Policy
After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, Joe Biden had a conversation with President Barack Obama and basically hit him with an “I told you so.”
Famously, Obama backed Clinton as his de facto nominee for a third term over Biden that year, eschewing the loyalty shown by his then-vice president throughout their two terms in the White House.
According to a new book by authors Hunter Walker and Luby B. Lubben titled Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic PartyObama and Biden were monitoring the election results when it became clear that Donald Trump would defeat Clinton.
The mood turned, according to excerpts obtained by the Daily Mail, to “sad.”
Biden reportedly picked up the phone and called Obama, telling him, according to multiple sources: “President, I told you. People just don't like it.”
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Biden: People don't like Hillary
Biden's assessment that people “don't like” Hillary Clinton is an understatement, yes, but it's also likely the last time he spoke the truth about his fellow Democrat.
The statement underscores the fact that Biden, who always campaigned as the beloved “Scranton Joe” or “Uncle Joe,” a working-class man of the people, valued being a people's person as a political tactic.
And he was right – Clinton's unfavorable public perception played a large role in her loss to Trump. But it wasn't her only problem.
The new book also highlights how Biden knew something was wrong after he appeared on behalf of Clinton in Wisconsin, a swing state she narrowly lost and chose not to campaign herself.
“It didn’t go well,” Biden said after the event.
Despite all the chatter that Biden is the failure of the Democratic Party, even he knew that Clinton could not and would not win in 2016. By contrast, Obama was unaware of this.
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Obama paved the way for Joe in 2020
According to my authors TruceOnce Joe was forced out of the presidential race, Obama and his team helped drag Biden to the nomination over Bernie Sanders in 2020.
Sanders has often condemned the Democratic primary process and suggested it was rigged in Clinton's favor.
According to the book, Obama was engaged in “the kind of behind-the-scenes power play that Sanders and progressives would consider corrupt” by pushing former South Bend and Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) out. from the race, paving the way for Biden.
“This was something much bigger, a beloved figure in the party working to end the primaries and stop the progressive revolution,” the authors wrote, noting that almost everyone declined to comment on Obama's power grab because it was such a bitter and divisive topic.
Truce The book is scheduled to hit bookshelves next Tuesday, and promises to reveal “how the Democratic Party was at war with itself for so long” before they banded together to defeat Trump in 2020.
