Over the past year, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former President Barack Obama practiced a political distancing of sorts, with Mr. Obama maintaining a posture of public neutrality in the Democratic primaries, offering counsel to any candidate who called (most did), and Mr. Biden saying he wanted to win on his own.
But with calibrated stealth, Mr. Obama has been considerably more engaged in the campaign’s denouement than has been previously revealed.
For months, he had 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 Mr. Biden was the party’s near-certain nominee, Mr. Obama — telling a friend he needed to “accelerate the endgame” — had at least four long conversations with his former vice president’s remaining rival, Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. 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 Mr. Biden, according to people close to the Vermont independent.
By that time, Mr. Biden and Mr. 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.
Mr. Obama will endorse Mr. Biden in an online video on Tuesday, according to two people with direct knowledge of the plans — including one who said the goal was to make it “not look like a hostage video.”
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.
Mr. Biden’s team knew better than to ask Mr. 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 Mr. 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. (Mr. Axelrod has said he considers himself an impartial observer.)
Party officials were more direct, prodding Mr. Obama to be more active behind the scenes, especially after Mr. 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 Mr. Obama.
Now, with the primary campaign over, Mr. Biden and his aides are eager to deploy the former president as quickly as possible, especially on fund-raising, as they race to compete with President 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, Mr. 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.”
Mr. 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 Mr. Biden.
A more immediate matter is the unprecedented logistical challenge of taking on a sitting president during a pandemic and an economic collapse. And Mr. Obama, like Mr. 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.
The camps are still working out the details of engaging Mr. Obama in fund-raising. But David Plouffe, who remains Mr. Obama’s most trusted political adviser, has offered to pitch in, and plans to participate in several virtual Biden fund-raisers that could be a dry run for Mr. Obama’s participation, according to people briefed on the plans.
Mr. Biden’s emergence as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee relatively early in the political calendar is unwelcome news to Mr. 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 Mr. Obama’s hesitancy in endorsing Mr. Biden.
“You know what? I’ll tell you, it does amaze me that President Obama hasn’t supported Sleepy Joe,” Mr. 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 Mr. Biden during his son Beau’s illness and death, is not without complications.
Mr. Biden is grateful for Mr. Obama’s friendship but increasingly proud of his historic comeback. When news reports surfaced that Mr. Obama had called to congratulate Mr. Biden on his victory in South Carolina, the candidate made it clear to his staff that while his connection to Mr. Obama played a role in delivering African-American voters, Mr. 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, Mr. Obama consulted with Mr. Biden’s team on campaign strategy, and he bucked up Mr. Biden after his loss in the Iowa caucuses. In a private dinner last fall with members of the liberal Democracy Alliance, Mr. Obama offered thinly veiled criticism of Mr. Sanders’s “revolutionary” policies and opined that voters wanted change, not to “tear down the system.”
Mr. 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 Mrs. Clinton in 2016 and congressional candidates in 2018. He resisted calls by some Democratic officials earlier this year to intervene on Mr. Biden’s behalf in the wake of Mr. Sanders’s 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 Mr. Sanders surged, and Mr. Biden slumped. By late February, he was telling people in his orbit that he thought Mr. Biden’s campaign had an alarming lack of “infrastructure” and shared his doubts about Mr. Biden’s belief that he could win the nomination after losing Iowa and New Hampshire.
Democratic officials say Mr. 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 Mr. Biden’s moves — naming as his campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, a former Obama campaign field organizing specialist, and moving another Obama veteran, the former White House communications director Anita Dunn, into a more powerful role.
Mr. Obama did not directly encourage Mr. Sanders’s rivals to endorse Mr. Biden ahead of 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 mayor soon joined the avalanche of former candidates backing Mr. Biden.
Mr. Sanders, who in 2016 accused the Democratic establishment of conspiring to support Mrs. Clinton, took note of all these moves, but he has made no such charges against Mr. 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 Mr. Obama’s neutrality throughout the campaign. And Mr. Sanders, who has denied reports that he contemplated a primary challenge to Mr. 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 Mr. Obama saw Mr. Sanders’s overture as an opening to assume the peacemaker’s role he believed himself best suited to play.
Since leaving office, Mr. Obama has ruminated about what he could have done differently, both as president and as a campaign surrogate for Mrs. Clinton, to stop Mr. 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. Mr. Obama, she added, would “have backed any nominee, any of them, with the same conviction.”
Mr. Sanders is much closer personally to Mr. Biden despite their political differences, but Mr. Obama, unlike Mr. 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 Mr. Obama lavishing praise on Mr. Sanders.
In the end, Mr. Sanders concluded that negotiating a détente through the former president would ease the blow of his withdrawal on his base. Whether Mr. Obama’s involvement will ultimately draw Sanders voters to support Mr. Biden’s candidacy remains an open question, and some supporters, including Mr. Sanders’s own campaign press secretary, say they won’t.
In late March, Mr. Obama reached out to Mr. Sanders. The two men would talk at least three more times, with the former president reassuring Mr. Sanders that he had already accomplished much of what he had set out to do, moving the party — and Mr. Biden — substantially to the left, according to two people with knowledge of their interactions.
But, the people said, he mostly listened to Mr. 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.
Mr. 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,” Mr. Sanders answered, with a laugh.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
