Joe Biden and Barack Obama at a Los Angeles fundraiser 12 days before the debate that imperiled the current president’s campaign.
Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
The fantasy has been repeated thousands of times in the last two weeks, shared not-so-quietly up and down the Democratic Party: Barack Obama is the one person who can talk Joe Biden into stepping off the presidential ticket. What if he marches over to the White House and puts an end to this?
The scheme has all the hallmarks of the best Washington dramas — a tortured relationship, a presidential election in the balance, and a dramatic secret meeting. But it’s still just that: a fantasy.
It’s true that Obama spoke with Biden soon after the debate. He’s also been in touch with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and has caught up with Hakeem Jeffries in New York at a fundraiser the day after Biden’s debate disaster. For two weeks now, he’s been receiving calls from old colleagues, friends, and supporters wondering what he can do. But since that fateful Thursday night, he’s also consistently answered those calls by dismissing the idea that he would be able to single-handedly push Biden out the door or convince him to stay in. He has been careful, even on these calls with close allies, not to tip his hand.
In the frenzied days since the debate, a fundamental misinterpretation of Obama’s post-presidential role, and of his self-conception, has set in across the party. It’s been visible in the fantasizing about some sort of come-to-Jesus meeting with Biden, but also in the suspicious whispers among some Biden allies that he’s organizing a pressure campaign on his old veep to drop out. Take the word of one person who’s spoken with the president since the debate, Joe Scarborough: “The Biden campaign and many Democratic officials do believe that Barack Obama is quietly working behind the scenes to orchestrate this,” he said on his show on Thursday. That was the same morning as official D.C. interpreted Obama’s silence over George Clooney’s plans to publish his now-famous op-ed calling on Biden to quit as tacit approval.
This has all been frustrating, if not surprising, to many of the people around Obama, who has said nothing publicly about Biden or the party’s conundrum since he initially tweeted to indicate his support of the president and, charitably, compared Biden’s debacle to his own bad debate against Mitt Romney in 2012. It’s the same studied silence he’s insisted on since leaving office. That posture has often infuriated supporters, but he believes it allows him to keep a distance from politics, letting his party move on from him, and to maintain his own influence for when he really needs to use it, usually in the form of rallies and TV ads right before Election Day. Though he and Biden have not spoken frequently in the last two years — and though Obama’s concerns about Biden’s reelection chances are widely known — he has made clear to his former partner that he is available to talk whenever Biden wishes and that he is happy to offer advice and to serve as a “sounding board.” (Biden took him up on the offer multiple times as his campaign ramped up.) Further, Obama has made clear to allies that he believes nothing good can come of his personal advice to Biden, or his political concerns, coming to public light. As a result, he has often been reticent to do much at all in private beyond one-on-one conversations.
He knows the secrecy creates a vacuum that can quickly fill up with rumors, yet this insistence on silence is also because he is intensely wary of feeding the idea, first shared by Donald Trump, that he is pulling any strings behind the scenes. Obama’s disdain for day-to-day politics hasn’t abated since he left the presidency, he has been loath to organize any kind of campaigns at all since 2017, and he has stayed busy with other projects. In the time since the debate, he has been working on the second part of his memoir, filming nonpartisan videos about democracy for his foundation, appearing with the American men’s Olympic basketball team for their 50th-anniversary celebration in Las Vegas, and filming a video for Willie Mays’s funeral, before now heading to Martha’s Vineyard for the rest of the summer.
But Obama has not been in a political coma. He is aware of the arguments that he has a responsibility to treat this moment differently, and he has discussed the state of the race with other Democrats who are terrified that Biden could stay in and lose to Trump. He’s stayed in regular touch with Pelosi since leaving office, and some of his allies closely watched her Tuesday appearance on Scarborough’s show, in which she seemed to suggest Biden should reconsider his decision to stay in the race. Yet even some of his friends have also wished to get a clearer signal of his feelings about Biden’s place in the race, since a number of his former aides have spoken out and others within the party have been eager to interpret those opinions as coming from Obama himself. “The idea that the Pod guys are speaking for him? Ridiculous,” said one friend, referring to the hosts of Pod Save America, former Obama staffers who have been notably critical of Biden. The same goes for David Axelrod, he added.
