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Inside Biden’s Private Rivalry With Obama, Whose Staff Thought Biden ‘Would Suck As President’

March 18, 2024

There is reportedly a “rivalry” between Joe Biden and Barack Obama that goes back many years, with the current president frequently comparing himself to the former one.

Obama And Biden’s ‘Rivalry’

“Obama would be jealous,” Biden has allegedly said in the past “when speaking about a perceived accomplishment,” according to two Biden aides who spoke with Axios. 

Other Biden aides lamented that “Obama and his team did not fully appreciate Biden’s experience with foreign policy, Congress and grip-and-grin politicking — and were disrespectful.”

“The Obama people thought Biden would suck as president,” said one former Biden aide. “They didn’t think he’d be organized enough to execute.”

“We do have too many Obama people who don’t care about Joe Biden. It’s about them,” another former White House official added.

“When people say, ‘This is what worked for Obama,’ their first response is often, ‘We’re not Obama,'” claimed one “senior” Democrat, referring to Biden staffers.

Disagreement Between Obama And Biden

The disagreements between Obama and Biden reportedly go back over a decade to when the latter was the former’s vice president. In his book “The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump,” Politico’s Alexander Ward revealed a private argument between the two men back in 2014 when the Russian forces invaded Crimea and later annexed the peninsula, making it part of Russia in the process.

“The United States might have done more had Barack Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, been in charge. Russia should ‘pay in blood and money’ for its actions, Biden told his boss as the 2014 invasion began,” Ward wrote. “Obama disagreed, but he made Biden his effective ambassador to Ukraine during the crisis.”

White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates denied that Obama and Biden have a contentious relationship.

“We recognize that the actual level of drama in this White House is insufficient to meet some reporting quotas, but President Biden does not make such comments in private,” Bates told Fox News. “As President Biden has said, President Obama is family to him.” 

Bates went on to claim that Obama and Biden have a strong “personal bond” and agree “overwhelmingly on the issues facing the country, including building an economy that works from the bottom-up and middle-out, protecting our critical freedoms, and opposing attacks on our democracy.” 

“There are no stronger supporters of President Biden’s leadership and agenda than President Obama, his team, and alumni of the Obama-Biden Administration – many of whom serve during this presidency,” he continued. “And the President talks to both former President Obama and President Clinton often.” 

Obama’s spokesperson also denied tensions between himself and Biden, saying that the Obama Alumni Association hosted an event for Biden’s re-election campaign in which attendees chanted “Fired up, ready to go” in support of the president.

Previous Reports Of Tensions Between Obama And Biden

However, reports of Obama and Biden having a contentious relationship go back many years. In his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden admitted that Obama “had been subtly weighing in against” him running for president in 2015, and that he believed the former president preferred Hillary Clinton as a candidate over him, according to The Hill.

In his 2023 book “The Last Politician,” author Franklin Foer wrote that after becoming president, Biden was determined to treat Kamala Harris better than he feels Obama treated him.

“[Biden] wanted to treat Harris with the respect that he felt Barack Obama hadn’t accorded him,” Foer wrote. “He a made a point of referring to her as the vice president, as opposed to my vice president. He was a stickler for asking her opinion in meetings — and making sure that her office was kept in the loop.” 

Obama and Biden can present a united front all that they want to, but it seems clear that there is no love lost between them behind the scenes. It seems that Obama may not even be able to deny that Biden is one of the worst presidents our country has ever seen!

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