Obama Really, Really Wants To See Trump Defeated Next Year

When Glenn Thrush reported that Obama tried talking an increasingly less alert Biden out of jumping into the race for the Democratic nomination fearing his former VP could "damage his legacy," I wondered whose legacy that "his" referred to, Biden's or Obama's. "You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t," Obama told him. Thrush reported that Obama has asked Biden staffers to make sure the gaffe-prone Biden-- who also has trouble sticking to the truth when cornered-- does not "damage his legacy" or "embarrass himself" during the campaign. The staffers have failed miserably and Biden embarrasses himself every time he gets in front of a microphone. Obama has told confidants that he worries that Biden’s top aides are "too old and out of touch with the current political climate." which is also a good description of Biden himself.

In 2008 when Obama was looking for a running mate, he wanted to balance the ticket. "I want somebody with gray in his hair," Thrush reported he told an aide. An old person. Thrush doesn't go into the fact that he also wanted a conservative since Obama wanted to run as a pretend-progressive. And, unmentioned is that a black man might benefit with someone with a very unfriendly record towards minorities and a lot of red with racists. Biden was perfect. A stinking old conservative racist... what more could anyone want-- for VP?

There were two other finalists-- both white conservatives: Virginia Governor Tim Kaine and Indiana Senator Evan Bayh. Neither is as disgusting as Biden but Bayh is very very close.

“You are the pick of my heart, but Joe is the pick of my head,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Kaine after he made his choice, according to people with knowledge of the exchange.

Eleven years later, Mr. Obama’s cautions and calculations have come to roost.

Mr. Obama, standard-bearer of change but conscious of the racial dynamics of his candidacy, was wary of asking voters to digest too much at once. In Mr. Biden, he found a running mate who would conjure the comforting past and provide experience he did not possess, but would not maneuver for the presidency from the No. 2 slot.

...[T]he choice of Mr. Biden as a hedge against change has left the demographically and ideologically evolving Democrats profoundly divided as they desperately seek to unseat President Trump. Even as Mr. Biden casts himself as the man to complete and cement the Obama legacy, that legacy has moved to the center of the Democrats’ fractious debate.

While paying homage to Mr. Obama, who remains popular among Democratic voters, many candidates, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, are urging the party to move far beyond his administration’s positions on immigration, criminal justice, health care, the regulation of banks, the environment, income inequality and race, which they now view as timid, conservative or dated.

“You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign. You can’t do it when it’s convenient and then dodge it when it’s not,” Mr. Booker said to Mr. Biden during the most recent Democratic debate.

The Obama-Biden origin story has been often told, and often sentimentalized. But a re-examination at this crystallizing moment of the primary campaign, based on more than two dozen interviews with Obama and Biden aides and others with knowledge of the relationship, reveals a more complicated dynamic between the two men, and one that is still evolving.

Mr. Biden and his advisers initially thought he might be a better fit as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, and he bridled at the Obama campaign’s attempt to control his every utterance and personnel move. He exploded when campaign researchers began asking questions about the private life of his family, especially his younger son, Hunter.

Mr. Obama, for his part, took a long time to warm to Mr. Biden, and kept him at arms’ length, and on a leash, in the early days. Up until earlier this year, he suggested Mr. Biden would be better off sticking with his vague promise, made during the audition for the vice presidency, that his short-lived 2008 presidential campaign would be his last.

...“It’s an incredible turn of events, when you think about it,” said Mr. Bayh, who retired from the Senate in 2011. “The question then was, ‘Do you happen to fit the moment?’ The question now is, ‘After all these years, can you turn yourself into an independent source of power, as opposed to being just a loyal and faithful wingman?’ Only time will tell.”

Mr. Biden ran for president in 2008 because he thought he could do a better job than anyone else, saw no real downside, and as chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee wanted to advance a cherished policy idea: a plan for partitioning Iraq into three ethnic enclaves.

“He felt a responsibility to do it,” recalled Ted Kaufman, one of Mr. Biden’s oldest friends and advisers. “He looked around at the potential people who would run, and he concluded, ‘It’s my time to run.’ It wasn’t a complex set of decisions. If he lost, he lost.”

Others in Mr. Biden’s orbit discerned a deeper motive: Here was his final chance to exorcise the humiliating memories of a promising 1988 campaign demolished by reports he had plagiarized speeches.

Mr. Biden drove his 2008 campaign from the lot directly into a pothole. On the eve of its rollout, in January 2007, he told a reporter for the New York Observer that Mr. Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Mr. Biden did not bother to tell any of his aides that the interview had gone catastrophically wrong.