Much of this paranoia about Obama has come from longtime Biden allies who never bought into the idea of an Obama-Biden “bromance.” For many of these people — including Biden himself — the memory of 2016, when Obama effectively backed Hillary Clinton over his own vice-president to be the Democratic nominee, is still raw and explains why Obama would be in no position to talk Biden out of this race even if he wanted to do so. The two presidents both know this and also that Biden remembers Obama’s early skepticism about his 2020 campaign. Yet after Scarborough’s comment, even some top Biden-backing Democrats were aghast at the idea that some of the president’s advisers would accuse Obama, one of the party’s most popular figures, of organizing against Biden. Still, even these very senior Democrats — Biden fans who miss Obama and are scared of Trump’s return — concede that Obama could have spoken up to support Biden if he wanted to at any point since that initial post-debate tweet. Strategic or not, his continued public silence during Biden’s worst political hours doesn’t read like confidence.
The truth is that, like at other critical moments of the Biden presidency, Obama has kept the number of people with whom he’s discussing politics — and Biden — to a bare minimum. The state of his relationship with Biden has always been a sensitive topic for both of them, and while the pair have been personally affectionate and Obama was grateful to Biden for booting Trump from office, they still view how politics works differently and have harbored their own criticisms of each other’s time in office. Obama has been helpful to the Biden campaign this time around, but is also clearly concerned about the political state of play and far less involved on an operational level as Biden has relied more on his own White House team than in 2020. (One of the awkward complications of the moment: Obama’s main point of contact on the campaign is Jen O’Malley Dillon, one of his former aides who is the Biden campaign’s effective leader.)
Now Obama is more wary than ever of letting his feelings about Biden’s political future or the campaign leak on someone else’s terms or in someone else’s words. And few of the people who have remained close to him in his post-presidency have said much on the matter, with the exception of Eric Holder. The former attorney general at first boosted Biden after the debate by reminding his followers to remember that the alternative is Trump. Before long, though, he was arguing on X that Democrats were the strong and responsible party for engaging “in a difficult determination about who our nominee for President should be,” as opposed to being “a pathetic, dangerous cult.”
The move to return focus to Republicans is a lot like Obama’s long-preferred approach. For months, those close to him have maintained that his concerns about the election are largely focused on the threat of Trump and the very real possibility of his return to power. It’s a convenient way for him to avoid opining on Biden, but it’s also his preoccupation. Earlier this year, at a tech festival in Antwerp, Flemish media reported that Obama was clear with event organizers that he didn’t want to talk politics. Yet onstage, even though he referred to Trump only as “my successor,” his message was unmistakable. In the words of the local press, he argued that “Trump is leading us to the abyss.”
The intensified interest in Obama has come as Democratic lawmakers, aides, and donors realize that their public-pressure campaigns are running into the tiny but stubborn phalanx surrounding Biden. He appears to be taking counsel from a smaller group than ever — this is saying something for a politician who’s become famous for maintaining a tight group of advisers who in some cases have had his ear for decades. They now include his wife, sister, and son, and a very small handful of confidants on his payroll: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, and on campaign matters specifically, O’Malley Dillon. Other longtime advisers like Ron Klain and Anita Dunn are not out of the circle but not exactly at the family-adjacent level.
Since the debate, some of these innermost advisers have mostly remained physically near Biden in Washington, Camp David, and on the campaign and money trails. Donors at Biden’s fundraisers in East Hampton and New Jersey were surprised to see Donilon, the president’s senior-most political adviser but a famously private and quiet figure, at his side. And the president this week dispatched Donilon, Ricchetti, and O’Malley Dillon to brief worried senators on the plan to win the election. But lawmakers walked away unimpressed, according to senators and advisers, feeling the trio had failed to articulate a convincing plan that addressed their significant worries about Biden’s ability to campaign effectively.
Few senators walked into the meeting expecting a totally convincing answer to Biden’s problems. Many influential Democrats have in recent days begun wondering aloud why it took Biden a few days to reach out to party leaders after the debate, why it took two weeks to hold a press conference, why he made only a handful of reassuring calls to lawmakers over last weekend — then stopped — and why his campaign operation didn’t immediately brief allies on a serious reboot plan. “The debate was bad, the last week and a half was worse,” said one top party operative. “If they had a halfway decent response, we wouldn’t be here.”
