Joe Biden heads into the Iowa caucuses, and thus actual voting in the Democratic presidential primaries, as the national front-runner. In other words, what he’s been for most of the campaign. According to the RealClearPolitics average, the former vice president holds a sizable polling lead in Nevada and South Carolina and a slim edge over socialist Bernie Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire. Nationally, he leads the Democratic field by 8 points.
Yet if there’s anything remarkable about Biden’s campaign, it’s how little enthusiasm anyone seems to have for it. Though his campaign stops are well attended, hundreds are not waiting for hours in line to get a photo with him as they are with Elizabeth Warren. He lacks ardent online advocates in the vein of Sanders’s “Bernie Bros” or Andrew Yang’s “Yang Gang.” On the contrary, most social media discussion of Biden cuts the opposite way, as evinced by the recent viral trend of teenagers posting “Please don’t make me vote for Joe Biden” videos on TikTok.
Portraying the former Delaware senator in a November skit on Saturday Night Live, Woody Harrelson joked: “The hearings have made it clear: Donald Trump doesn’t want me to be the nominee. Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be the nominee. Nobody in America wants me to be the nominee.”
Among those who share this antipathy toward Uncle Joe, ironically enough, is Barack Obama. The former president famously discouraged his vice president from seeking the Democratic nomination in 2016, preferring instead to throw his weight behind Hillary Clinton. As Biden recounted in his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad, he knew Obama and his team “were putting a finger on the scale for Clinton.” Now, Obama has been signaling his opposition to Biden’s run yet again.
When Biden announced his presidential campaign in April, he did so without Obama’s endorsement. “President Obama has long said that selecting Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008 was one of the best decisions he ever made,” read the statement released by Obama spokeswoman Katie Hill. “He relied on the Vice President’s knowledge, insight, and judgment throughout both campaigns and the entire presidency. The two forged a special bond over the last 10 years and remain close today.”
“I asked President Obama not to endorse,” Biden told reporters at the time. “Whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits.” Obama is both the most popular and the most famous Democrat in America, and according to Gallup, he was one of the two men in the world most admired by Americans in 2019 (tied with Trump, coincidentally). Biden, on the other hand, has run for his party’s presidential nomination unsuccessfully twice already, in 1988 and 2008. It beggars belief that he would have asked Obama not to endorse him. Yet he has stuck to this line. “Everyone knows I’m close with him,” Biden said in an interview last month. “I don’t need an Obama endorsement.”
In any case, Biden has spent the entire campaign touting his association with the Obama administration and his relationship with Obama. It took all of three sentences for Biden to bring up the former president in the Jan. 14 CNN/Des Moines Register debate, shoehorning a mention of how Obama “picked [him] to be his vice president” into an answer about the Iraq War. Invocations of the patron saint of the Democratic Party are as central to Biden’s run as is Sanders’s demagoguing of “billionaires” or Warren’s lying. “BIDEN 2020: OBAMA” is practically Joe’s campaign slogan.
Campaigning, Biden has reversed a number of positions from his long career in politics, including his support for the Iraq War and for the Hyde Amendment, and he has apologized for working with segregationist senators to oppose busing in the 1970s. Whatever is out of political fashion, he’s ready to disavow. Yet on matters involving Obama’s record, he has remained steadfast. Even as Sanders, Warren, and the also-rans blasted the healthcare system for being inadequate in their push for “Medicare for all,” Biden has continued to tout Obamacare, Obama’s singular legislative achievement. While he does propose changes (which is as much an implied criticism of the law as it is political maneuvering), Biden’s healthcare plan is nevertheless wrapped in a promise to “protect and build on Obamacare.”
Yet, in tone and frequency, one senses these overtures are directed as much toward Obama personally as they are to the voters who made up his 2008 and 2012 coalition. On his “No Malarkey” bus tour through Iowa, Biden told supporters he would be open to nominating Obama for the Supreme Court. “If he’d take it, yes,” said Biden. If, indeed.
A particularly plaintive moment came back in June, when Biden attempted to rekindle the fires of his and Obama’s much-ballyhooed “bromance.” “Happy #BestFriendsDay to my friend, @BarackObama,” Biden’s account tweeted, along with a picture of two friendship bracelets with the names “Joe” and “Barack.” The bracelets were a callback to 2016, when Biden tweeted the same picture to wish the then-president a happy 55th birthday. Obama had been recorded making the bracelets during a get-out-the-vote video as one of “5 things that are harder than registering to vote.” No such buddy-buddy moment was forthcoming in June, however, as the tweet came and went without a response from Obama.
The bromance is now very much one-sided. As in 2016, Obama pretty clearly doesn’t want Biden to be nominated. Yet Biden’s viability depends on his attachment to Obama. Thus, the awkward dance is fated to continue. Obama’s legacy is Biden’s hope, but Biden’s candidacy is a threat to Obama’s legacy. After all, Biden’s presumed moderation on policy, his old age, and his whiteness brand him as a figure of the liberal establishment, not a progressive warrior. And the last thing Obama wants to be is an obstacle to leftist triumph, or passé.
In a December interview, Biden touted his relationships with Democratic voters built while campaigning as Obama’s vice president. Biden was then asked about an article that reported how Obama had confided to another Democratic primary candidate that Biden “really doesn’t have it” when it comes to connecting intimately with voters. In response, Biden completely changed course and conceded the criticism with a garbled, circular argument, saying, “He may have said that. And if it’s true, and he said it, there’s truth to it.”
