A new book exploring the future of the Democratic Party details how former President Barack Obama helped President Joe Biden secure the 2020 nomination after backing Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen, authors of The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party, said sources told them Biden called Obama after it became clear Clinton would lose to Donald Trump in 2016 to say, “Boss, I told you. People just don’t like her.”
The book, which will be released on Tuesday, claims Obama told Biden to stand down in the 2016 election but pushed Democrats out of the 2020 primary to pave the way for Biden to become the party nominee, according to the Daily Mail.
Although Biden reportedly held the belief he could win the 2016 election instead of Clinton, he announced in October 2015 from the White House Rose Garden that he would not run for president.
“Obama’s team had demanded Biden make an immediate decision,” the authors wrote, adding that Obama’s team reportedly told Biden that this “isn’t going to end well for you.”
The authors wrote that there was friction between Obama and Biden after the former president picked Clinton as his successor over his vice president.
“It is fair to say, and I believe it, that Joe Biden has been more politically loyal to Barack Obama than Barack Obama has been politically loyal to Joe Biden,” one Biden adviser told Walker and Luppen.
When 2020 came around, Biden shocked the nation by winning the South Carolina Democratic primary after a fourth-place win in Iowa, a fifth-place win in New Hampshire, and a second-place win in Nevada. The contest appeared to be a two-person race between Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) after now-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) dropped out.
However, the authors say that Obama played a significant role in the departures of Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Two senior staffers told Walker and Luppen that “Obama was involved” to put “things in perspective for candidates.”
“It was exactly the kind of backroom power play that Sanders and progressives might see as corrupt,” Walker and Luppen wrote. “After all, a convention floor fight nearly broke out in 2016 over much lower-level party officials being caught playing favorites when the hacked emails were released.”
“This was something far bigger, the party’s most beloved figure working to end the primary and stop the progressive revolution,” they continued. “Almost no one would touch the subject in interviews.”
A source close to Obama told Walker and Luppen that it was true the former president spoke to Klobuchar and Buttigieg when they launched their campaigns, expressing “the existential threat that a Trump reelection poses” in the conversations.
“Go do this. Give it your best shot,” Obama allegedly said to the 2020 candidates. “I’m not going to be partial in this primary, because I believe the most important role I can provide and the most value I provide is helping to consolidate at the end.”
However, the source explained that in the conversations after Biden’s primary win, Obama reportedly reiterated “how important it is to be unified going into the fall. That doesn’t mean he’s telling Pete, ‘You need to drop out and endorse Joe Biden.’ … He’s more nuanced in — not a hammer like that. … It’s stressing the importance of unity and being on as strong as possible footing going into November.”
Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out and endorsed Biden, and Biden’s sweeping wins on Super Tuesday prompted Sanders to drop out of the race as well.
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Ultimately, Obama wanted the Democrats to be unified in 2020 in a way they were not in the 2016 election.
“He had multiple conversations with Sen. Sanders and with Sen. Warren, knowing the context of ’16,” a source told the authors, “making sure that the unity building behind Biden was more heartfelt and authentic and stronger and robust than it was around Hillary in ’16.”