...Biden managed just 4 percent of the vote in Iowa on the night of Jan. 3, 2008. His communications adviser, Larry Rasky, suggested he soldier on in New Hampshire, and the candidate wavered for a moment. But his sister, Valerie Owens Biden, shot it down, and he dropped out.

Mr. Biden slipped back to the Senate, and seemed at peace. Shortly after dropping out, he approached Mr. Bayh, who had briefly considered running for president, in the Senate gym. “You were a whole hell of a lot smarter than I was!” Mr. Biden said, according to Mr. Bayh. “I never had a goddamn chance!”

...It was around that time, in February or March, that Mr. Donilon raised the idea of the vice presidency. Mr. Biden, according to two people in his orbit, initially dismissed the idea, saying he had no interest in being anyone’s “second banana.”

“It wasn’t that easy for him to move on,” said Terrell McSweeny, a longtime Biden policy adviser. Still, “he was starting to ask himself, ‘What can I do that will make the biggest difference for my country?’”

Mr. Biden did not dissuade his people from exploring the opportunity.

By the summer, Mr. Obama’s two top strategists, David Plouffe and David Axelrod, had Mr. Biden at the top of their list. The choice was not just about politics and optics. Mr. Obama, confident to the point of cockiness about his political chops, was privately expressing anxiety about his ability to govern-- conceding that Mrs. Clinton, his chief rival for the nomination, had made valid points about his inexperience.

“He needed somebody in the Situation Room, and somebody who would deal with Mitch so he wouldn’t have to,” said Mr. Axelrod, referring to Mitch McConnell, the combative Senate Republican leader.

Mr. Biden’s relationship with Mr. McConnell would come with its own complications. In late 2012, Mr. Obama tapped his vice president to negotiate one-on-one with Mr. McConnell what was known as the “fiscal cliff,” a budget-cutting deal.

It produced one previously unreported incident that left White House and Senate staff scratching their heads: During a follow-up meeting in the Oval Office in early 2013, Mr. McConnell ruled out a big deal before the 2014 midterms, when he would be running for re-election in Kentucky. Mr. Biden responded by saying, “Mitch, we want to see you come back,” an off-the-cuff endorsement of one of their biggest adversaries.

“That was Joe Biden being Joe Biden,” said Harry Reid, then the Senate Democratic leader, who was in the room, adding that it was an attempt to put Mr. McConnell at ease.

One of the first decisions Mr. Obama’s search team made was to exclude Mrs. Clinton from consideration, despite a tepid public claim that she was in the running. The protracted primary fight had simply been too bitter, and the president would soon offer her the State Department, to put her near, but not so very near, the seat of power.

The extended list of hopefuls included Ohio’s governor, Ted Strickland; a moderate Texas congressman, Chet Edwards; and Mark Warner, a former governor of Virginia who was running for Senate that year. Kathleen Sebelius, the progressive governor of Kansas, was added later to compensate for the gender imbalance. In the end, however, it came down to Mr. Biden and two men who would have represented generational change: Mr. Bayh, then 52, and Mr. Kaine, 50.

It was indicative of Mr. Obama’s unsentimental approach that his personal favorite, Mr. Kaine, finished third. The nominee viewed him as too young and too unschooled in foreign affairs to help him in the campaign or White House. Mr. Obama was also deeply worried about a backlash against a black man at the top of the ticket, and believed that an older white running mate would ease fears in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana that he had lost in the primaries.

“Barack Hussein Obama is change enough for most people,” Mr. Obama said of passing over Mr. Kaine, according to Mr. Axelrod.

In late July, Mr. Plouffe and Mr. Axelrod embarked on a one-day trip from the campaign’s Chicago headquarters to audition all three, starting with Mr. Biden in Delaware.

“Basically I said, ‘Forgive me for being so blunt, but how do we know you know how to shut up?’” Mr. Axelrod recalled asking. “An hour later, he finished answering. So I asked him another question.”

[Joe Biden has a long history of verbal flubs and gaffes. And he knows it.]

Mr. Biden was candid about his struggle to maintain verbal discipline, and he repeatedly interrupted himself to ask, “Am I making sense?” But the quantity of his advice was offset by its quality. Mr. Obama’s political magi were especially impressed with his insights into the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain.

...Obama agreed that Mr. Biden would be the final person he spoke to before making a big decision, and the two men would have weekly lunches. Mr. Biden also made a loyalty pledge that would become the basis of their deeper personal bond. “You make a decision, and I will follow it to my death,” Mr. Biden said, according to Mr. Kaufman.