Obama has feigned neutrality in the primary contest, but his fingerprints are all over it. When his longtime friend Deval Patrick jumped into the fray in November, it was seen as a signal of Obamaworld’s dissatisfaction with the state of the race. Contra Biden, Obama had actively pushed Patrick to run for president as early as 2017. As Edward-Isaac Dovere recounted in the Atlantic, Patrick’s campaign, and especially his decision to enter the race so late, were held by those in the know as “the clearest sign yet of how much anxiety there is among Obama’s inner circle about Biden’s campaign.”
Speaking in Singapore in December, Obama mused that women are “indisputably” better leaders than men. “Now women, I just want you to know; you are not perfect, but what I can say pretty indisputably is that you’re better than [men]. I’m absolutely confident that for two years, if every nation on Earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board on just about everything … living standards and outcomes.” Then, he added pointedly, “If you look at the world and look at the problems, it’s usually old people, usually old men, not getting out of the way.”
It’s hard not to see Biden, 77 and very much male, as a primary target of this remark. Perhaps not merely coincidentally, more than 200 Obama administration aides and campaign alumni signed a letter of endorsement for Warren’s presidential campaign later that month.
If Obama does not want Biden to be the nominee, then, the question is, why not? Put simply, Barack Obama does not want Joe Biden to be the arbiter of his legacy. Ironically, Biden hit upon this the first time around. Explaining how Obama “had been subtly weighing in against” him running in 2016, Biden wrote in Promise Me, Dad:
“In January 2015 the president was convinced I could not beat Hillary, and he worried that a long primary fight would split the party and leave the Democratic nominee vulnerable in the general election. More than anything, he did not want to see a Republican in the White House in 2017. I got it, and never took issue with him. This was about Barack’s legacy, and a significant portion of that legacy had not yet been cast in stone.”
Obama was a “pen and phone” president. Beyond Obamacare, his main “legacy” achievements — the Iran deal, the Paris climate accords, gender identity policy by regulation, and little else — were initiated by executive fiat and not inked into law by Congress. He didn’t want to see a Republican in the White House in 2017 who could make his precarious accomplishments disappear just as easily with the stroke of a pen.
In 2016, losing was, putatively, Obama’s fear of a Biden nomination. In 2020, this worry is more suspect. According to the RealClear average, Biden also fares best of all the Democratic primary candidates in head-to-head polling against Trump. So, why won’t Obama relent?
Two reasons. The first is an obvious one. Obama, like the rest of us, knows Biden is a loose cannon, often foolish, and an altogether unreliable torchbearer. Biden cannot be trusted to shepherd Obama’s legacy into the history books in the manner and glory Obama so wishes. “Nobody messes with Joe!” Obama joked back in 2009 when putting his vice president in charge of “oversight” for the stimulus package programs. The joke, as Washington Examiner columnist Rob Long explained at the time, is that “everybody messes with Joe.” “Biden couldn’t oversee a ham sandwich,” but that was no matter. He was on the ticket to help win Pennsylvania and Ohio and in the administration to be Obama’s fall guy. (It’s also worth remembering that Amtrak renamed the train station in Wilmington, Delaware, which came in $5.7 million over budget after receiving $20 million in stimulus funding, after Biden.) Biden is the fun uncle who acts out on Thanksgiving; you may love him, but you don’t put him in charge of the family trust.
The second reason is more about Obama than Biden. Obama believes history to have two sides and that he is on the virtuous one. Being on “the right side of history” is so fundamental to Obama that he had Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” sewn into the carpet in the Oval Office. Obama wants to be remembered as the father of a new progressive age. What and who come after him are nearly as important as anything he did in office.
If Clinton had won the White House as he expected, his legacy would have been nearly set. She would have continued his domestic policies, whether with congressional support or again by executive order and regulation, appointed liberal, living-Constitution judges, and followed the leftist zeitgeist. He would have been the first black president; she, the first woman president. The arc of the moral universe would have bowed in the direction he desired.
Biden, however, is old, male, and straight. To elect another white septuagenarian liberal would be to move backward in a way, whatever the details of policy.
Biden’s other sin is that he was Obama’s vice president. Obama smartly realizes that if Biden becomes president, criticism of a Biden administration would become, in the hazy eyes of history, a criticism of both their administrations, both presidencies, lumped together. Biden’s record would become Obama’s record, much in the same way Biden is now running for president by attempting to link Obama’s legacy with his own. If followed by a progressive woman, or another black or gay progressive, Obama could be remembered forever as the forefather of leftist Hope and Change. If followed by Biden, he is likely to be remembered, and blamed, for a Biden presidency that is insufficiently woke and, likely, insufficiently successful. And a man of Obama’s supreme vanity cannot risk that possibility.
Nor can Obama come out and openly reject Biden’s candidacy, for that would also reflect poorly on his legacy and on his past statements about all of Biden’s presidential qualities and virtues. The real question is, what if the only alternative to Biden ends up being Sanders? The Vermont socialist doesn’t generally attack Obama by name, but instead frames his socialist quest on the premise that the Obama revolution never happened. In Bernie’s telling, the corporate fat cats are just as fat; the Wall Street cowboys are just as lawless and unrestrained. Plus, a Sanders victory would make Obama look a fool for his gestures toward centrism on the campaign trail, as it would reveal you don’t have to be seen as moderate to win. Indeed, a Sanders presidency could be even more damaging to Obama’s legacy than a Biden one.
So Obama is stuck between his ego and a hard place, firing off passive-aggressive potshots at the only candidate on stage promoting his presidential record and the one with the best chance of beating Trump. Some legacy.
J. Grant Addison is the deputy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine.
