Want to know why former President Barack Obama didn’t immediately get behind Joe Biden’s heir apparent as Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris — and still hasn’t, for that matter?
According to an inside source who spoke to the New York Post, the former president thinks that Harris can’t win against GOP nominee Donald Trump and “was shocked” to learn that Biden endorsed her so shortly after he announced he wasn’t running on social media on Sunday.
The source is anonymous, but is described by the paper as “close to the Biden family.”
And, if what they’re saying is accurate, it would be the best reason why Obama still hasn’t endorsed Harris even as the rest of the party gets behind her.
Both Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were two notable exceptions to the parade of stalwart Democrats who had come out in support of Harris after Sunday’s letter and social media endorsement from the president.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024
My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best… pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024
Do you think Kamala Harris will lose?
As for Pelosi, she had said she was in favor of an open nomination process were Biden to drop the nomination battle before apparently deciding this wasn’t feasible or that too much of the party had already lined up behind Harris, because she eventually lent her an endorsement, too.
As for Obama, his initial statement on Biden’s decision to recuse from the nomination didn’t mention Harris at all and spoke of something like an open nomination contest, if in less specific terms: “We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead. But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.”
Since then, he’s also declined to offer his endorsement, including in a post after Biden’s speech to the nation about his decision to step aside as nominee on Thursday night — something that didn’t go unnoticed on social media.
Looking forward to your endorsement of Kamala Harris. We can make sure Trump doesn’t get elected again.
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) July 25, 2024
Have you endorsed Kamala yet?
— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) July 25, 2024
Why didn’t you endorse Kamala?
— Michael J. Morrison (@OfficeOfMike) July 25, 2024
Well, apparently, he didn’t endorse Kamala for a very obvious reason, the source said: While she may be in her honeymoon period with the left and the media right now, he doesn’t think that will last until November.
“Obama’s very upset because he knows she can’t win,” the source told the Post in piece published Thursday evening, before Biden’s speech. “Obama knows she’s just incompetent — the border czar who never visited the border, saying that all migrants should have health insurance.
“She cannot navigate the landmines that are ahead of her.”
And, if Biden did bad in his debate against Trump, the source said that Harris will do no better if the second contest goes ahead as planned on Sept. 10.
“Wait until the debate… She can’t debate. She’s going to put her foot in her mouth about Israel, Palestine, Ukraine. She’s going to say something really stupid,” they said.
“Obama knew this was going to happen, Joe knew this was going to happen. Now she is going to have to answer real questions.”
Which is why, the source said, “Obama was shocked” when the endorsement from Biden came less than a half hour after the recusal.
The source claimed that Obama favored Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly “at the top of the ticket” and is “furious” that it didn’t happen.
Another source, described as a “well-placed Democrat,” had a more withering appraisal of Obama’s motives.
“Obama being surprised by a smart political decision actually makes sense when coupled with his personal inability to see politics beyond his singular, immediate interests,” they said.
“Obama always thinks he is the smartest and coolest guy in the room. He’s friends with George Clooney, after all.”
A source partisan to Biden and a source partisan to Harris might indeed have their biases — but both could also be true in their own way: Kamala can’t win and endorsing her still could have been the smartest move the president could have made.
The path to the debate performance from hell wasn’t just a few bad weeks and a little cold. It was years in the making. In fact, it’s probably accurate to say that Biden’s quality as a rapidly depreciating asset, cognitively and politically, was known during the 2020 race. He just had the good luck to be the last guy who wasn’t knocked out that the donor class thought could beat Donald Trump.
And, when Kamala Harris was taken on as his running mate, she was, to use a sports metaphor, the quarterback of the future, ready to take the field after Biden had finished the one four-year term that already looked a bit too much for him. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that, as metaphorical draft picks go, she was a bit less Peyton Manning and a lot more Ryan Leaf.
Stuck with an aging starter and a draft-bust back-up, the Democrats decided to do the worst possible thing: nothing. In four years of diminishing returns from Biden and no clear signs of leadership from Harris, nobody seemed to want to have a blunt discussion about where this was all headed until 10:30 p.m. Eastern on June 27, when the first debate and Biden’s chances both ended.
Pelosi apparently thought this could be settled via an open convention process, which sounds like a fantastic idea; what could go wrong in Chicago with a retiring president, a Democratic Party in disarray and a restive activist base set to descend on the city for the convention? That’s never happened before. Thankfully, Pelosi is old enough to remember 1968 and why those remarks are both sarcastic and eerily similar to the situation that year, which is why she decided a Harris coronation, while perhaps not a good idea, is still the best one on the table.
Obama — the guy who thought that Hillary Clinton was the guy to beat Donald Trump in 2016 and who lost both houses of Congress and innumerable state house seats during his presidency despite starting off with a 2008 landslide in the wake of the economic crisis and the George W. Bush administration’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan — still thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, though. Thus, he thinks Mark Kelly, someone who doesn’t have name recognition that stretches far outside of Arizona or Democratic political campaign circles and wasn’t preparing for this, is the perfect pick for the party.
Kelly is a grumbling lukewarm liberal on almost everything but the Second Amendment, where he’s a raving partisan on gun control. Thus, he makes pretty much everyone unhappy — not to mention the fact that, despite the fact he has an interesting backstory as a combat pilot, an astronaut, and the husband of a congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt, he has the baseline charisma of your average high school assembly speaker.
The problem isn’t all Kamala, although her cringeworthiness is still a large part of it. Rather, it was the inability of Democratic suzerains like Obama, Pelosi, Biden’s inner circle, and the rest of the gang refusing to address the issue until it became impossible to ignore — and it put them in a position where it was very unlikely, no matter what they did, that they would win without several massive unforced errors from the Trump campaign.
At least Obama is under no illusions about the party’s just signed up for, however, if this report is indeed accurate.