Mike Donilon arrives on Marine One in East Hampton for a fundraiser where he was at Biden’s side, 48 hours after the debate.
Photo: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times/Redux
For ten days, rumors have circulated on Capitol Hill about some sort of coordinated flood of statements urging him to step aside — enough to force him to pay attention. Yet that didn’t come on Monday or Tuesday as expected, held off in part by Biden’s defiant letter to the Hill insisting that his decision had been made and in part by his surprise appearance on Morning Joe, where he said much the same. With many lawmakers suddenly reluctant to put their names to the kinds of statements they were considering over the weekend, people close to Biden felt the momentum swinging their way. It was only after Pelosi’s own appearance on Morning Joe that Democrats on the Hill detected a new opening. It all added up to a series of wild swings between confidence and pessimism for the lawmakers desperate to get Biden out, with some believing by Thursday that he would screw up a high-stakes press conference that would finally shut the door on his candidacy. Many watched to gauge how aggressively they could come out against Biden in the ensuing days, but found that it exceeded their expectations aside from a few verbal flubs.
Biden’s band of true believers signaled almost immediately after the press conference that they had only been buoyed by it — not forced to reckon with any sort of grim political reality like the one described by Biden skeptics across the party. “To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs. He’s just that fucking good,” tweeted the White House’s senior deputy press secretary, Andrew Bates. Deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty tweeted a GIF of Biden in 2020 telling the New York Times’ editorial board, “I ain’t dead, and I’m not gonna die.”
What’s not clear now is precisely how many Biden ride-or-die types remain below the most senior or most public parts of the White House and campaign. Multiple donors reported this week that high-level campaign and party fundraisers told them they no longer believe Biden has a path to victory, but other candidates might. Some mid- to senior-level campaign aides have expressed disbelief at the confidence coming from the top of the operation. Four Democrats closely aligned with the campaign used the word “delusional” with me on Thursday. One said he felt like everyone with power in the political operation “is just pretending this isn’t happening. It’s insane.”
Down at the delegate level, the Biden camp has tried calling around to ensure that the individuals who are headed to Chicago will stick with Biden. But among this crowd of loyal Democrats, too, schisms have emerged. In the Facebook group for the California delegation, after some discussion over whether Biden should stay on the ticket, the group’s moderators announced they would “prohibit any organizing for a new candidate for president in this group” and would delete any post in favor of a ticket other than Biden-Harris — prompting a new wave of outraged comments from delegates in favor of an open discussion about their roles and responsibilities.
To some longtime Biden advisers outside the innermost orbit, this has all provided an occasion to vent about an insularity they say has long worried them. Ahead of the press conference, one such Democrat sighed that Biden had been poorly served by the advice to avoid media events and interviews for so long. “If they had done this shit for four years, people would be used to it. It’s maddening,” he said. Biden’s circle of advice-givers, he continued, is “way too small. People don’t even know how to help them right now. And I don’t know if he understands it.”
That’s one reason why the “Joe’s gotta go” drumbeat kept going after the press conference: If doubters weren’t getting through to him via his advisers, they might as well try applying pressure in public. Four House members added their name to the “drop out now” rolls in the hours after the presser, even as some of their colleagues expressed renewed support for Biden. Some prominent donors also doubled down on their calls for a new plan. Bruce Heyman, a longtime party fundraiser and ambassador to Canada under Obama, wrote on LinkedIn after the press conference that while he knew and respected Biden, he now believed the party needed to hold “a series of town halls, debates, and interviews to showcase” alternatives before the convention in Chicago.
Still, after Thursday’s performance viewed by over 22 million people, a new consensus seemed to be settling on lawmakers and other high-ranking Democrats: that this saga would likely now last a while longer, with Biden’s insistence on staying in the race getting new fuel. These liberals and progressives like Biden and almost uniformly wish him well personally. But their patience is gone. They had half-hoped he would crash and burn at the microphone. It would have been hard to watch, but at least it would have made the perils of his continued candidacy impossible to ignore.
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