was to make it “not look like a hostage video.”
The camps are still working out the details of engaging Obama in fundraising. But David Plouffe, who remains Obama’s most trusted political adviser, has offered to pitch in, and plans to participate in several virtual Biden fundraisers that could be a dry run for Obama’s participation, according to people briefed on the plans.
Biden’s emergence as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee relatively early in the political calendar is unwelcome news to Trump, his bluster notwithstanding, several of the president’s advisers said. Last Thursday, after trying to goad an anti-Biden revolt among Sanders supporters, the president suggested dark motives for Obama’s hesitancy in endorsing Biden.
“You know what? I’ll tell you, it does amaze me that President Obama hasn’t supported Sleepy Joe,” Trump said at a White House coronavirus briefing, in between questions about his administration’s response to the crisis. “It just hasn’t happened. When is it going to happen? When is it going to happen? Why isn’t he? He knows something that you don’t know, that I think I know, but you don’t know. So it’ll be interesting.”
That claim was Trumpian misdirection. But the Biden-Obama relationship, which deepened from a congenial partnership into a real friendship in 2015, when the president consoled Biden during his son Beau’s illness and death, is not without complications.
Biden is grateful for Obama’s friendship but increasingly proud of his historic comeback. When news reports surfaced that Obama had called to congratulate Biden on his victory in South Carolina, the candidate made it clear to his staff that while his connection to Obama played a role in delivering African American voters, Obama “had not lifted a finger” on his behalf, according to a senior Democrat with knowledge of his remarks.
Well, maybe a pinkie. Last year, Obama consulted with Biden’s team on campaign strategy, and he bucked up Biden after his loss in the Iowa caucuses. In a private dinner last fall with members of the liberal Democracy Alliance, Obama offered thinly veiled criticism of Sanders’ “revolutionary” policies and opined that voters wanted change, not to “tear down the system.”
Obama is relieved that the Democratic contest is over early, but he had other plans for 2020 — hoping to finish, publish and promote his White House memoirs before the campaign kicked into high gear.
He had intended to engage publicly only after the convention (now scheduled for August, at the earliest), in line with his fall barnstorming campaign on behalf of Clinton in 2016 and congressional candidates in 2018. He resisted calls by some Democratic officials earlier this year to intervene on Biden’s behalf in the wake of Sanders’ victory in the Nevada caucuses, arguing that he did not want to “thumb the scale” for his friend.
Nonetheless, he was becoming more agitated by the state of the race as Sanders surged, and Biden slumped. By late February, he was telling people in his orbit that he thought Biden’s campaign had an alarming lack of “infrastructure” and shared his doubts about Biden’s belief that he could win the nomination after losing Iowa and New Hampshire.
Democratic officials say Obama had no direct role in the campaign shake-up that happened soon after. But people with knowledge of the situation say he made it clear that he supported Biden’s moves — naming as his campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, a former Obama campaign field organizing specialist, and moving another Obama veteran, former White House communications director Anita Dunn, into a more powerful role.
Obama did not directly encourage Sanders’ rivals to endorse Biden before the decisive Super Tuesday primaries. But he did tell Pete Buttigieg, a moderate, that he would never have more leverage than on the day that he was quitting the race — and the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor soon joined the avalanche of former candidates backing Biden.
Sanders, who in 2016 accused the Democratic establishment of conspiring to support Clinton, took note of all these moves, but he has made no such charges against Obama.
In fact, one of his campaign advisers, speaking on the condition of anonymity in the wake of last month’s string of Sanders defeats, said the senator was grateful for Obama’s neutrality throughout the campaign. And Sanders, who has denied reports that he contemplated a primary challenge to Obama in 2012, had made a point of reaching out to the former president several times in recent months to update him on the progress of his campaign.
Before those conversations, the two men had a polite but frosty relationship, and some of their private exchanges over the years devolved into policy debates, former aides said. But Obama saw Sanders’ overture as an opening to assume the peacemaker’s role he believed himself best suited to play.
Since leaving office, Obama has ruminated about what he could have done differently, both as president and as a campaign surrogate for Clinton, to stop Trump’s ascent, and concluded that he needed to do more to repair the damage from party infighting.
“His true north is winning back the White House, period,” said Valerie Jarrett, a close friend and adviser to the former president, in a phone interview last month. Obama, she added, would “have backed any nominee, any of them, with the same conviction.”
Sanders is much closer personally to Biden despite their political differences, but Obama, unlike Biden, remains a trusted figure to many Sanders supporters, so much so that his campaign released an ad that featured a patchwork of clips with Obama lavishing praise on Sanders.
In the end, Sanders concluded that negotiating a détente through the former president would ease the blow of his withdrawal on his base. Whether Obama’s involvement will ultimately draw Sanders voters to support Biden’s candidacy remains an open question, and some supporters, including Sanders’ own campaign press secretary, say they won’t.
In late March, Obama reached out to Sanders. The two men would talk at least three more times, with the former president reassuring Sanders that he had already accomplished much of what he had set out to do, moving the party — and Biden — substantially to the left, according to two people with knowledge of their interactions.
But, the people said, he mostly listened to Sanders, who was in a reflective mood, speaking candidly about his post-campaign plans and feelings about the race, the kind of conversation the two men had never had before.
Sanders, for his part, is intent on protecting his open line of communication with the former president. When asked for a readout during an interview on MSNBC shortly after dropping out last week, he replied, “They’re private conversations,” waving a don’t-even-ask-me-about-it hand at the camera.
The interviewer, Chris Hayes, plowed ahead: “Well, can I ask about your conversations with Vice President Biden?”
“Oh, yes,” Sanders answered, with a laugh.
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