At some point, Mr. Biden also told Obama aides that “Barack would never have to worry” about him positioning himself for another presidential run. He was too old, he told them, and he viewed his new job as a capstone, not a catapult. But while both sides assumed that vow covered the duration of Mr. Obama’s presidency, what might happen after that was never explicitly stated.

Mr. Biden was the only one of the finalists to make such a promise. “That was helpful,” Mr. Plouffe said.

Before parting, Mr. Obama popped a surprise, intended to test Mr. Biden’s commitment to being a wingman: “Would you prefer being secretary of state to vice president?” he asked.

Mr. Biden chose the latter. Mr. Obama formally offered him the job after he flew back to Washington. Neither man has ever spoken publicly about exactly what was said, but one Biden aide who was watching the little red switchboard light for the senator’s private line said it stayed on too long for it to have simply been a perfunctory call of congratulations.

...Biden’s simmering ambition was a source of unease for both men. Mr. Plouffe shut down an early move made by Mr. Biden as vice president to assemble a presidential team-in-waiting, blocking Mr. Biden’s attempts to court the party’s West Coast fund-raising elite and rejecting an attempt to hire Kevin Sheekey, a veteran Democratic operative.

In 2016, Mr. Obama quietly pressured Mr. Biden to sit out the race, partly because he believed Mrs. Clinton had a better chance of building on his agenda, and partly because he thought Mr. Biden was in no shape emotionally following the illness and death of his son Beau in May 2015.

By now, the line between heart and head, between the personal and political, so clear a decade ago, has blurred completely.

The two men spoke at least a half dozen times before Mr. Biden decided to run, and Mr. Obama took pains to cast his doubts about the campaign in personal terms.

“You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Biden earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Mr. Biden-- who thinks he could have defeated Donald Trump four years ago-- responded by telling Mr. Obama he could never forgive himself if he turned down a second shot at Mr. Trump.

Mr. Obama has said he will not make an endorsement in the primary, and has offered every candidate his counsel. But he has taken an active interest in the inner workings of his friend’s campaign, to an extent beyond anything offered to other candidates.

In his interactions with Mr. Biden-- the pair had a quiet lunch in Washington last month-- Mr. Obama has hammered away at the need for his campaign to expand his aging inner circle.

He has communicated his frustration that Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are too old and out of touch with the current political climate-- urging him to include more younger aides, according to three Democrats with direct knowledge of the discussion.

In March, Mr. Obama took the unusual step of summoning Mr. Biden’s top campaign advisers, including the former White House communications director Anita Dunn and Mr. Biden’s longtime spokeswoman, Kate Bedingfield, to his Washington office for a briefing on the campaign’s digital and communications strategy with members of his own staff, including his senior adviser, Eric Schultz.

When they were done, Mr. Obama offered a pointed reminder, according to two people with knowledge of his comments:

Win or lose, they needed to make sure Mr. Biden did not “embarrass himself” or “damage his legacy” during the campaign.

Obama will be an enthusiastic campaigner against Trump and for whichever Democrat wins the nomination-- even Elizabeth Warren or Bernie, even if Obama is generally from the neoliberal wing of the party and Bernie certainly not. I want to recommend people read Matt Taibbi's new Rolling Stone essay, Media Companies Run By The Country’s Richest People Can’t Help But Project The Mindset Of Their Owners. "The news media is now loathed in the same way banks, tobacco companies, and health insurance companies are, and it refuses to understand this. Mistakes like WMDs are a problem, but the media’s biggest issue is exactly its bubble-ness, and clubby inability to respond to criticism in any way except to denounce it as misinformation and error. Equating all criticism of media with Trumpism is pouring gasoline on the fire. The public is not stupid. It sees that companies like CNN and NBC are billion-dollar properties, pushing shows anchored by big-city millionaires. A Vanderbilt like Anderson Cooper or a half-wit legacy pledge like Chris Cuomo shoveling coal for Comcast, Amazon, AT&T, or Rupert Murdoch is the standard setup."

This is why the White House Correspondents’ dinner is increasingly seen as an unfunny obscenity. The national press at the upper levels really is a black-tie party for bourgeois stiffs who weren’t smart enough for med school, and make their living repeating each other’s ideas and using Trump to sell Cadillacs and BMWs. Michelle Wolf was on the money when she ripped us for only covering “like three topics”:

Every hour it’s Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel of four people who remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving… You guys are obsessed with Trump… He couldn’t sell steaks, vodka, water, college, ties or Eric. [But] he has helped you sell your papers, books, and TV. 

...Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn’t create it. He sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward “elites” to his side. The criticism works because national media are elites, ten-percenters working for one-percenters. The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder for politicians. Sanders wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last.