Obama asks Biden to quit presidential race, which could backfire

President Joe Biden would be furious if his former boss advised him to quit the presidential race, Barack Obama biographer David Garrow says Newsweek.

After his troubling performance in last month’s debate, Biden has faced an avalanche 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 on Biden to step down grows, former President Barack Obama has remained silent.

Privately, however, Obama reportedly expressed concerns to his former vice president about the future of his 2024 campaign. Politico also reported that actor and donor George Clooney consulted with the former president before publicly calling on Biden to resign. New York Times Tribune published Wednesday.

But Garrow, the author of Rising Star: The Birth of Barack Obamasaid Newsweek In an email sent Friday, he said those conversations would likely not go down well with Biden, who would likely be enraged by such a suggestion from Obama.

“I don’t think I’m alone in believing that any attempt by Barack, however gentle and implicit, to suggest to Biden that it would be better for him to step aside would backfire, sparking explicit anger. [and perhaps obscene] “Biden’s response,” Garrow wrote.

Despite admitting that the debate didn’t go well for him, Biden has defiantly refused to give up on his candidacy. He has insisted in a lengthy interview, in a letter to congressional Democrats and in a solo news conference that he will continue to seek a second term and that he is the Democratic Party’s best bet to defeat former President Donald Trump in November.

Most of the time, he strikes an angry, frustrated tone. In a nationally broadcast interview on Monday, Biden challenged his critics: “Go ahead, challenge me at the convention.”

But some Democrats have warned that Biden’s candidacy could pose problems for the party in 2024, even before the president takes the debate stage. Among them was David Axelrod, chief strategist for Obama’s two 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 there were risks associated with doing so, “there is a lot of leadership talent in the Democratic Party ready to emerge.”

“The greatest worry is that his greatest handicap is the one thing he cannot change,” Axelrod wrote in November 2023. “Among all the unpredictables, there is one thing that is certain: the arrow of age points in only one direction.”

Those comments reportedly prompted Biden to privately call Axelrod an “asshole.”

“I think we’ve all seen over the last week and more that Biden and his inner circle in the White House are displaying an attitude of resentment toward ‘Obama’s world.’ [e.g. Axelrod #1] “Because of the perception that they are haughty and they have always looked down on Biden, and I think that is also Biden’s private attitude toward Barack,” Garrow said.

As the internal drama in the Democratic Party plays out recently, many are reminded of the strained relationship between Obama and Biden. It has been widely reported that Biden regrets listening to Obama and other party members who urged him not to run for the White House in 2016, when Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee.

But their complicated relationship dates back to the long-discussed personality clash between the two men when Biden was Obama’s vice president, which gave rise to a broader rivalry between the two camps and their aides.

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki told Politico in 2020 that Obama advisers 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, which is not surprising.”

Garrow said he would “love” to know how Obama feels in retrospect about his 2008 decision to choose Biden as his running mate, but added: “We will NEVER know!”